IN his best-known poem, The Man from Snowy River, A.B. "Banjo" Paterson has the bushmen on a wild ride through beautiful but treacherous terrain, the kind that "well might make the boldest hold their breath".
The Banjo may well have been writing about the journey many Australians are enduring at the moment.
Millions of voters are holding on tight as they contend with the soaring cost of living, "twice as steep and twice as rough" as the hills in Paterson's poem. Australians are desperately trying to rein in daily expenses that are galloping ahead of household budgets. Some are facing mountains of debt, just as interest rates look likely to climb.
While The Man from Snowy River has a triumphant ending, with the brave young rider catching the elusive prize of a colt worth "a thousand pound", life is not so poetic for many at the moment.
That is evident by what goes on behind the front door of a modest cottage at Raymond Terrace, in the electoral division of Paterson.
It is the home of a not-for-profit organisation called Port Stephens and Family Neighbourhood Services.
If the Bard of the Australian Bush were to walk through that cottage door in the Hunter Valley electorate named after him (along with another figure called Paterson, the British soldier and botanist Colonel William Paterson, who explored parts of the Hunter in the colony's early days), he would have a different story about national life to tell.
It would be a story not about how a young horseman became a "household word", but how households are being squeezed and broken, as they tumble, to borrow a few words from The Banjo, into financial "gorges deep and black".
Port Stephens and Family Neighbourhood Services is there to catch people before they fall. The organisation offers a range of programs and services, from family and financial counselling to providing food, helping find accommodation, and supporting those escaping domestic violence.
"We try to fill the gaps," says Ann Fletcher, the organisation's assistant manager.
"I think that's what we really try to do, to be there to stop people from falling through the gaps."
As those gaps become wider and deeper, demand for the organisation's services grows.
The number seeking help is in the hundreds.
"Certainly I have noticed in the past two years since the pandemic, our numbers have increased markedly," explains Ms Fletcher. "We're talking in the homelessness space, 500 people above what we would have typically seen in years gone past."
Ann Fletcher has been particularly surprised by the number of older people needing assistance. Many who have been tenants and living on a pension have not been able to keep up with the skyrocketing rental prices, or they have been evicted as landlords took advantage of the hot property market to sell.
"So we're certainly seeing an increase in aged pensioners, 70 and above, who are homeless, living in their car, living in motels," says Ms Fletcher.
She believes housing affordability and, more broadly, the cost of living should be at the forefront of voters' minds when they go to the polls on May 21.
"I feel if it's not an issue, then, honestly, we really need to take a good look at ourselves, because housing is a basic human right," she says. "Without housing, without somewhere to be safe and call 'home', to lay our head at night, it's really, really hard to capitalise on any other portion of your life. You imagine trying to get to work everyday when you don't even have somewhere to live."
Ann Fletcher says whichever party is elected into government has to provide more social housing, and to give more assistance to the most vulnerable by raising support payments.
"Even at the local motel, where we've got people on a Jobseeker payment renting a room at 255 to 300 dollars a week, if the Jobseeker payment is $600 a fortnight, thereabouts, they've got nothing left," Ms Fletcher says. "They can pay to keep the roof over their head, then they're coming to us for food."
To the east of Raymond Terrace, the electorate of Paterson pushes towards the blue water wonderland and the retirement heaven that characterise the bays and peninsulas of Port Stephens.
About a third of Port Stephens residents are aged over 55.
"Oh, this is God's own country here," declares Jill Stephenson, as we sit and chat in the Port Stephens Uniting Church at Salamander Bay. "We're so fortunate. It's a beautiful area."
Jill Stephenson, who turns 81 a week before the May 21 poll, is an elder of the church. A music lover, she has just been playing the church organ, teasing out a hymn with the opening line, "Be Still My Soul, The Lord Is On Your Side". Although Jill assures she chose the piece not as a message to the political candidates.
Jill Stephenson lives nearby in an over-55s village at Anna Bay.
With so many older people living in Port Stephens, she says, aged care is a local election issue.
"I think it will be on a lot of minds, not only people who are older but their families, families who live a distance and are concerned for their elderly relatives," Mrs Stephenson says. "We're very fortunate here. We have two good nursing homes.
"But the government's policy of ageing in place means that you need to stay in your own home, and that's good, that's what we want to do. But I have a number of friends who had a fall, some have cancer, some have health issues, [they] desperately need help, and they're unable to get it."
Roads are also an issue, says Jill Stephenson, with frequent traffic bottlenecks approaching the Pacific Highway, which slices through the centre of the electorate.
Roads and transport pop up in conversations a lot in Paterson, which is spread over 1123 square kilometres.
On the north-western edge of the electorate, in his office by the Hunter River in Maitland, communications firm managing director and president of the city's business chamber Shane Hamilton argues the area doesn't "receive its fair share of funding when it comes to ... government-planned infrastructure around transport".
Maitland Business Chamber, which boasts about 170 members, has drawn up a list of infrastructure projects it believes a government should commit to, since the city is growing rapidly. Among those projects are a venue for concerts and conferences, and better roads.
But one series of transport projects in the electorate that Shane Hamilton applauds is the upgrade of Newcastle Airport at Williamtown.
Just after the election was called, the federal government announced a $55 million dollar expansion of the terminal. That followed the announcement of a $66 million dollar upgrade of the runway, to accommodate larger aircraft.
"The benefits that will be flowing upriver from the airport infrastructure are a greater visitor economy, businesses can base themselves here in the Hunter and have a quick turnaround for staff that need to fly interstate to clients, and we can get bulk freight in as well with upgrades to the airport," Mr Hamilton says. "So transport and logistics will receive a huge boost, which then, in turn, will allow businesses to grow in our area, including manufacturing."
To the south-west of Maitland is an area that, for many years, was synonymous with industry: the Coalfields.
With electorates' boundaries shifting, a parcel of the Coalfields is now in the seat of Paterson, including the communities of Weston and Kurri Kurri. Incidentally, the town of Paterson is not in the seat of the same name; it is in the neighbouring electoral division of Lyne.
Kurri Kurri is seamed with not just coal but labour history and Labor Party politics. Few know that better than Coalfields Local History Association member and "very proud Kurri boy" Bill Holland. Wherever he looks around his hometown, Bill sees that history.
"I look across to the Kurri Hotel," he says, gesturing to the grand pub near where we meet, "and the vivid image I see there is in 1928 of the miners' union representative standing on that veranda and talking to a crowd of, can you believe, almost 10,000 miners in this park we're sitting in now."
Industry continues to make its way into Kurri. In recent months, the town has watched political and business leaders turn up, outlining plans for a $600 million gas-fired power station, built on the grave of another local industry, the former aluminium smelter.
Even before it is built, the power station has been generating headlines and political statements revolving around energy and the environment. The Federal Government has pushed the project. Labor has said if it was in government, it would also back the project but would want the facility to run on green hydrogen, not gas, by 2030.
Bill Holland doubts the plant will power much interest and influence among voters on May 21.
"I think it will influence some people, but I don't think it will be as strong an influence as perhaps a lot of people think," he says. "I think that power plant is about influencing people at a national level, and setting up an example somewhere that the government can highlight, that simply says, 'We're doing something about the environment'."
Bill Holland says Coalfields people are largely self-sufficient, stepping up where governments haven't, from funding their own hospital to setting up co-operative societies, and educating themselves through the establishment of schools of arts.
"That's the kind of people they are," he explains. "They'll tolerate things to a point, where a government doesn't look after them. They tend to look after themselves but always remind consequent governments of their inability to meet those needs, and even today they still remind people we get short-changed."
And there is much that needs doing locally, he says, raising the issues of roads, health and aged care. While it may be traditionally a Labor town, Kurri Kurri shouldn't be taken for granted, or for major parties to presume which way the locals will vote, says Bill Holland.
"I don't think people are silly enough to just continually vote Labor for the sake of voting Labor here anymore," he says. "That doesn't exist."
Having said that, Bill Holland predicts Labor's Meryl Swanson will hold the seat that she has represented since 2016. He says Kurri voters look not so much to the leaders in Canberra but to the local members - "I don't ever hear the name 'Scott Morrison', I don't hear any of those names, but I hear 'Meryl Swanson' and I hear 'Joel Fitzgibbon'" - and based on that, he believes Ms Swanson has done enough to keep her job. What's more, in his assessment, it doesn't hurt she's a Kurri girl.
"I don't think there'll be much in it, but I'm pretty sure the thing that gets her across the line will be the Kurri people and the Heddon Greta people voting for the Kurri girl who is proud to come from Kurri," he says.
Port Stephens Family and Neighbourhood Services' Ann Fletcher and Anna Bay retiree Jill Stephenson also predict Ms Swanson will win the election.
Meryl Swanson holds Paterson with a five per cent margin. However, at the 2019 election, she sustained a swing of 5.7 per cent against her.
This time around, with a slimmer margin in play, there have been visits from high-ranking members of both major parties, and a harvest of promotional signs have popped up on roadsides throughout the electorate, including the bright blue billboards promoting the Liberal Party's candidate, Brooke Vitnell.
Maitland Business Chamber president Shane Hamilton is pleased by all the attention in Paterson.
"Safe seats don't get funding," Mr Hamilton says. "Seats that are up for grabs are the ones that gain the funding and most political attention. So my word ... is vote smart and work on how we're going to get our fair share."
And the Maitland businessman has a blunt message for the political candidates in Paterson.
"What we really need is a commitment from both sides who we should be voting for," Shane Hamilton says. "And that is a commitment to key infrastructure projects, to the betterment of the seat of Paterson and the seat of Hunter.
"If you guys aren't going to show what you're going to do to improve our areas, you don't get our vote, plain and simple."
