The Big Merino in Goulburn, NSW
The Big Merino in Goulburn, NSW (Image: AAP/Alan Porritt)

North Africa, 1941.

The rosy fingers of dawn stretched through the sky above the Tobruk desert. In a dugout, Bluey, Curly and Sarge looked out across the desert and considered their options.

“I’m all done in, Sarge. Rommel’s coming. Why not surrender?”

“Sit out the war, Sarge. Take our chances. See Goulburn again. Have a milkshake in the Paragon Cafe.”

“I know, lads, it’s tempting. But remember what we’re fighting for.”

“What’s that?”

Sarge’s eyes misted.

“We’re fighting for a three-storey entertainment complex, stuffed with pokies and several bistros, with a Fleetwood Mac tribute band on the weekend, and some weird hologram thing in the corridor.”

“Sarge, is that… Sarge… Sarge… Marulan Sarge… Marulan…”

“… answer is more services in Marulan.” Your correspondent had drifted off a little, halfway through the Meet the Candidates evening at the Goulburn Soldiers Club, a vast pile, like all NSW clubs, shiny and shimmering in the midst of the small dowdy city that its pokies have sucked a lot of the money out of. 

The four candidates — Greens, Labour, Liberal and Shooters — were arrayed before vast windows looking onto the magnificent mulga, orange earth up a hill, stands of green trees below an evening blue sky, answering questions on service delivery in Marulan, a country town to the east, zoned for rapid urban development.

Some of the more local questions about Goulburn in the hour previous had been a little tedious — “Wakefield Park needs special activity status, now”. The questions about Marulan made that hour seem like the recitation of a futurist manifesto in the Zurich Dada Club, 1916. We had just had one of the great questions of all time, from the pre-supplied list: “Should there be a permanent ambulance station at Marulan, given that it’s at the intersection of three quarries and there’s a lot of heavy industry accidents?”

The Shooters candidate, Andy Wood, would be the last to answer. As the other three tried to outdo each other in what a scandal this was, ambulance straight away, etc, etc, I pointed my forehead towards Wood and tried to send mind waves. Go, Gonzo Andy! Go wild! “No! Ambulances make us soft! We didn’t build this great country getting chauffeured to hospital! If your arm’s come off, stick it under your other arm, and walk to the first aid station!”

He did not say this. But, perhaps, bored as I was at the obvious booster question, he did make the cogent point that there was no point harrumphing about this when there weren’t enough trained personnel to make it happen anyway.

Next question: “Should there be a permanent police presence at Marulan?”

“Bev was there four days a week,” the MC added helpfully. “But she’s been unwell. To Michael first…”

“Well, yes, of course…”

German howitzers boomed in the distance.

“Tell us more about this democracy temple, Sarge.”

“Lads, I see a series of suites that can be rented for conference purposes…”

“Conference purposes,” Bluey and Curly mouthed, chewing their bully beef.

“There will be a Merino Room and a Diggers Room, with full catering facilities…”

“Will there be art, Sarge?”

“There will be art.”

“What sort of art?”

“It will be a form of serviceable colour field abstraction that would not disgrace the walls of a display home and that no one will really like…”

“No one will really like…”

The explosions came closer.

“Some may say we have tough times now, but let’s just remember what it was like last time Labor was in. This government has delivered. The only state with a AAA rating, $178 billion on infrastructure, $112 billion committed in this election campaign alone, for a better future.” Rat-a-tat-tat, full machine-gun style. It was not unimpressive.

Wendy Tuckerman, seated in the middle of the candidates’ row, is the Liberal member for Goulburn, a city-based seat with hinterland stretching towards Yass (Labor candidate, Michael Pilbrow, is a Yass man), held by the government with a 3% margin.

This is pretty much the Plimsoll line for the Minns insurgency. If they get Goulburn on an evenish statewide swing, they should be able to form government. They have high hopes and a presentable candidate — Pilbrow is a neat-suited business type, but worked in the cooperative sector for decades. Plus there’s enough dissatisfaction within the seat to see it leave the non-Labor camp for the first time in six decades. 

Tuckerman, as the member, increased that sense of possibility. Dropped in as a candidate in 2019 when Pru Goward quit on short notice, Wendy was a small-shire mayor who stumbled her way through the campaign to a narrowed victory. This time around, she’s still giving away points. Days ago, at one of those dumb forums where candidates hold up “Yes” or “No” cards to privatisation of Sydney water, Tuckerman held up a “Yes”, which was a big no-no for the Perrottet government’s position. The Libs said she made a mistake. Which begs the question, how? How do you flash the wrong card?

“Only a Perrotet government can deliver for all the state,” Tuckerman said, pretty much out of the box. “Chris Minns will be beholden to the vested interests”. She never went off the attack all evening.

So Labor might have taken a little for granted here. Tuckerman is a former AFP cop, a tough cookie, hard-faced lady with an earth-coloured, big-baubled necklace, like she had hung the testicles of previous victims around her head. Through the evening, she’s quick on the comeback, and double-quick shuffling a big set of briefing notes.

Someone at Lib HQ has realised, perhaps, that one thing a cop can do is work an interview brief in real time. Wendy finds the stat she needs, the fact that refutes — and reads the rest out like she was cautioning two youfs smoking ice beneath the horns of the Big Merino, the town’s vast and terrifying concrete Big Thing mascot. 

She’s fighting for her political life, for the government’s, and to not be the newbie that lost the state. She’s fighting hard.

“This democracy we’re fighting for, Sarge… it’ll be big meetings, with full-blooded speeches and no-holds-barred questions from the floor?”

“Ha, no, Bluey. It’ll be run by the Chamber of Commerce, with three minutes for opening remarks.”

“Three minutes? It takes Chif three minutes to load his pipe! How are the parties going to express a worldview, a whole philosophy, give an account of the state’s problems?”

“Ha, they won’t, lad. The format will restrict them to specific problems, which will present in a depoliticised fashion. Any candidate who tries to connect things together will sound like an eccentric.”

“But the audience will ask questions about it!”

“No, they’ll be pre-submitted, including about two written down. And the MC, the head of the Chamber of Commerce, will choose which gets asked. Which will be about depoliticised technical problems, largely.”

“But Goulburn, like all regional cities, needs really deep thinking, Sarge! As its former role as a wool capital recedes decade by decade from the 1970s onwards, it needs substantial reinvention, a whole renewal of what a regional can be!”

“Curly, you mean like vast new solar farms totalling around 800 megawatts output, taking advantage of Goulburn’s position as a major junction on the grid, but heavily opposed in a National Party culture war, led by federal member Angus Taylor?”

“Yes, Sarge!“

“Yeah, aside from some argy-bargy about solar in general, that won’t get much of a debate. But there’ll be a lot about Wakefield Park… Wakefield Park… Wakefield Park…”

I tuned in again about four minutes into the discussion of Wakefield Park. I’d arrived two hours before the event, and by the time it started, I knew more about Wakefield Park than about Taylor Swift. In the newso — Goulburn has three main-street newsagents surviving, a wonderful thing, but a sure sign of stagnation — a question about what the issues were got three people barraging me about Wakefield Park, the car race circuit/stadium that hosts various races, car club rallies and the like, which according to the ad-hoc research group “used to fill the motels and high street every weekend”.

Now complaints about the noise from a small group of residents living nearby have made weekend events impossible. “It’s people moving in from Sydney who don’t value this town,” one angry young man in the newso says, as I buy yet another volume of local heritage sepia photos, which appear to be 40% of the output of rural Australia now. 

Labor has jumped on the issue, offered a million bucks for noise abatement and demanded immediate action, blah blah. “I remember you and I standing with Lionel Fogelthwaite [or something] and shaking hands and saying this must stay open,” Michael Pilbrow said to the chair, in the 14th minute of the Wakefield Park discussion. (The Greens’ very capable candidate Gregory John Olsen had voiced his support, suggesting it would be a great place for “electric vehicle races”. Bless. Nice try.)

Labor is on this because it cares about rural people, their lives and what they value. And because Wakefield Park has been operating on weekends illegally for a decade, the whole thing is tangled in proceedings, and the government can’t make any promise to reopen it at all, since the illegality was the mechanism by which it was half shut down.

Wendy Tuckerman squirmed and manoeuvred, but it was hard for her to get purchase. Didn’t matter audience-wise, they were all rusteds — not one swinging voter found afterwards — but the Goulburn Post journo’s pen was flying across the pad pages as Tuckerman plunged around for a position. This issue alone could easily win or lose it for her.

“Well, I’m pleased to see the owners of Benalla Park have…” Hang on, what was Benalla Park? Some mob who’d bought Wakefield Park, it turns out. Local issues start simple. Within 15 minutes, it’s like the Council of Trent. After that we got on to Marulan.

“How come there were no questions on the solar farms, when they’d refloat the town?” I asked, afterwards, in the Tartan Room of the Hibernian Hotel, over steaks so big it looked like someone had sliced a cow in half and covered it in béarnaise sauce. The question is directed at a member of the Goulburn Group, a group of activists trying to bridge community revival, commerce and environmental advancement.

“Well, one can say that… people from the Chamber of Commerce said they don’t support the solar farms.”

“But it’s… commerce. And they’re the, uh, chamber…”

“They say there are local objections to them.”

“So you, the ‘greenies’, push business, and business has become the NIMBYs.”

“Literally the NIMBYs…”

“People told me this and Wakefield Park are opposed by Sydney blow-ins.”

“Nahhh, it’s old money, the old families. They don’t want the place to change. Or much improve.”

Goulburn prospers and despairs simultaneously, like all regional Australian towns. Prospers because a group like the Goulburn Group have got solar going, saved a wetlands, made it an electric vehicle centre, and created a buzzy new cafe, distinct from the vast, gloomy Paragon on the main street, all arches and booths, a neon sign and uniformed waitresses, and which I prefer immensely. Prospers, too, because of somewhere like Wakefield Park.

But for how long can such places live on the sepia memory of earlier times, the special event, the subsidised festival, all stopgaps because we will not build as big on energy and new forms of production? 

Ranged against that are the vested interests who want to freeze the place in decline, and who are overwhelmingly based in the National Party, selling stagnation as a victory in the culture war against smart city types.

These cities’ initial purpose has passed, but we stopped being a nation-building state about the time they really got into trouble. Victoria has reversed the trend somewhat, as a social democratic state, and after two decades of full divergence, Victoria and NSW are different places. Here, the clubs have got rich as the main streets have withered. It’s absolutely noticeable, and if it’s a coincidence, it’s a helluva one.

The NSW Coalition government’s winddown of services has created huge spatial inequality. You have to go to Sydney or Canberra for some now-standard medical specialist processes like an MRI, and if you take rail, you have to get up at five in the morning to do it, like peasants waiting to load up the milk train. The NSW rail system is now, as we used to call it, Third World — before the Third World shot past us on 400km-an-hour maglev trains, as ours groan around 19th-century curves and stop for willy-willies. 

To give an account of that needs more than three minutes, and the debate controlled by the Chamber of Commerce chair. It needs time for people to give, from their perspective, a whole account of what’s wrong with the way we’re doing things, and how it could be changed, and then have some actual in-the-moment cut-and-thrust from an audience trusted to act like adults, asking about more than the Tingwell bypass on the Ponsonby Road.

That night, after the event, I walked down to the Big Merino on the outskirts of town. Like many, I know and hate that beast, because in the days before cheap airfares, it was the midnight rest stop on the ghastly coach run from Melbourne to Sydney. Nauseous, sleepless, having just had to endure the driver’s movie choice (The Power of One, Jesus, three times), you emerged under the baleful eye of that stern ram, looking out over the land to which its plentiful wool would soon bring bloodshed and genocide on a vast scale.

Only with the coming of the wool industry in the 1820s did we really start to need the whole country fenced off. This is where the project known as “Australia” really began (“Goulburn’s got a sheep abattoir and a prison specialising in serial killers. It’s bad karma,” one of the Goulburn Group had noted. It’s pretty much Australia). The sheep fattened on the thinning of the land. 

I’d heard that a local myth had grown up since the Big Merino’s construction, that if you touched the beast’s huge concrete pizzle, you would be cured of disease and blessed with fortune and strength. People sneaking out at night to touch the sheep’s dick, to make up for the town’s grievous health care shortages. Who needs that ever-promised MRI machine for the hospital, when Big Sheep Dick Magic will cure you? Alas, not true, if it ever was. The sheep’s underside is block concrete.

“There’s no dags,” someone had once observed, staring at its big concrete arse, on one stopover. Then we’d all gotten back on the $20 bus. 

“Sarge, these are Aussies! They won’t take it! They’ll throw out a few googlies!”

“Like what, Bluey?”

“Like on gambling, pokies, Clubs NSW, Labor’s total betrayal of the working class on ’em.”

“Gambling will not be mentioned the whole evening, Bluey. And across the land, Meet the Candidates evenings will all start to become like this. Smooth, controlled, pseudo-democratic events that deliver the voters to the candidates, not vice-versa.”

“What about the Shooters guy? He’ll give ’em what for.”

“The Shooters candidate will suggest over the course of the evening that a number of inquiries are required — into nursing and teaching working conditions, emergency services and Wakefield Park — and then, in summing up, say that people have had enough of inquiries, and want action. We’re fighting for a country to become wholly dominated by the administrative mindset. Every dissident political grouping that emerges will, after five years or so, become sucked into its logic.”

“The guns are coming closer, Sarge, tell us more.”

“Bluey, there will be a show on the big screen called ‘Hot Seat’ in which a multimillionaire condescends to people who are even stupider than he is, and in the bistro they’ll eat bully beef.”

“Bully?”

“Yes, except it will be called corned beef hash with sweet potato fries and a rocket salad.”

“And they’ll think this was worth fighting for?”

“They will, Bluey. And who’s to say they’ll be wrong?”