It’s the last morning of pre-polling in Sale, in the now vacated Nu-Scene clothing store on Raymond Street, and Kerry Brewer, the United Australia Party’s candidate for the seat of  Gippsland has got herself into a bit of an odd possie, wedged between a traffic pole and the Greens sandwich board. She’s shy – ‘an inward sort of person,’ she tells me – so when all six birders flock to a voter with HTVs, she sometimes doesn’t make it. ‘Ah well, they can read.’

Kerry’s slim and pale, veins through thin skin, in her 50s, with a quiet manner, has seen much and suffered much, something you can tell before she tells you. She was a nurse for twenty years, benched for a couple of years by ovarian cancer, then a shoe saleswoman –‘why? Oh uh later’–now back in aged care at Sale Hospital.