KEY POINTS:
The town of Benalla is a gem of northeastern Victoria, squatting on the banks of Broken River and blessed by enough recent rain to green land parched for too many years by drought.
Its tree-lined main street is flanked by a blend of classic rural Victoriana and modern
additions, humming with surprising life for a rural centre of 10,000 people: even on a mild Sunday night the local Italian restaurant is doing a thriving trade.
On its fringes is an old wartime air force base that is now a gliding and ultralight centre. Local motels are packed with Austin-Healeys and other classic racing cars in town for a nearby rally.
Benalla is famous for its roses and as the birthplace of two giants of Australian rock - Crowded House bassist Nick Seymour and brother Mark, leader singer for Hunters and Collectors.
It is a safe, comfortable town, 200km from Melbourne and enclosed by Victoria's conservative heartland. The federal seat of Indi sprawls out across the surrounding plains, held since federation by conservative MPs with the exception of the 1928 election, when their candidate forgot to nominate.
The present member is barrister Sophie Panopoulos, a Liberal sitting on a large and very safe majority - the kind of electorate that warms the heart of embattled Prime Minister John Howard.
But undertones run beneath Benalla's comfortable surface, echoing the tremors that are reshaping Australia's former political certainties.
While there is no chance these changes will rock Indi this election, they have shaken state politics, overturning a former citadel of the rural-based National Party and creating a new, nail-biting competition with Liberal and Labor candidates.
Local MP Bill Sykes is sitting on the sidelines as the federal contest heats up.
He holds Benalla by a whisker for the Nationals in the state parliament, and can see the sweeping changes that will help influence federal votes on November 24. Many will be replicated across rural Australia, some with resounding force.
In the past decade Benalla has been reshaped by modern forces.
Its former, overwhelmingly conservative, Anglo-Saxon farming base has seen an influx of "tree-changers" - Melburnians heading for a new lifestyle in the bush - and retirees attracted there by years of earlier family holidays.
Others come from need. There are shorter waiting lists for public housing in Victoria's rural towns, attracting people on welfare desperate for a roof over their heads. Sykes says that on a basis of incomes under A$25,000 a year, his electorate is now the 10th poorest in the state, and that with the number of people arriving without prospects of work and with no social networks, a whole new range of issues is emerging.
At the same time, Benalla is exporting its youth. Young people move to Melbourne looking for work and careers, meet partners who have no love of the bush, and never return.
On the land, drought and economic pressures are crushing farmers.
"We've been lucky and there's a lot of green around at the moment," Sykes says. "The country is looking good, but the people are as fragile as hell."
He says there have been more than 100 drought-related suicides in the past seven years, including one farmer whose body was not found for days.
In a statement to parliament warning of more deaths to come, Sykes quoted the policeman who found the body and sat with it for six hours waiting for backup.
"I'm not crazy," the officer told Sykes. "But I found myself talking to him, asking him questions he couldn't answer - because he was dead, because he'd blown his head off with a shotgun three days earlier because he could no longer afford to feed his cattle."
The drought is a huge issue for both federal and state politicians. They respond with mutual buckpassing.
Locals want secure water supplies, to protect local Lake Mokoan, its wetlands and the irrigation water it provides, to block a planned pipeline from the Murray River to Melbourne, and to repair the dangerously ailing Murray Darling River system.
And in a message finally heard by Howard and looming as an issue for this election, climate change is big in Benalla. The drought of the past seven years may not be a product of climate change, but it has hammered Australia's water crisis home.
The people of Benalla will also be voting on problems repeated nationally and of crucial importance in the marginal seats that will decide whether Howard survives or is defeated by Labor Leader Kevin Rudd.
Health and local hospitals are under huge pressure, reflected in long waiting lists and overcrowded emergency wards. Waiting lists for public dentistry in the area extend for between two and four years.
The former Anglo-Saxon stronghold is now seeing a slow influx of migrants, mainly from Asia, a process welcomed by Sykes and others who believe Benalla can only gain.
