Inside Barnaby Joyce’s wrestle with the Big C

Sitting in his doctor’s office in April, Barnaby Joyce heard the words he’d been hoping against hope wouldn’t come. It was a diagnosis that has put everything in perspective – and came about only after the intervention of a worried staffer.

Barnaby Joyce with wife Vikki and children Thomas and Sebastian on their property near Woolbrook. Picture: Ryan Osland/The Australian

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Like many men before him, ­Barnaby Joyce likes to come in first place. And as someone who rose to the head of the Nationals before serving as Australia’s deputy prime minister – not once, but twice – you could say he ­usually does.

But after a brush with cancer this year that led to major ­surgery, the 58-year-old NSW MP started to notice the men he used to be able to run rings around on his Tamworth farm were for the first time starting to leave him in ­second place.

“I just noted last night, when we’re loading railway sleepers to try and get a tractor off, guys I ­usually got round were getting around me. I don’t like it,” he told The Australian.

“I mean, no guy likes it. Guys are chock-a-block full of ego. You come in first, you want to keep coming first, you don’t want to come second. Us guys, in our own minds, well you see yourself as 20, 24 or 28. We never really see ourselves as 58 or 45 or whatever. You ­always see yourself at your prime, but you’re not.”

The fact his 20s were long behind him hit Joyce hard when, sitting in his doctor’s office in April, his worries were confirmed when he heard the words he’d been hoping against hope wouldn’t come: “You have prostate cancer.”

It was a diagnosis that has put everything in perspective for Joyce and meant that being unceremoniously dropped from the Coalition frontbench last week didn’t sting in the same way it once would have.

“When you get dropped from shadow cabinet, which is like being dropped from a C-grade football team, it’s not as great a concern as you might think,” he said. “You’ve got other things on your mind.”

Joyce had been putting off ­getting his second prostate-­specific antigen test for some time after a first test showed his PSA was elevated. After all, it was an election year.

There may not have been many fortuitous moments in the 2025 election campaign for Joyce and his party, and yet, looking back, one call he took while on the road in WA and overheard by a worried staffer may well have saved his life.

“My GP rang, and I had her on speakerphone in the car, and she said, ‘Barnaby, you haven’t had your second PSA, do it’,” Joyce said. “And my staff member sort of remonstrated that I must immediately get a PSA. In fact, they organised it, they rang the office and said to get me into the doctor for that blood test.”

Barnaby Joyce and Vikki Campion in 2024. Picture: Portia Large.

Joyce’s wife, Vikki Campion, revealed that in fact she was the one who received the call from her husband’s staff member, who had taken the matter of her boss’s health into her own hands.

“His staffer in the car with him called me and said he needs to get checked, she had overheard the conversation with his GP,” Campion said.

After finally getting his second blood test, Joyce was told that his PSA was still elevated, prompting doctors to get the former Nationals leader an MRI and refer him to a specialist.

“The MRI comes back, and they go, ‘Oh, look, we’ve found something and we’ll need to put you under general anaesthetic and do a biopsy’,” Joyce recalled.

“Even the biopsy was a bit traumatic. You urinate blood and stuff a bit afterwards. And then the ­biopsy comes back and they say ‘Yep, you’ve got cancer’.”

Hearing the “C word”, as Joyce put it, was immediately sobering.

“I think it’s like everybody, you go ‘Oh no, that’s something that happens to somebody else, that doesn’t happen to me’,” he said.

“All of a sudden you’re sort of aware of a fallibility about yourself that you’ve never had before … as you also become aware of like sort of an evil passenger in your body.

“It makes you consider things in a more sober light, and all I was thinking about was what are your responsibilities to other people, and what do you need to do to look after yourself, but more, more ­essentially, to be responsible to other people who rely on you.”

The fear of not being around for his children was something that stood starkly in Joyce’s mind after seeing his brother Tim leave behind his family six years ago when he lost his battle with bowel cancer.

“My younger brother died at 43 from bowel cancer. He had three young kids, and I was at his bed when he died. You don’t want that,” Joyce said.

“He died of bowel cancer because he didn’t get it diagnosed early enough. He saw the ad on television talking about irritable bowel syndrome, he thought that he might have irritable bowel syndrome … he had cancer.”

Tim’s missed chance to live a long and happy life is something that now resonates with Joyce, who says that if his battle with prostate cancer makes one person get the PSA test that could save their life, “then this would all be worthwhile”.

It’s a big call, particularly when keeping in mind the surgery to treat Joyce’s disease involved ­removing his entire prostate, causing him ongoing issues such as pain, the inability to do as much as he once could and, as he deftly phrased it, the fact that “some things don’t work like they used to”.

“But if I’d have waited, it could have broken out of the prostate and then metastasised, gotten into the bones and then you’ve got problems,” he said.

Barnaby Joyce with his wife Vikki on their property near Woolbrook. Picture: Ryan Osland / The Australian

Campion said that, following the cancer diagnosis, she found herself breaking her husband “down into parts”. “Suddenly you are aware of each organ, each function. Is it in the stomach, the lymph, the brain, the bowel?” she remembers thinking.

Joyce spent an uncomfortable two days in hospital away from his family – having not told his two young boys about the surgery – after an operation booked in days after the election was called.

“It was a matter of: do you want to go do it during a campaign and have every question be asked about my health? Or do you want to go to a campaign and have ­issues asked about why people should vote for the Coalition or not?” he said.

“I didn’t want it to turn into a bit of a circus, and for every second question to be: ‘how are you feeling today?’ or something like that. I don’t think that’s what an election campaign should be about.”

Joyce admitted that, had the prognosis been worse, he would have immediately resigned.

“You do have to make a value judgment as to if it’s really serious, you have to resign, because you’re obviously not fit enough for the next term,” he said. “But I’m all right, I’m dealing with it.

“If your prostate is removed and there are margins between where the cancer is and the edge of the prostate – that’s a very good sign, and that’s what they found.”

By “dealing with it”, Joyce means he still needs to monitor the after-effects of the diagnosis, which put his Gleason score – the system used to grade prostate cancer on how abnormal the cells ­appear – at seven out of 10.

Seven on the Gleason scale is considered moderately aggressive and intermediate in risk.

Despite not being out of the woods, Joyce says life is “too joyful” to focus on the darker side of mortality. “You know life is not eternal but all you can do is prioritise what’s important,” he said. “Taking the boys to school becomes vastly more enjoyable, for example.”

Joyce with then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in his beer-drinking, deputy prime minister days. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen/The Australian

Campion remarked that Joyce certainly had not let the cancer ­diagnosis stop him living life as he wanted to, revealing that as soon as he left hospital, he walked over to one of his favourite spots – the Bendemeer Bakery and Buddha Belly Kitchen – for a meat pie. “To be fair, they are home-cooked pies with vegetables hidden inside,” Campion said.

While her husband had been ordered to take it easy after the surgery, Campion said he was quick to get back to farm work, conduct television interviews and ride his motorbike. “There’s no stopping him,” she said.

Joyce has continued to largely abstain from alcohol, something that was prompted by the realisation drinking was not advisable while on medication. That realisation came shortly after he was filmed lying in a Canberra street late one night talking into his phone. “If I go to a wedding, I’ll have something to drink, I suppose,” he said. “But I’ve gone nine months without a drink, and sometimes I have a drink and another couple months go by without one. So, yeah, I just don’t do that a lot anymore.”

While Joyce likely would have gone on pretending he was 28 forever had he been able, he said he had come to terms with the fact that most people wouldn’t live as long as they do without medical intervention.

“At the age of 55, your body’s basically saying, ‘That’s how long the tyres and the bearings and the filters can go for’.

Joyce has continued to largely abstain from alcohol. Picture: Ryan Osland / The Australian

“If I want to get myself to 70 and then I want a ­period of time of retirement where I can go for a drive and still be healthy enough to stand upright and enjoy our Thermos of tea with my partner ... well, OK, if that’s what you want, then you better start realising that there’s a whole range of things that are there in the background, but they’re going to fight, they’re going to start making their way to the foreground,” he said. “And prostate cancer is a classic one.

“Things you didn’t have to worry about at 25, you better start worrying about them. You’ve got to mature in how you see yourself. We’re all going to die; what you can change is when.”