Being Barney: the Deputy PM’s world

Barnaby Joyce on the four daughters he rarely sees - unless they book an appointment - and the deal to chuck it all in.

Time for reckoning: Barnaby Joyce turns 50 next month. Picture: Sean Davey

That blood moon head, that ­crimson revelator. His face is a mood ring filled with a thermochromic element that changes colour according to temper­ature and the statements of Bill Shorten. It’s an open book. That face has been cut open, stitched back together, praised, punched, squashed, scratched, kissed, pinched, rubbed in dirt, blessed by priests, splashed across newspapers, affixed to billboards and celebrated, affixed to placards and set alight, loved, scorned, abused, smiled at by royalty, cursed by prime ministers and burnt by the sun.

Barnaby Joyce rolls up his right shirt sleeve to reveal a pink scar gouged into his arm, like a scar from a ­lightning strike. He turns in his chair in the bistro at the Dungowan Hotel, his local near ­Tamworth, and points to another skin cancer scar on his neck. That low burning sun, like one or two members of parliament, appears to want him dead.

“They took a spot out of my arm and said, ‘That one was a melanoma’,” he says. “This is ­happening while parliament’s on and I’m trying to be cool and calm. There were three. The one in my neck could have ended up in a nerve and gone into my brain. Big problem.” He shrugs, swigs from a glass of Carlton Draught. “The highest incidence of melanoma recorded in Australia is in Walcha, where I grew up. Why? Higher altitudes. Because it’s cooler they don’t think they’re getting burnt. Fair-skinned people. I wasn’t genetically bred for the country I was in.”

He lay back on the surgeon’s table recently to have his stage one melanomas removed. (He’s all clear now, but needs regular checkups.) Member for New England. Leader of the Nationals. Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. Barney, father of four. A great leveller is the surgeon’s operating table. A place where a man can reflect on his successes and failures before the gas sends him to dreamland. His uneasy mind drifted where it always drifts, to Natalie, his wife. To his daughters, Bridgette, 20, Julia, 19, Caroline, 17, and Odette, 15.

Beautiful Bridgette at birth. The terrifying complications. “My kids were big babies,” smiles Natalie, sitting across from her husband, sipping a soda water. He remembers how Natalie struggled during the labour. The nursing staff were too glib, too relaxed when everything his stomach told him spelled danger. He laid eyes on Bridgette for the first time and she was purple, gasping for air. “Blokes panic,” he says. “She was the wrong colour. And then they took Bridge in one direction and they took Nat off to surgery in the other direction and I was thinking, ‘Holy shit, this is a car crash’.”

She’s 20 now but Bridgette Joyce was 20 when she was 10. There’s a story she tells about that. “We’d go to these political events because Dad would be like, ‘You want to come here with me?’, and of course you want to go and spend time with him in the car – that’s where we spent most of our time together – but you get to this event and he’d be, like, ‘Oh, I just gotta stop in here and see someone’. There’s lights and cameras and he takes off and I’d be lost in, like, a campaign launch and I’m, like, ‘Okaaayyyy’. I remember standing once between two men and they’re like, ‘So, what news agency do you work for?’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, no, I’m here with my dad’.” ­Barney, the guy over there holding court with those former PMs. “That’s him, there.”

This is one of those northern NSW bars straight out of Flame Trees. The dessert special is lemon meringue pie with cream, but it’s the crumbed lamb cutlets that folks drive out of Tamworth for. Nobby’s nuts and the smell of cigarettes in the ­carpet. A farmer doing his taxes over a beer by a wall lined with framed photos, a rogues’ gallery of loyal and dead regulars.

That ubiquitous blood moon mug, red with embarrassment now because Natalie is telling the story of their University of New England courtship. “The first time we spoke was O Week,” she says. “The last day was a car rally in a ute and he just came up to me and went, ‘You’ll do’.”

“I had all the lines,” he says, his big eyes rolling back in his head, mortified.

He approached true love with an accountant’s sensibility, asked himself a series of secret and woefully unromantic questions, a kind of unofficial checklist for a man wedded to the land. “Will she be upset if she can’t go to a restaurant every night? Does she have the resilience to get through commercially tough times?” He nods. “No point starting a project you can’t see the end of,” he says.

The most important part of that project – the child-raising part – is almost over and now he longs for the purple diary days. These are the days Joyce colours in purple in his diary to ­indicate where his schedule allows him to sleep in his own bed, not far from this hotel. These are the days he sees his family. In the 59 days of February and March, he has precisely two purple days coloured in his diary.

“I have finally got access to the diary,” Natalie says. “I talk to the diary person two times a day and try and organise my life. My life is ­basically organised around his life.”

His mobile phone buzzes. He sneaks a look at it, shakes his head briefly. That phone usually starts buzzing on his bedside table at about 5am, ­earlier if a crank call lands from another bitter constituent who has acquired his mobile number.

If he has enough time after this lunch, he and Natalie will go home today and briefly change before they are guests of ­honour at the Landmark Classic campdraft and horse and cattle sale in Tamworth, where more than 2000 people from farms across Australia are gathering as we speak. If that ends early enough, he might chance a dinner with Bridgette and Julia. Caroline and Odette are away at boarding school.

He taps a few times on his phone. “[The girls] have his PA Kate’s number,” Natalie says. “They don’t go through me, they will go through Kate. ‘Is Dad here, can he come to this?’ and Kate, if she can, will book them into the diary. And, I mean, that’s really sad when you’ve got to go through his PA to organise dinner.”

Joyce winces, sips his beer. Crap topic. Kill me now, the mood ring says. But he dives headfirst into the shit like always, dives into politics and life like he dived into rugby mauls in his 20s, emerging with one lost front tooth, a distended spleen, 28 stitches across his face, fractured ribs and three premiership tilts for his college.

He’s the master of the sledgehammer summary. A walking thought bubble. “Brevity is the attribute of a well-remembered message,” said Father Drake, the only childhood sermoniser he stayed awake for. He talks to himself on long drives, debates himself, ruminates on matters of national interest behind the wheel, and by the time some slow-motion cattle mob has crossed the road he’s settled on another thought bubble. Carbon taxpayers won’t be happy “when they’re paying over $100 for a roast”. “It’s time that Pistol and Boo buggered off back to the United States.”

Change the date of Australia Day, Minister Joyce? “They don’t like Christmas, they don’t like Australia Day… just miserable gutted people and I wish they would crawl under a rock and hide for a little bit.” He says those things when he ­forgets he now has “Deputy Prime Minister” in front of his name. “The DPM would never say shit like that,” he says. “But Barnaby would. When I’m at work I don’t think I’m the Deputy Prime Minister. I’m Barnaby. If I just think of myself as who I am rather than the office I hold then I’ll probably give the best service I can.”

He’s messy and impulsive and flawed and human. He was dumped from a key role as shadow finance minister in 2010 after a series of gaffes – his volatile mouth famously mixed up his “billions” and “trillions” at a National Press Club speech on climate change policy – but he scraped the mess off his ill-fitting suit, adjusted his ill-sitting tie, dived back into his stormy metaphorical sea of troubles and swam all the way to the DPM.

Scars: Joyce after skin cancer surgery.

“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he says. “The moresuccessful you get, the more people want you to champion their cause…”

“And families take a back seat,” Natalie adds. “We’re probably lucky, and maybe not so lucky in a way, that they were so young when he started so they really don’t know any different.”

“Bridge was nine,” he says. “Odette, the youngest, was 18 months. They’ve grown up with it.”

“Odette’s never known anything but politics,” Natalie says. “Every time he’d come home she actually wouldn’t go near him because he hadn’t been home. It’s taken a long time to get that father-daughter rapport.”

He’s Odysseus from his beloved Homer, always taking the long way home, finally walking through the front door to find his daughters have swapped their Ken dolls for smartphones and their smartphones for boyfriends. Apologies for lateness lost all meaning long ago. The worst bit was when they stopped waiting altogether. “I hate it,” he says. “In the end they give up on you. They just don’t think you’re going to be there.”

His job often comes down to a matter of how many cards he has up his sleeve. Wins come with losses. Wins and losses come with enemies. He played a card recently for Queensland grazier families set to lose their properties in an Australian Defence Force land grab. “I had a meeting with the Prime Minister and the Defence Minister,” he says. “I just went in and said, ‘The Nats aren’t ­supporting this, so how you go from here is kind of up to you but we won’t be supporting this’. They said, ‘What are you not supporting?’ and I said, ‘We’re not supporting people losing their places against their will’.” Days later, the govern­ment abandoned plans to compulsorily acquire farming land.

“I’d love to show people exactly what we do because I think people think it just happens magically,” he says. “It ­happens with fury, with people ­getting the screaming shits with you and you’re sort of belligerently pushing your way forward because you believe something is right. Then what always annoys you is, someone else will pop up and claim credit for it and you say, ‘Aaahhh, they told me to get f..ked, not you. You weren’t even at the meeting’.”

He calls Canberra “boarding school for adults”. Friends scratch your back, then you scratch theirs, then they put you in the dog house for reasons unknown. Joyce finishes each political day replaying wars he’s had on all sides of the battlefield. “Someone’s pissed you off and you rewind it back through your mind. There are repercussions from people. I go to sleep at night thinking, How do I change this around? How do I play these cards I have? What really are they willing to put on the table for it? Are they willing to put the Coalition on the table for it? See, people who are outside the system think you’ve got a fistful of jokers and you can just keep on throwing jokers out. You can’t. You’ve probably got one. And once you’ve thrown it out, your capital is spent.”

He’s run out of jokers to lay before his kids. “See, they get their own rhythm without you,” he says. “They’ll see you on television but they won’t actually see you in the house.”

“Probably the worst thing is that we haven’t spent time together as a family since he got elected in 2004,” Bridgette says. In his first year as a ­senator he spent 22 nights in his own bed. In his second year it was 45 nights.

Natalie has a four-letter word up her sleeve. He bites the last bit of lettuce on his bistro lunch plate. Looks into his wife’s eyes. “There are times in any career when you’re ready to tip,” he says. “You can’t let people know that. You’ve just got to keep it to yourself. I always say to Nat, ‘The moment you don’t want me in there, you say ‘bail’ and I’ll be out that night’.”

Big promise. One of those grandiose declarations husbands make to their wives over a sudsy stack of dishes. Do you really mean that? “Well,” he says, shifting in his seat. “The thing is, we got expenses to pay now so I’m sort of locked in…”

Natalie laughs. “The thing is, yes, I probably will when the time is right,” she says. “And I’ll know when he’s ready. He’s not ready.” She laughs harder. “I might be ready,” she says. “But he’s not ready.”

He shrugs his shoulders. Enough of this. He hears you loud and clear. Nothin’ worse than a bloody politician crying into his beer. Who needs that sentimental bullshit anyway? He looks down at his glass and it’s empty. His mate, publican Kevin Smith, pours him another beer. A couple of hours ago I asked Kevin for a juicy tidbit about his ­Deputy Prime Minister, who he’d watched over countless Fridays down schooners in his beloved Dungowan Hotel. “Naaaahh,” Kevin said, after some thought. “What happens in Dungowan…”

Fair enough. There’s really only one question that a lamb cutlets lunch with the DPM leaves you with anyway: Why? Why not tear that diary with its two purple days into tiny little pieces and spend the rest of your life playing chess with Odette? He dwells on the why like he’s waiting for a cattle mob to cross the New England Highway.

“Guilt,” he says.

Joyce meeting locals.

He collects Antarctica stamps. He didn’t eat a single prawn until university: “My parents just didn’t buy shit like that.” He choked several prawns down then asked his uni friends sincerely why the legs didn’t get stuck in their throats. “We peel the legs off first, Barney.”

He had a pathological fear of communism as a boy. He remembers exactly where he was on November 11, 1975. He was sitting under a banana tree outside a holiday shack his father had built at Valla Beach, south of Coffs ­Harbour. His dad was talking to a neighbour. His mum came screaming out of the shack. “He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone!” she hollered. “Who’s gone?” his father bellowed. “Whitlam!” she barked. James Joyce never swore but he sure swore that day.

Joyce repeated his first year at boarding school because his Jesuit teachers believed his country primary school education had left him close to illiterate. He read every book he could get his hands on – Tolstoy, Homer, Dostoevsky – because he was always aware of where he wasn’t. He was known for taking his football mouthguard to the pub on a Friday night in case his mates got in a blue. He believes his parents spent too much time screaming at politicians on the living room tele­vision and not enough time screaming at politicians in party meetings in town.

His job pulls him west and east and south and north, which might explain his curious way of walking, hunched over slightly, his right hand fixed to his downcast chin in contemplation, like he’s in the early stages of curling into a ball, taking shelter somehow from the next attack, the next headline, the next father who blames his government for killing his business, the next mother who blames his government for killing her kid, the next threat from errant backbencher George Christensen.

Everybody wants a piece. Women abuse him in bars. Men abuse him in restaurants. Sometimes he has a go back and it sounds like this: “Mate, I’m clocked off. I’m here with my family. You’re not making a big man of yourself even though you’re saying it in front of your girlfriend. You’re just being a pain in the arse.”

Recently, one of the girls’ ­science teachers let fly at a parent-teacher night at school. “Everyone thought I was having an ­interesting conversation with the science teacher but it was actually meltdown,” he says. Natalie adds: “Even the principal looked and went, ‘Oh, shit’, and went the other way.”

“We were arguing about global warming, can you believe that!” he says. The science teacher, he thought, had a frustratingly narrow view on ­climate science. “You’re on the extreme end of only one side of the argument,” he stammered. “Is there any other side of your debate?”

“There is no other side!” the science teacher hollered. Joyce responded with typical measure and grace. “Well, that’s bullshit!” he barked.

The Joyce bunch: Barnaby at Parliament House with, from left, Natalie, Odette, Bridgette, Julia and Caroline.

At the Landmark Classic campdraft, Joyce walksinto the centre of a cattle yard to present awards to several competitive horse wranglers. He passes an old friend, Peter Cookson, who is a judge tonight. Joyce was an accountant for the 60-year-old from Dirranbandi when he and Natalie were living in St George, western Queensland, in the blissful pre-politics years.

“I knew the real feller,” says Cookson, watching Joyce hand out the awards. “The real feller would go to the pub every Friday night and have a yarn to everyone and when he became a politician he went to the pub every Friday night and had a yarn to everyone. A few roasted him but he copped it good.”

The Deputy Prime Minister spends the next two hours shaking hands with a hundred people, most of them wearing the same cream-coloured cowboy hat and offering the same ice-breaker.

“Hot enough for ya, Barnaby?”

“Hot hey mate.”

“Hot ain’t she Barney.”

He takes a photo with a group of fundraisers, The Classic Ladies Foundation. “I run a cattle feedlot so I’m Barnaby’s choir,” says Candee Thorn, one of the group. “But, to be honest, I feel disillusioned a bit by the Nationals and the Liberals at the moment. I don’t think the National Party really stands for rural people much anymore.”

It’s almost 8pm when he walks out of the ­stadium. The sun is going down and the ­Tamworth sky is dusty and pink, orange and light blue. He dwells for a moment on the why. “I feel a sense of guilt,” he says. “A sense that if I don’t do it, I’ve let the show down a bit.”

He comes to events like this to reaffirm his ­politics as much for people like Candee Thorn as for himself. “I’ve seen what happens in Canberra,” he says. “You get embroiled in the Fourth Estate. You involve yourself in this little clique and you go down to Kingston and you reinforce your ­conceits and reinforce your conceits.” Then group philosophy and policy grows bigger than people like Candee Thorn. “Economic purists, the market reigns supreme; everything that happens, no ­matter what the ­consequence, is ultimately good. No! It’s ultimately f..ked if you hurt someone.”

He walks out to the gravel carpark where his four-wheel-drive is parked. Natalie walks a few steps behind him. “People say they understand policy,” he says. “Well, I’ve read the policy on love-making. I have. I’ve read Byron, I’ve read Keats, I’ve read Flaubert and I’ve also participated in it and, you know what, the participation is vastly different to the poetry.” Natalie nods heartily in agreement. His deep belly laugh echoes across the campdraft paddocks at sunset.

A woman approaches. “Sorry to interrupt,” she says. “My name is Katrina.”

“Hi, I’m Barnaby.”

“I know,” she says.

Katrina Gilligan. She lives on a property west of Townsville. She’s a mum. She says the army was going to take her home. She travelled down to Tamworth to beg him to intervene but in the time it took to get here the problem went away. Like magic. Now she’s come to say thanks. “It has been the most stressful time of my life,” she says. “My kids…” And she cups her mouth, holds back tears. “I couldn’t sleep,” she says.

“Yeah,” Barnaby says, softly.

“The family started fighting,” she says. “I’m still in shock… I came here to visit you.”

He grips his pant pockets with his thumbs, awkward in all this bloodletting, the deep emotion in the moment. The mood ring melon is scarlet red with embarrassment, pride maybe.

“Thank you,” Katrina says wholeheartedly.

He drops his head, digs a boot heel into the grass. “Yeah,” he mumbles. “OK.”

She speaks of her kids’ futures. The upheaval she saw. The agony of powerlessness. Katrina might weep but she waves goodbye before she does. “Thank you very much,” she says.

“OK,” he says, taking a relieved breath when this brief and perfect political moment is mercifully over.

Grounded: Joyce with family members.

There’s an Indian restaurant nearby where the prawn masala is to die for and the house red wine might kill you. “How was your day?” 19-year-old Julia Joyce asks at the end of the table.

“Fascinating. I spent it with your dad.”

“Glad someone got to spend time with him,” she says. Her sister, Bridgette, laughs beside her and both girls shoot smiles at their old man. They’re whirlwinds. Beautiful and bright and bone-dry funny and direct, like their mum and dad. Like at home, Joyce doesn’t get a word in at the restaurant table. It’s almost 10pm and he’s too tired to add much anyway. He lets an update of their week simply wash over him. A mere observer in his daughters’ lives.

The girls recently had a party that ran for ­several days in which the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia kept walking past shirtless, beefy teenage boys he’d never met. “Some boy was walking around in his towel and I said, ‘Didn’t ya mum and dad give you a shirt?” He mumbles into his red wine. “Dickhead.”

I ask the girls to talk honestly about growing up with Barnaby Joyce for a dad. Kill me now, the mood ring says. “I’ll go have a cigarette,” he says.

He stands and raises his smoking fingers to Bridgette, who pulls a packet of cigarettes from her handbag, slips one to her dad. He steps outside. “We can say the truth now,” Julia laughs.

Truth is, it’s been incredible and maddening and disappointing and inspiring. They remember getting in trouble for spinning on chairs behind their dad while he was on Sky News. They remember watching their dad getting abused. They remember looking out the window to see their dad mowing the lawn in a new business suit because the only spare moment he had to trim the grass was when their mum was fixing her make-up before another event. They remember the endless campaigning. “We’d go to meetings and we’d want to be with the other kids running around and you had to learn to sit there and listen and act about 10 years older than you were,” Julia says.

“I hate telling people,” Bridgette says.

“Yeah, I never tell people,” Julia says. “I have a really good friend whose parents hate Dad. Like, you want to go over, but then, ‘Wow, will they treat me differently because of Dad?’”

“When I got to college I didn’t tell anyone for six months,” Bridgette says. “I had one person ask me, ‘So what does your dad do?’ I said, ‘Public ­service’. They said, ‘OK, cool’.”

Bridgette sits up, leans into the table. “OK, this is our life in a nutshell,” she says, smiling. Dad calls out of the blue. Let’s have dinner. That nice Italian place. Great. Can’t wait to spend time with you. Dad’s PA Kate calls back. Dinner is now at The Lodge. You know, like, with the Prime Minister.

“Dad calls back and he’s like, ‘I’m sorry, half the cabinet is going and he just invited us and I said I’d go but if you don’t want to go I’ll tell him that I’m going to dinner with you’. I’m like, ‘So you’re going to tell him the reason you’re ditching dinner is to come out for dinner with me?’ Then Kate calls me and says, ‘They’ve already got your name place set out’.”

Bridgette howls in agony in her ­restaurant seat. “I was so angry,” she says. “I was livid. I said, ‘I just wanted to talk to yooouuuuu!’ I mean, it’s fine, they’re lovely people, but, you know, it’s like going to dinner with your boss.”

The girls fall back in their chairs, laughing. “People always joke and ask me if I’ll go into ­politics,” Bridgette says. “No way. I’ve seen what he does. I’ve seen what goes into it. It’s a horrible life and I don’t wish it upon anyone.” The girls laugh, Natalie shakes her head.

Joyce reappears, pads back towards his seat. Bridgette wants to squeeze one final message in before he returns to the table, one final note about being his daughter. She keeps it brief. She knows that brevity is the attribute of a well-­remembered message. “It’s been a privilege,” she says, sure and true.

The girls go back to their meals. Joyce sits back at the table and pours himself another wine. “Oh, Dad, there’s no hot water at home,” says Bridgette.

“What?” he barks.

“Yeah, no hot water,” Julia says.

“Gggyahh!” he grimaces, shaking his head. That blood moon head, that crimson revelator telling tales of victories and miseries.

At 10.30pm, the Joyce girls leave the Indian restaurant to meet some friends in the Dungowan Hotel. The lights start to go out across New England. And the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia goes home to fix his hot water system.