“Deeper And Deeper Into The Heart Of Darkness” Whispers Sussan Ley As She Takes The Busselton Line Down To Find The Coalition’s Captain Kurtz

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

The train moved through the night, its windows black mirrors that showed only Opposition leader Sussan Ley’s face and the faint flicker of passing signals. The Busselton Line ran south through the dark, across salt flats and scrub, through towns that seemed half-asleep or politically abandoned. She sat alone in the last carriage, hands folded in her lap, feeling each shudder of the wheels like another shaky step into the void.

They said there was still a heart to the party somewhere down here, but no one was sure it still beat. An island of Vasse, girt by McGowan. A name had been whispered, as if invoking a ghost. Andrew Hastie. Once a soldier, now something else. A man who had gone too far from the capital, too deep into the wild quiet where speeches run to sermons. Some called him the conscience of the movement. Others said he had lost it.

The carriage lights blinked above her. The only other passenger was a shift worker asleep behind a copy of The West Australian. Outside, the paddocks were faint silver under the moon, fences leaning, windmills turning without purpose. The land looked deliberately bare, as if it had given up long ago.

Ley leaned her forehead to the glass. She thought of Canberra, its marble corridors and soft lights, the talk of renewal and reset, all of it already fading behind her. She could not tell if she was going to find a man or a memory.

The train slowed somewhere past Bunbury. The guard called out the name of the next stop, but the word dissolved into the night. This is Buswell country, she thought. A trouble man he was, a man lost to the sniff of a chair. The penchant for driving pissed. A soul lost to this land a long time ago.

She whispered, barely above breath, “Deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness,” and almost laughed at herself. The phrase hung in the air and would not leave.

Beyond Busselton, where the peppermint trees close over the line, Hastie was waiting. A man who has lived too much and believes in a country that no longer sails in a sane direction. She wondered if she would recognise him when she saw him, or if she already knew what she would find.

This is an edited extract from ScoMo’s Shorties: Allegories from the Coalition by Scott Morrison. In this new collection, the former Prime Minister reimagines contemporary political figures as travellers and prophets in a moral wilderness.

In “Deeper and Deeper Into the Heart of Darkness” Sussan Ley journeys south on the Busselton Line in search of Andrew Hastie, the party’s lost idealist. Blending fiction, reflection and a touch of unintended autobiography, Morrison explores loyalty, faith and the quiet despair of marginal seats.

Published by Pan Macmillan Australia. Out November 1. RRP $49.