By Phil Jarratt
Election day dawned fairly miserably here in Noosa.
Strictly speaking, there was no dawn at all, just a slow transition from black to dark grey. Wet, miserable and petrol back up to $2.15.
Regardless of your politics, there was little to be cheerful about, unless you happened to be Llew O’Brien, sitting on a 13 per cent majority.
But wait on, compulsory voting means schools and church halls are turned into min-Eccas for the big day, and it’s all the fun of the fair for the kids while you cast your vote.
Meet the neighbours, have a chat, then front up at the sausage sizzle before repairing to the pub.
The big question this election was, with almost half of us having already voted at the pre-polls, with it raining cats and dogs, with everyone suffering from post-Covid and/or election fatigue, would the democracy sausage survive?
With the major political parties changing leaders as often as underpants (often for more or less the same reasons) over the past decade or so, you’d think we’d be too busy trying to work out who to vote for to indulge in frivolity on election day, but oddly enough we’ve embraced the idea of making it fun, and the humble sausage has become not only a fundamental part of that fun but also a proud symbol of our egalitarian electoral system.
But this is a history in three parts, so let’s go back to the very beginning of voting in Australia.
The earliest elections in the colonies were apparently rowdier than the Villa on Cup Day.
Candidates would ply voters with food and booze while rival gangs of supporters would sing songs and sporadically attack each other, at first verbally then physically.
At the first election held in New South Wales in 1843, two men were killed during rioting and dozens of others injured.
Later, when the colonies had self-government and the majority of men were free settlers with the right to vote, candidates were banned from bribing voters and alcohol was banished from the voting halls.
The second part of this history begins at the end of World War II when, after years of being derided as mystery bags, sausages began to become popular again.
In 1946 in Forbes, NSW, the Country Women’s Association called their fundraiser for food parcels to be sent to Britain, The Full Moon Sausage Sizzle. This is thought to be the first use of the term, but in a short time they became the fundraising staple of service clubs and charities throughout Australia.
When the portable gas barbecue arrived on the scene in the 1980s, the service clubs were able to set up a sausage sizzle wherever there was certain to be a crowd, be it a shopping centre, sporting event or polling booth.
Ever since, voters and their families have been able to buy a barbecued sausage on a slab of white bread, with a smear of mustard or a splash of train smash (tomato sauce), and sometimes even a tong full of fried onion.
It made casting your vote a fun day out, but was the humble snag being politicised? Not yet.
In 2012 some bright spark came up with the term democracy sausage to explain the connection between voting and munching on a snag sambo.
It hit a nerve with political media wonks who are always looking for ways to humanise their masters, and was named Word of the Year by the Australian National Dictionary.
By 2016, when Australia had to endure the longest official election campaign ever, it took off with the public. And from that day forward Australia’s political leaders have had to learn not only the art of truth minimisation but the skill of eating a sausage like you were born to do it.
As Prime Minister in 2017, Malcolm Turnbull shocked the nation by rejecting the offer of a free sausage sandwich. What sort of a man turns his back on a free snag?
But during the 2019 federal campaign, Labor leader Bill Shorten completely blew his cover as a man of the people when he tried, pathetically, to eat a sauso sanga from the middle out. As mustard exploded onto his cheeks, so too did his chance of winning the unloseable election.
Which brings us back to Noosa’s soggy election day.
I went straight to democracysausage.org (I’m not making this up) to check the sausage sizzle map which identifies polling booths around the country with sausage sizzles and cake stalls.
I was appalled to discover that only Peregian Kindy guaranteed a sizzle, with Sunshine Beach State School a possibility.
Unfortunately this was in the domain of my colleagues, the Maccolls, so I set out to prove the website wrong about the northern end of the shire.
Across Noosaville’s four polling booths I found wet corflutes and wet vollies handing out wet how to vote cards to wet voters. I even found a cleverly defaced Labor poster, but nary a sausage.
Has the democracy sausage lost its sizzle? Yeah, nah. I bought a packet of porkers and a loaf of white bread at Woolies on my way home and munched them while I watched the election coverage and sang It’s Time.
