Two states and a territory in one day, an accumulative distance of some 1500 kilometres. I wonder how many carbon credits they will need to offset the environmental cost of this election.

Television determines everything nowadays, from the structure of the stage-managed events, which have been designed for maximum audiovisual impact, to the strange bifurcation of the day into blocs of production (morning) and post-production (afternoon) time. (Neologistic thought of the day, to be pursued in a hypothetical future post: core and non-core imagery. Howard's morning walk is a core image, while those of him smiling or engaging with primary school children are non-core, perhaps because they're less believable.)

Very little of importance can take place in the afternoon because of the evening news. Anything that takes place after midday runs the risk of not being packaged (like breakfast cereal or takeaway food) in time to make the bulletin, in which case the candidate will have missed the chance to be seen and heard by millions. This is unacceptable. Even in our heterogeneous mediascape, the evening news remains critically important. For one thing, it screens when people are only vaguely aware of the television (it's dinner time, after all, and they're multitasking) and is therefore absorbed, almost subliminally, without too much critical reflection. Doublespeak is absorbed doublefast. This, of course, is plusgood.

This emphasis on the evening news, along with the fact that Howard is running his campaign in the way your grandfather might run for the local council (tired, cynical, and with a lot of naps pencilled in between engagements—which is not necessarily intended as a criticism, given that it's how I'm getting through it too), means that on my first day as a full-time political correspondent, I only worked part-time.

Yesterday, everything was over before midday, including the the two hour-long bus rides that bookended our engagement in the suburbs. This left me with time to kill before starting work on my stories. I wandered around the city, had some lunch, and searched in vain for someone to look at my camera's malfunctioning lens cover. I visited the Art Gallery of New South Wales (though a quick once-over hardly sufficed) and read a piece on postmodern urbanism (I have no desire to read what the newspapers are saying and have bought plenty of non-election material to keep myself from going mad). Then I slowly but surely wandered down to the backpacker-infested boondocks of Potts Point.

The evening was one of those torturous ones, where writing involves staring at a blank screen until droplets of blood form on your forehead. Outside, the backpackers raged into the night. I sat on my bed, eating Thai food and watching Top Gear, having a minor ethical-aesthetic dilemma. When the obvious story, the official story, is a rhetorical construct designed to obscure ulterior motives, or when politicians engage in pork-barrelling, dog-whistling, or other animal-verb activities, clearly the journalist is morally obliged to say so, the pretense of objectivity, which has done much to hurt journalism, be damned.

But what form should such journalism take? There have been so few precedents set in this country that it's hard to know what the truth should sound like. In the end, I decided upon a kind of cross between the critical essay and the fly-on-the-wall descriptive piece, and vowed to make a point of engaging with (listening to) the peripheral characters at any event. However, it was so late by that stage and I was so tired that I accidentally deleted a whole blog post about three little girls and their failed attempt to have John Howard acknowledge them at yesterday's media event. Disgusted with myself, I went to bed.

It's a lonely existence, this. And not merely because I'm not living with the journalists in their swanky hotels or getting drunk with them every night. It's not because I'm much younger than they are. Even when we're all together, and everybody is being civil to one another, there nevertheless remains a tendency towards isolation, and all of us seem to share it. When we board a bus or plane, nobody sits with anyone else but takes up an entire row of seats on their own. This makes sense when everyone's filing, but it happens all the the time, not just when we're writing.

On the other hand, this tendency towards isolation is tempered by a simultaneous tendency towards homogeneity of thought. Without fail, every morning someone will ask: "What's the story today?" It's only partly intended as a joke. There is a constant negotiation going on between what I like to think of as opposing wolf metaphors. On the one hand, the lone wolf. On the other, the pack animal. The journalists toggle between the two with almost imperceptible speed, though the effects of this change upon their behaviour and the space around them are anything but subtle.

Journalists have a tendency to form very a concentrated, monolithic mass of bodies around a central point or subject. They focus energy and attention on that point, like a magnifying glass focusing the sun, and positively charge it to the detriment of any non-space that might fall even a few feet outside the configuration. However, the moment a press conference or media event ends, this regime of bodies collapses and the space it helps to define begins to change.

The journalists disperse, like spores on the breeze, following highly singular trajectories as they begin to plan their stories in their heads. Their laptops, notepads or mobile phones (whatever they're using to file their stories) become the new, randomly organised points of a new, randomly organised space. Here, empty or vacant space is no longer the non-space found (or rather ignored) on the fringes of the mass during the media event, but rather an active structural element of the new configuration.

A journalist may move between these two spaces two or three times a day during the campaign. I find it endlessly fascinating to watch, and even more fascinating to take part in.

To borrow Margaret Simons' term, there are no God-correspondents out here on the trail. No Laurie Oakes. No Michelle Grattan. The Coalition's campaign launch is today and I imagine we might see some of them there. To be honest, I couldn't care less if we do. As much as I complain about them, and marvel at their occasional boorishness, I have developed a new found respect for people who get their shoes scuffed collecting the news. These miners at the coalface. I like the photographers, the camera and sound men, the reporters who write like bats out of hell for the wires. It might be the overwhelming fatigue talking here, but I think I'd much prefer to be one of them than a pseudo-celebrity columnist or commentator.

I've been too busy studying the journalists to have become friends with any of them. There are a couple I am partial to and a few who seem to be partial to me. I'm not fussed about it either way, and think my feelings of isolation are actually a good thing for my tracking. There's a lot of time to think about things, to draft articles and blog posts in my mind. It feels strange to call home at lunchtime and to have already visited two states and a territory.

There are plenty of things that make me smile out here. People, as opposed to journalists and politicians, are really beautiful and deserve to have their pictures taken. I've decided that this can be a side project for the remainder of my time on the trail. Then there's the inherent absurdity of the situation. The fact that we're flying around the country in a French plane, with a French pilot and flight staff, is terribly amusing to me, though I'm looking forward to flying on the Croatian plane so that I can say dobro jutro to the cabin supervisor. For now, though, the cockles of my heart will have to be warmed by the sound of a French accent. Welcoming us to Kahnbirra.

This may be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, but it's still the simple things that get you excited.

ElectionTracker, 11 November 2007