How Indi independent Cathy McGowan became a real challenge to Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella Cathy McGowan with her beloved Indi Valley behind her. CATHY McGowan stands in the late afternoon sun and, just for a moment, allows herself to dream. "Imagine if I did go to Canberra," she says. In Canberra, and I wouldn't have to answer to any political party. Imagine that. She grins, then waves to a woman driving slowly up the main street of Yackandandah, the picturesque township in Victoria's northeast that has helped to create one of the most fascinating human stories in the 2013 federal election. It is here, and across the sprawling, 28,000-square-kilometre electorate of Indi, that the people bucked the national trend and instead of backing the formidable local Liberal MP, Sophie Mirabella, did their best to chuck her out. And if the close-run voting pattern continues, into her place will step the independent Ms McGowan, a 59-year-old sheep farmer, propelled on the road to Canberra by one of the most organised and unlikely local campaigns ever run. A campaign that looks set to unseat Ms Mirabella, the woman who seemed to have an unassailable hold on the mountain-and-river electorate, which has been held by the conservative parties since 1931. It started back in February when a bunch of young people from the region, which stretches from Wodonga in the north to Kinglake in the south, and takes in centres including Wangaratta, Beechworth and Yackandandah, got together for a dinner party in Melbourne. A bright, engaged and ambitious group of 20-somethings, they'd all been born and raised in Indi but had moved to the city for study and work. Among the group were several nieces and nephews of Ms McGowan, who, as one of 13 kids, has so many nieces and nephews she's forgotten their exact number. "There was a mob of young people who had gone to school up here who connected up in Melbourne," she says. Sophie Mirabella is on the verge of losing the seat of Indi. They were interested in politics and with the election coming up they decided to get involved. Riding a wave of Gen Y enthusiasm and connectivity, the young people - Ms McGowan called them Indi Expats - made contact with their friends and networks back up in the country, and community consultations began. A recurring theme emerged - dissatisfaction with the reliability of the train network, poor mobile and data connections, and lengthy hospital waiting lists - and a view that the community was not being listened to, not in Canberra, nor by the local representative, Ms Mirabella. An organisation was born called Voices for Indi, and Ben McGowan, 28, was dispatched to call his aunt Cathy and press her into service. At first she was reluctant - a working sheep farm and an agricultural leadership consultancy were keeping her busy. I initially said I'd help in some other capacity. You don't want to let young people down when they ask for help but I tried to find something else I could do without standing (for election) " Ms McGowan said. But as Voices for Indi gathered momentum and Easter rolled around, she decided she would stand against Ms Mirabella, the ambitious Melbourne lawyer and Liberal warrior who'd held the seat for 12 years. The Cathy McGowan for Indi campaign was born, and the Gen Y support team was joined by almost 600 registered volunteers, many of them community leaders, who threw their support behind the independent, raising almost $120,000 through small donations and crowd funding, and blitzing the electorate with democracy dances, fundraising and a sea of orange bunting, signs and T-shirts. THE Liberal Party seemed to be caught flat-footed as the McGowan juggernaut hit the campaign trail. Who was this candidate, who had refused to direct her voting preferences to any other party because she wanted to remain truly independent? What made her tick? In fact, she was well known in the local community, and had lived in the Indigo Valley, near Yackandandah, nearly all her life. The daughter of a local farming family, she'd been actively involved in the Victorian Farmers Federation and the National Farmers Federation; so was she a closet National Party supporter? She'd worked for three years as a research assistant to former Liberal MP for Indi Ewan Cameron back in the Fraser Government days; so maybe she was secretly a Liberal? She's Catholic and she supports gay marriage, believes in man-made climate change and describes Australia's asylum seeker policies as "embarrassing." "People keep trying to pigeonhole me, to work out what box to put me in," she says, cheerfully enough. I'm none of those things. I'm for Indi. Ms McGowans campaign was run by a group of volunteers, most of them first time campaigners. Rex McCartney owns a mechanics shop in Wodonga, and became a volunteer for Ms McGowan, running her door-knocking teams and driving the bus for the McGowan volunteers singing circle. Yet he'd previously voted Liberal - including for Ms Mirabella when first elected. "I did vote for her (Ms Mirabella) the first time," he says, as his colleague Tony Scragg emerges from the shop to give Ms McGowan a congratulatory kiss. I've been a Liberal voter most of my life but I'd become disillusioned. Mr McCartney, who knows Ms McGowan because she is a customer, said he'd once stood for council but had never been involved in organised politics. But he said campaigning for Ms McGowan was "a no-brainer," even if he'd "never been involved in a political campaign in my life." "Win, lose or draw, congratulations mate," the 57-year-old says, giving the hopeful future member for Indi a hug. FIRST-timers as political campaigners they may have been, but there's nothing amateurish about how firmly Ms McGowan and her team are on message with their positivity agenda. Ms McGowan steadfastly refuses to make any personal comments about Ms Mirabella, and even had her door-knocking team sign a values pledge that included a promise to always smile, always be polite and never, ever, make criticisms of Ms Mirabella or her campaign. "I really don't want to get into the anti-Sophie stuff," she says. Ms McGowan said she only knew Ms Mirabella professionally. "Trying to unpick Sophie is never the way it was done," she said. It was never an anti-Sophie campaign. Cathy McGowan, daughter of Paul and Marie, went to Beechworth local and Catholic schools before "finishing off" as a boarder at Sacre Coeur in Melbourne, and getting her arts degree with a major in economics and history at Monash University. In her mid-40s, she went back to school to get her masters in agricultural and rural development. She doesn't have children. Her partner of several years, David Wolfenden, is a grain farmer from up the road, who, like her, has been active in agricultural politics for many years. THERE is much talk about which parties, if any, supported Ms McGowan. There are whispers she handed out for the Greens. She says they did, and that her volunteers handed out for all the other candidates, including Ms Mirabella, at smaller booths where rival volunteers had to leave their stations for a few minutes. She said some of these volunteers also handed out for her. "That's just how it's done across rural and regional Australia," she says. Some Liberals are also accusing the Nationals of supporting her. She readily says several individual Nationals did support her, but the party machine did not. High-profile Nat Barnaby Joyce campaigned for Ms Mirabella. Former Victorian Nationals MP Ken Jasper was one who campaigned for Ms McGowan, wearing her distinctive orange T-shirt and handing out how-to-vote cards for her at the major polling stations in Wangaratta. After 35 years as the state MP for Murray Valley, Mr Jasper knows a thing or two about politics, and decided he would not support Ms Mirabella, even though the Libs and the Nats were Coalition partners. Asked why, he says that he was concerned the electorate was being "taken for granted." We needed the best representative we could possibly have. "The first responsibility of an MP is to represent the electorate and I had some concerns about that," Mr Jasper says. He'd previously refused to be involved in federal election campaigns. Under the rules of the Coalition agreement, the Nationals were unable to stand a candidate against the incumbent, Ms Mirabella. Mr Jasper's high-profile support of Ms McGowan has been somewhat controversial, but he denied that he campaigned in radio and newspaper advertisements against Ms Mirabella because he didn't approve of her. "I wouldn't put it like that," he tells the Herald Sun. I was not strongly supportive of her. Mr Jasper said the Liberals seemed to wise up in the last few weeks of the campaign that the swing was on. "We were being bombarded," he says. Five shadow ministers came through, and in the Wangaratta Chronicle there were five advertisements on the Wednesday before the election. THE looming defeat of the polarising Ms Mirabella sent shock waves through the Liberal hierarchy. The member for Indi is close to Liberal heavyweights such as former federal treasurer Peter Costello, who helped her campaign. Ms Mirabella was due to take a seat in new Prime Minster Tony Abbott's Cabinet but stood aside from contention this week when it became obvious she would likely lose her seat. The Herald Sun showed Ms McGowan the comments made by Mr Abbott when she stood aside, as the new PM warmly praised Ms Mirabella. "Oh that's nice, I'm glad he saying nice things about her," she says, peering through her glasses at the phone screen. That's how it should be.