On Saturday night in an airport hotel in Essendon Fields, is the party from hell.

The woman checking my name off the list around 8pm is angry and crying and saying, “I don’t get it, we went in with policies, they went in with nothing.”

Inside it is awful. This is meant to be Bill Shorten’s victory party, but the energy is heavy – as if some trauma had taken place and a great shock was being absorbed. Inside no one is talking, and if they are, it is quietly and involves references to franking credits.

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Under the room’s sickly pink lights, there are trays of cakes with tiny Labor flags, that as the night wore on only seemed to mock the territory not seized. Many of the party faithful have a drink in each hand, and are joylessly getting pissed.

Later people are openly sobbing when Shorten gets up to speak. No one is consoling anyone, because each person here seems to be in the middle of their own unique and terrible pain.

Shorten says he did his best and tried his hardest – and someone shouts out from the crowd, “It’s not you Bill, it’s the country.”

It’s the country.

It’s not Morrison, it’s not the Liberals, it’s not the policies, it’s not Queensland, it’s not Dutton. It’s the country that’s rotten.

The call from the floor chilled me to the core. This is it, I thought. This is the hardening of the arteries, the cleaving of the country in two, the thing that Australia has largely avoided so far.

In 2016 Britain voted for Brexit and America for Trump. In those countries, part of the national trauma was the realisation that one part of the country was so ill-acquainted with the other part. Citizens stopped knowing each other. The polls got it wrong, the media got it wrong, people were so siloed in their own tribes and social media bubbles that the other side winning felt like a profound shock. Like it wasn’t meant to happen. The falcon couldn’t hear the falconer and all that. And in those countries, it’s only gotten worse. Part of the damage in the years since has been the hardening of the lines and divisions between these tribes, between red and blue.

Through the night, texts came in from people I know, echoing the sentiment. Their fury was not with the Liberals but with Australia. That their fellow citizens had chosen their investment properties over climate action.

There had always been the thought that such a schism couldn’t happen in Australia. If anything, we gravitate towards the middle, and for years both Liberal and Labor had such similar offerings that it hardly seemed to matter who was governing. But this election was different. There was a clear choice about the future, and for the many people in the room on Saturday night, the fact that their vision for Australia’s future was not affirmed, made them feel estranged and alienated from their own country.

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Younger volunteers I spoke with – the ones that have the most to lose (the climate, the natural world) – said that the campaign did not go hard enough to the left. This too reminded me of America and the UK in the aftermath of Brexit and Trump.

Outside it was freezing. The party was near the airport and the hotel was ringed by highways and caught the cold winds. It was miles from anywhere. A man in a suit was outside talking into his phone and crying: “This country’s breaking my heart,” he said.

I couldn’t bear to go back inside.

Sunday morning and I’m talking to my dad about Hawkie and this country.

“Are we doomed? Are we just like all the other countries where one half hates the other half’s guts?” I asked my dad.

Dad said no way, and quoted Bob Hawke at me: “I want to be remembered as a bloke who loved his country and still does.”