Joyce has promised his wife that when he retires from politics it will be for good. Credit:Nic Walker There are elements of the same formula in Joyce's own rise from shy, awkward farm boy to leader of the National Party, Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources, and fallback PM. As he puts it, "With some people, you throw poo at them and it scares them. But other people just use it as fertiliser." The landscape that shaped Barnaby Thomas Gerard Joyce – the place he might never have left but for an odd falling out with his parents decades ago – is this lost-world valley, 40 minutes' north-east of Tamworth on the western side of the Great Dividing Range. Before being sent to boarding school in Sydney, the young Barnaby, a solitary, dreamy boy, roamed these hills talking to himself. "You've gotta talk to somebody," he reasons now, "otherwise you're gunna go insane!" Did the valley spook him back then? "Oh yeah, and it spooked other people, too. Because your mind plays tricks … because, without sounding too whoopee, you're very aware of ghosts. And all the things within the silence; your mind sees things and hears things out here."

Jim and Marie Joyce bought the 1821-hectare Rutherglen in 1964. Credit:Nic Walker A Catholic, his faith was stronger then than now. "If you're surrounded by nature, you ask the questions. 'Where did this come from?' 'What's it about?' " he says as the valley broadens and stars appear above the blackness. "But when you're surrounded by humans, you believe the world is all human, all man-made. And when you live in a job where apparently you are the solution, then your [inclination] to ask about the solution from somewhere else, somewhere higher, becomes less prevalent." Can this be the same bumbling Barnaby Australia imbibes in comic grabs on the TV news? The same "sweaty, big-gutted man" (as Johnny Depp cast him) who threatened to kill the irritating actor's wife's illegally imported lap dogs; the same shadow finance minister who, referring to Australia's national debt, famously rambled, "All this billions, quillions, Brazilians, what-ever you want to call them, they're just numbers"? Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce on his parents' property, about 55 kilometres from Tamworth. Credit:Nic Walker And if not, then who is this thoughtful fellow? According to Joyce's wife, Natalie, it's the man the rest of us never see, "the man behind the politician, and the man I fell in love with".

Our journey to the heart of Joyceland begins at the rustic Walcha Road Hotel, not far from Rutherglen, the property where he and his five siblings had spent their early years. We'd got together hours before in nearby Armidale, where Joyce was hosting a visit by the German agriculture minister, but it isn't until we settle on the pub verandah that the so-called "real Barnaby" starts to emerge. "I don't get angry, I get sullen." Credit:Nic Walker Was this where he first got pissed? Beer in hand, the member for New England cadges a cigarette from my pack and considers the question. "No," he concludes, "I probably first got pissed with the shearers [at Rutherglen], long before I should have been drinking." It's a typical response: over the next couple of days I realise Joyce is a man somehow compelled to answer questions about his life in authentic detail, however compromising the outcome. The only question he's dodged since contact began a few weeks earlier is whether I can visit his parents, who still live at Rutherglen, and talk to them about him.

"Barnaby's funny like that; you'll just have to meet him and see how you get on," suggests his media adviser. (The real reason for Joyce's reticence, it emerges later, was his concern that his "to the left" parents – Marie, 86, and Jim, 93 – might say something to embarrass him.) At 49, Joyce in the flesh is solid, jowly, with a big blockish head and a genial, open face that assumes various shades of red depending on his level of animation. ("We can tell how he's going by the colour of his head," a Joyce staffer once explained.) "I can't help it if I've got a red face," Joyce says, colouring slightly when the subject comes up. "People say, 'You must have high blood pressure' but I haven't. I suppose I'd be a very bad poker player." And not just because of his complexion; Joyce's expressions also betray his every mood. "I don't get angry, I get sullen," he says at one stage. Confusingly, his sullen face – a downcast, naughty-boy look – also appears when he talks of himself as an "outsider", drawn to Nationals politics because he has always identified with underdogs. "I suppose it comes from the whole sort of metaphor of where you grow up," he says, "that sense of loneliness and isolation a person has when they're on the outside."

Second youngest of the brood born to his university-educated parents, Joyce attended a tiny public school at Woolbrook, a village near Rutherglen, before becoming a boarder at St Ignatius' College, Riverview, one of Sydney's most expensive boys' schools. He wasn't happy there – "I didn't have much in common with that privileged class of people," he once said – and developed a "yearning for home" that still affects him today. In Canberra, he has lodged for years in the home of a retired Latin teacher, Mrs Primrose, who leaves a light burning which he's supposed to turn off, and so always knows when he's late home. "Some of the boys might say [after work], 'Let's go out for a beer!' " he says. "Then we go, 'Aww, shit. Mrs Primrose …' " Joyce attended the University of New England in Armidale, majoring in accountancy. Back then, when he was known as an enthusiastic brawler and a rugby player so wild his eyes appeared to spin in his head, young Barney (as friends call him) had no intention of actually becoming an accountant. His plan was to find a wife, then go home to manage his beloved Rutherglen. But all that changed when he married fellow university student Natalie Abberfield, and his parents, who didn't approve of the match, failed to attend the wedding. Other family members were also absent. Years ago, Joyce admitted "it was very hard to take" when he entered the church and saw that all but two pews on the groom's side were empty. Since then, he has refused to discuss the rift that saw him leave the area and strike out on his own. He tells me the dispute, now healed, may have been a "good" thing: "Otherwise, I might still be around here somewhere riding a horse…you've gotta move on. You can't carry around anger or hate; you can't be driven by these things." When I ask why his parents didn't approve of Natalie, Joyce flicks me the sullen look. "To be honest," he says, "there was a time when they didn't approve of any girl. But that's all over now … there's no point in revisiting all this shit."

Did he have much luck with girls as a young bloke? "No, I was very, very unlucky. I was awkward, I guess, and I just didn't have the lines." In 1998, he and Natalie ended up in the western Queensland town of St George, where he started his own accountancy firm before being elected to federal parliament on the Nationals Senate ticket in 2004. Politics was a career he had considered since childhood, when the figure who became his role model, Queensland's National Party premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, was the darling of regional Australia. Along with some of his hard-right political stances, Joyce's sometimes confusing utterances and tortured syntax make you wonder if he actually copied the style of the late dictator/premier. "We underdogs liked Joh because he got things done," he declares on the pub verandah. "We liked him because everyone used to lay shit on him. The more shit they laid on him, the more we liked him. And the more people didn't understand him, the more we believed in him." What about Joh's crushing of legal dissent; the way he used his politicised police to crack the heads of peaceful protesters?

"That was nothing to us," says Joyce. "It was irrelevant to us. It wasn't our life. Our life was: can you get us a hospital, a dam, a sealed road?" Everything else, he insists, was just a show for the TV cameras. "They were all having fun: university students tearing around and wreaking havoc! And the cops on their gee-gees chasing them! It was all a bit of theatre, really." What about the corruption among politicians and police that flourished for so long under Joh? "Look, corruption in Queensland was 20 bucks to your local prostitute. It was all small stuff. Down here, and this is off the record [he mentions a former NSW premier and his alleged links to organised crime] …mate, that was serious shit! And who started the Fitzgerald inquiry [into corruption in Queensland]? The National Party did! They inquired into themselves. There was no big inquiry down here!" Having lived in Brisbane through the Joh era, the kindest interpretation I can put on this nonsense (wrong in a Brazilian ways) is that Joyce must still be courting the sort of voters who served Bjelke-Petersen so well. Which inevitably involves a fair bit of talking from his rural rump. He is, after all, the man Tony Abbott calls Australia's "best retail politician", the man who threatened us with "$100 lamb roasts" in his scare campaign against Labor's emissions trading scheme, the man most observers agree isn't the buffoon he pretends to be. Shadow agriculture minister Joel Fitzgibbon, whose electorate of Hunter adjoins Joyce's, reckons his fellow country boy has misread the nature of New England. "It has a very large section of progressive people who don't react well to his 19th-century approach to agricultural policy. Denying climate change and making silly comments about $100 roasts worked much better in [Queensland] than it will down here."

Yet it's always a mistake to think you've got Joyce pegged. Asked if he ever belonged to the Young Nationals (whose ranks included some of Joh's scariest acolytes), he pulls a face. "Oh, no, no," he says. "They're real zealots and they drive me f…ing crazy. They come up with bullshit ideas, which, if you progressed them, would definitely get you kicked out of power." Joyce, who calls himself a social conservative, has made astute electoral plays in opposing numerous Liberal initiatives, crossing the floor 28 times in total. Among other key issues, he opposed the privatisation of Telstra and John Howard's WorkChoices laws, relenting and supplying his vital Senate vote only after the government agreed to significant amendments and sweeteners to his rural constituents. He also achieved tougher rules governing foreign investment in Australian farmland, and more scrutiny of the Coles and Woolworths supermarket duopoly. In 2013, Joyce left St George and came home to contest New England, then held by the popular independent Tony Windsor. Windsor ended up retiring before the election and Joyce took the House of Representatives seat with a hefty swing. Now, of course, Windsor is back. If he regains New England in the July election, Joyce's most audacious political gamble will probably be his last. Joyce seems to genuinely identify with life's underdogs, and never tires of reminding the party faithful that, demographically, the Nationals represent Australia's poorest people. Yet almost everything about his background – landed parents, private school, uni degree – suggests a more conventional establishment figure. Except, of course, for his own nature.

Joyce was just eight when he had his first serious fight. "A bloke at school was picking on me and picking on me," he says, "so I knocked him A over T." He recalls other fights during his long, lonely years at Riverview, where he was never part of the in-crowd and had to "sort out" boys who "didn't like me", or were "having a go at me". His sister, Anastasia, has described him as a gentle boy who couldn't make himself heard in the family home: "He'd try to get a word in edgeways when his other brothers were talking and he could never do it. He used to stammer and stutter. He could never quite get to the punchline." Jim and Marie Joyce bought the 1821-hectare Rutherglen in 1964, but never really clicked with the old-money social crowd based around the nearby town of Walcha. "They weren't fabulously wealthy," says Joyce, "but they got ahead by working hard. And there was nothing they hated more than wasting money … They only went to town to go to Mass, then they might have a cup of tea with someone, then go home." At Riverview, he had an allowance of $20 a term for all personal expenses, and had to give an accounting of how he spent it. Later, when he worked as a bouncer at the Wicklow Hotel in Armidale to defray his uni costs, Joyce got his first real exposure to the "cookie-cutter crowd" (as he calls the despised trendy Left), which has mocked him ever since over his idiosyncrasies and conservatism. "They were usually around the pool tables," he recalls grimly. "They were all dressed in black, and they all got so psyched by uni politics … you'd know without them speaking their views on any subject." Even today, especially during his ordeals on the ABC's live current affairs program Q&A, Joyce, wearing his sullen face, still seems to see himself as a victim of the group-think Left. "They feed me loaded questions where it looks like there's only one possible answer, and that answer is the one that makes a hypocrite out of you," he says.

What goes through his mind when under siege from such quarters? "It goes back to the underdog thing," he says. "I sit there thinking, 'You might feel intimidated here, but there's a heap of people [watching TV] who are barracking for you. And the only way to disappoint them is if you roll over.' " Last year, the "underdog" sunk his teeth into Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's tiny terriers, Pistol and Boo, found to have been smuggled into Queensland in Depp's private jet. In his best Joh style, Joyce threatened to have the pets put down if they hadn't "buggered off back to the United States" within his 50-hour deadline. The initial response was a flood of mockery and abuse from Depp's outraged fans, including the radio shock jock Kyle Sandilands, who publicly called Joyce an "absolute wanker", "a ponce" and "a gerbil of a thing". In the end, though, it wasn't Joyce who rolled over but Depp and Heard. In an unedifying sequel, part of a deal with federal authorities, the couple appeared in a video apologising for their actions and urging respect for Australia's biosecurity laws. Two charges of illegally importing the dogs were subsequently dropped. In the Southport Magistrates Court in April, Heard pleaded guilty to making a false statement to Customs and escaped with a one-month good behaviour bond. Last year, before himself going paws up, Depp called the politician "a sweaty, big-gutted man" who wanted to kill his dogs. How did Joyce react to that?

"I thought, 'That's odd, because you broke the law, I haven't. And now you're just reinforcing the view we all had of you. Once more, it's all about you.' " The sun is down when we leave the pub and head towards Woolbrook. Joyce is bound for home (a small-acreage subdivision near Tamworth, where he and Natalie live with their four daughters) via back roads that will take us past Rutherglen. Maddeningly, he still hasn't confirmed whether we'll be visiting his unpredictable parents. We coast through rundown little hill-country settlements which Joyce says house his strongest political supporters. They're mostly battlers who get by on part-time work and welfare. Some have been here for generations; others, typically from Sydney's west, come in search of cheap housing and a better way of life. Their houses are ramshackle and tiny yet brightly painted, often with Australian flags or smiley-faces displayed in the windows. "They're very proud of their country," says Joyce. "You see other people who the country has given so much, and they're cynical and run it down. These people have so little, yet they love the place so much." From Woolbrook, we slip down into the silent valley of his origins on dusty Danglemah Road, which parallels the Main North railway line. Rabbits bound across the road before us, and a flock of wild ducks whirrs by overhead. Joyce laughs, drinking it all in. "Every time someone says, 'He's the deputy prime minister of Australia,' I sorta go, 'Am I?!' " he confesses, beaming like a child. "And I think what a great thing it is that someone who came up round here can have that office!"

Joyce is the only one of the six siblings still in the area. Intriguingly, his sister and three of his brothers married Asians, although Anastasia has since, as Joyce puts it, "split the sheets" and formed a new relationship. In the past, Anastasia has spoken of the social isolation in which they grew up and how it left them feeling they didn't "belong" locally. With some trepidation, Joyce takes up the theme: "We weren't very good at socialising, and so, armm, I dunno … you didn't get to practise on girlfriends and boyfriends … so you sort of arrived later on in life sort of naive, and maybe it was a little bit daunting … and girls might have been telling you to get stuffed, or something, but [Asians] were less likely to tell you to go away, they were polite to you." After a pause, he adds, "So I have a family like a mini United Nations, and they're all pretty happy and successful. Maybe that's the way the world will go in the future. There's nothing wrong with that … the colour of skin doesn't make any difference." Nearing Rutherglen, he finally announces that we'll stop to visit his parents. Are they impressed by his achievements?

"Oh yeah," he responds without enthusiasm. "Of course. I don't think they're particularly over the top about me individually, but they're proud for the family that someone's done well." In its glory days, Rutherglen's historic brick and timber homestead had a tennis court, maids' quarters and its own butchery. Though now a bit down-at-heel, it's still imposing, rising like a vision from the past as we ascend the farm track to the knoll where it sits. Marie Joyce, tall and willowy, greets us on the verandah; inside, the less mobile Jim is stretched out on a sofa in a pair of comfy slippers. Given what I've heard about the family's austerity and isolation, I'm half-expecting some sort of dour, hermit couple. Instead, the senior Joyces are urbane and talkative, especially Jim, who subscribes to The Economist and is given to long, erudite monologues. Joyce sits in a chair next to his mother, his colour rising as she explains how their only other media interview occurred early in 2009, when a journalist knocked on their door uninvited. At the time, Joyce had floated the idea of returning to New England in time for the 2010 federal election and taking on Tony Windsor for the House of Representatives. Embarrassingly for Joyce, Marie told the journalist her son would be "ill-advised" to run against Windsor, whom she and Jim had both voted for in the previous federal election in 2007, when he took the seat with a daunting 62 per cent of the primary vote. The couple threw in some advice to their son on future political moves, and the story appeared under the heading, "Barnaby's mum says don't run."

Now, to Joyce's mounting dismay, Marie tells how her "fanciful, imaginative" son read Lord of the Rings at the age of 12. "I was eight, not 12," he interrupts, glowering at the floor. Marie beams at him. "And over across the creek he had his own little Hobbit hole," she continues, drawing a groan from Joyce. "I read things in the papers about him throwing people out of hotels and so on. But he wasn't like that then. I always found Barnaby a very cheerful, warm, affectionate little boy." Marie and Jim laugh over how they want Australia to become a republic while their son remains a staunch monarchist. "So you want Big Ears [Charles] to be our boss!" taunts Jim, before beginning a long story about why he doesn't really like Poms. It's well known that Joyce has more in common with Tony Abbott than Malcolm Turnbull. But his parents prefer Turnbull, whose dumping as Liberal leader in favour of Abbott in late 2009 was a direct result of Joyce's campaign against the Coalition's bipartisan support for an emissions trading scheme. At Joyce's suggestion, Jim recalls how (not long before Turnbull was deposed) he emerged from an anaesthetic after a heart bypass to find Turnbull sitting beside his hospital bed in Sydney. "He saw my eyes open, and he said, 'Good afternoon, Mr Joyce.' I said, 'Good afternoon, Mr Turnbull.' And I thought to myself, 'What in the name of God is he doing here!' Ten minutes later, Barnaby strode in. And they started arguing and arguing and arguing [over Joyce's contention that Turnbull should abandon the ETS]." Jim suspects Turnbull visited him in hospital as a means of waylaying his son over the coming crisis.

"Yes, the [ETS] ," laughs Joyce. "That was the thing Malcolm was being intractable about." At the Deputy PM's suggestion, we stop for a smoke as soon as we're back on Danglemah Road. "I gave it up for Lent," he mutters, lighting up. "But it didn't last." Hardly surprising, given his new political responsibilities and the pressure he's under to beat Windsor in New England. "Yeah, yeah, I'll beat him," he says when asked. But he doesn't sound convinced. (Tony Windsor laughs at Joyce's claim to being the underdog of the contest: "He's got all the resources of the government behind him … that's just a tactic." He calls Joyce "a maverick who operates through thought bubbles", and suggests his championing of Bjelke-Petersen shows "the real, dictatorial Barnaby … that's [the direction] he'd take us if it was just left to him".) If he does win New England, Joyce hopes to stay in politics for another decade, then retire: "I wouldn't want to be in politics in my 60s." If he loses, there's a good chance he'll return, finally, to Rutherglen to work the land he loves. Joyce has promised his wife that when he retires from politics it will be for good. "If you ever do what Tony Windsor has done," the no-nonsense Natalie reminds him in the car the next morning, "I will personally shoot you, and your girls will hand me the bullets!" On our last afternoon with Joyce, we return to Rutherglen for a photo shoot. Not for the first time, he anguishes over how much work the place needs – "I always feel I've gotta come home and start!" – and the dire effects of the drought on pastures and water tables. At one stage I notice him standing beside the ever-diminishing creek, near his one-time Hobbit hole, looking as though he might cry.

"It's the driest I've ever seen it," he mourns. And then, as if suddenly possessed by the valley's ghosts (or something equally whoopee), Barnaby Joyce takes a tentative step into the realm of scientific consensus. "When I look at this," he says, shaking his head, "I start to wonder whether climate change might really be happening."