The state seat of Barwon is about as rusted-on as you can get.

About the same size as Germany, its south-western end is the Labor-dominated town of Broken Hill. Most of the rest is committed National party country and has been that way since 1950.

So the fact that Barwon, on a margin of 12.9%, is one of the seats in contention at this election is big news. There are NSW National seats with safer margins (Tamworth is 28.9%) but there is something about the landscape, the sheer rurality of it, that flags a significant shift.

No one is as surprised as the candidates. Labor’s Darriea Turley, the mayor of Broken Hill, describes the response to her on the ground as “shockingly positive”.

“Traditional farmers feel let down, they feel their voice has not been heard,” Turley says. “They talk about local issues but they need to be brave enough to change their vote. They say it’s hard, embracing that physically and mentally.”

The current Nationals MP, Kevin Humphries, will retire at the 23 March election, and the Nationals hope he will be replaced by Gilgandra poultry farmer Andrew Schier.

Turley is one of two challengers with a chance to take the seat. She is “Broken Hill born and bred”, has been chair of the National Rural Women’s Coalition and the Australian Local Government Women’s Association.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The empty Barwon River. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

Turley says the challenges for the electorate stretch beyond the drought to loss of services, water management, the hollowing out of Tafe and the removal of government offices.

“Barwon was promised decentralisation but we got centralising to regional cities where local programs [are] not accessible at all,” Turley says.

“You can walk down any main street and shops are empty. There are towns here where you can’t buy a pair of shoes, you can’t buy underwear, these are the changes we see every day.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shooters, Fishers and Farmers candidate Roy Butler. Photograph: Oliver Jacques

The other challenger is the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers candidate, Roy Butler, a public servant who was western region manager for NSW police. Though he is a vegetarian cattle farmer, Bacon Busters and the Sporting Shooters magazine have reassured their readers that his plant-based diet was “the only ‘vegan’ philosophy” he followed.

Given the cultural resistance to the Labor party in many parts of country Australia, Butler is probably in with a better chance.

He decided to run because he saw towns dying, life expectancy dropping and services withdrawn over the massive electorate while the “seats were being rearranged at the ANZ stadium”.

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“We are pushing people away from regional NSW. I don’t want to see towns die and farming families pushed off,” Butler says.

“No matter who forms government, I hope to join a small number of crossbenchers and bring about an unfair advantage for Barwon. We deserve that because we’ve been shafted for a long time.”

Never before have so many country seats been in play. Challengers are independents, minor parties such as SFF and the Greens, as well as Labor. These three-cornered contests, in combination with optional preferential voting, has made the vote so unpredictable the ABC has abandoned its usual vote calculator.

The focus is largely on National party seats. On the north coast, the political and demographic landscape is changing so much that voters are considering a jump straight to the Greens.

Inland, other seats in play include Murray (3.3%); south of Barwon, Upper Hunter (2.2%); Dubbo and even NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro’s seat of Monaro (2.5%). Country seats won in byelections, such as Orange (0.1%), held by SFF’s Phil Donato, and Wagga Wagga, held by the independent Joe McGirr (9.6%), are also in play.

All of these seats have local issues that channel into broader themes of discontent with the political status quo. In more eastern seats, they include health services, the inland rail cutting through properties, farming versus mining disputes, jobs and the lack of them, and fly-in fly-out workers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A mass fish kill in the NSW town of Menindee. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

In the western districts, water is the big one, exacerbated by drought but honed by perceived mismanagement by state government and/or local councils. The fish kills became the symbol of the pressures in the system. When you can’t get a drink out of a tap, it makes you mad.

Carlton Copke is a policemen in the town of Mendooran (population 300), where Roy Butler owns a cattle property. The town, just an hour from Dubbo, jumped from level two restrictions in January to level six. That is two loads of washing a week, no outside watering, three-minute showers or a 100mm bath per person once a day.

In his spare time, Copke and his wife Natalie coordinate bottled water donations from other regions. He delivers donations, sparked by a single Facebook post, to the vulnerable. When he is working, people pick up water from his house. Even though people are short, he says it’s hard to give away. Everyone thinks someone else is worse off.

Copke says the lack of communication from the local council and the lack of recognition from the National party has left people feeling let down. He says the Nationals’ Schier has only turned up once, with the environment minister, Niall Blair, and in previous years he saw the former member, Humphries, once when he handed out a novelty cheque. (Schier did not return calls.)

Copke sees the stress in the local community and underlines that his views are not connected to his policing. After running a local youth group, he knows kids turn 18 and then leave.

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“They don’t stick around [because] the bush gets ignored by state government,” he says.

As a resident, he reflects on the mood of the town.

“They are staunch Nats but they won’t be voting for Nats for the first time.”

Water is also the big issue in the neighbouring seat of Murray, where the largest centre – the irrigation town of Griffith – is wracked by drought.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Austin Evans, Nationals MP, Murray, NSW. Photograph: Gabrielle Chan

Nationals MP Austin Evans faces a challenge from SFF’s Helen Dalton, a farmer who attracted a 19% swing at the 2017 byelection. Other candidates include One Nation’s Tom Weyrich and independent David Landini.

Evans holds the seat on a 3.3% margin.

“People aren’t rusted on to parties any more,” Evans says. “What they might say today, they are not going to do in a month.

“I’m confident as I can be, having done the work we’ve done, but you never know until the election.”

Water and the lack of all but high-security allocations dominated a recent candidate forum run by the Griffith Business Chamber, but mental health services were a close second.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shooters, Fishers and Farmers candidate Helen Dalton, Murray, NSW. Photograph: Gabrielle Chan

A man from West Wyalong described the death of his friend from suicide. Graeme Pyle from Berrigan described the staff cuts of district nurses from four to one and highlighted cuts that will mean the mental health unit must close after May.

“That’s an indictment on the government we’ve got here, that’s a terrible thing,” Pyle said.

“We are coming into an avalanche of strife and the staff and people that you go and see have gone. We are devastated and we don’t know what is going on and neither do they.”

Water quality is so poor other citizens have to donate bottled water Shooters, Fishers and Farmers candidate Helen Dalton

Mental health is also largely connected to water. The stress of water politics, the recent fish kills, the evidence of water theft in other parts of the Murray-Darling Basin and the quality of water are dominating the election agenda. Griffith, Wagga Wagga and Leeton have seven times the rate of motor neurone disease than the national average and scientists are working closely with sufferers to try to determine the cause.

Dalton has been campaigning hard on water allocation and quality and has called for the Coalition government to call a state of emergency on water in Murray.

“People out here have been so neglected for so long, they are expecting to be treated like second-class citizens,” she says.

“They should be calling a state of emergency, it is just not acceptable – water quality is so poor that other citizens have to donate bottled water.”

But she is facing a challenge on her right flank from One Nation, whose NSW leader, Mark Latham, has criticised the SFF preference deal with Labor.

Latham claimed Dalton would be “the Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott of NSW politics” by pledging support for a Labor government in a hung parliament. Dalton, who is not directing preferences on her how-to-vote card, says his claim is rubbish. She would speak to major parties only after the election, she says.

“As a general rule, I’m very suspicious of the Labor party,” she says.

In Dubbo, the Nationals are under pressure from a centre right independent, the Dubbo mayor, Matthew Dickerson.

Dickerson is a local businessman who has been campaigning for almost a year in a seat formerly held by retiring Nationals leader Troy Grant. The Nationals are seeking to replace him with Dugald Saunders, a former ABC presenter.

Saunders had the courage to turn up to a candidate forum run by Anyone But Nats, the third-party group aiming to challenge the old Country party’s electoral stranglehold in the bush.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A tree with bare roots on a section of the Barwon River. Photograph: Carly Earl/The Guardian

Saunders came armed with a list of funding delivered to Dubbo and stood to unfurl it in front of the audience, as he described how odd it felt being the only Nat at a forum called Anyone But Nats.

“This is $1bn worth of delivery for this electorate,” he said.

“There has been the most amount of spending and delivery that it has ever seen. Simply put, that is what has happened. Now I understand that people feel disenfranchised … but when we are talking about what has happened on an electorate wide basis, it has never been better.”

In front of an audience split between proud Nationals supporters, swinging voters and anti-coal seam gas campaigners, Dickerson homed in on familiar themes; a desire for a louder voice in parliament and a demand for a better share of funding.

“We have come to accept in regional areas that we get a lower level of service and we sometimes say, ‘Oh but we’re regional so that’s OK’. But I’m here to say it’s not OK,” he told the audience.

“I’m here to say the state government at the moment has excessive amounts of money and they are spending it on things like stadiums and on things like light rail and we could have better services out here, we just need a better voice out here.”

As the political landscape shifts in rural NSW, the other change is the increasing role of women in campaigns. Back in Barwon, both Butler and Turley notice it is the women who are pushing for change the loudest.

Butler says his support is strong among 18-35 year old voters, but that support drops away in the over-50 demographic, which remains solidly National party. One of the last second world war veterans took his voting card and ripped it up in front of him.

“I notice the young ones coming on board and women, not only supporting Shooters, Fishers [and] Farmers, but volunteering to hand out,” he says.

“I think that is fed by how some of the high-profile Nationals have behaved with women, like [Andrew] Broad and [Barnaby] Joyce. They are offended by that.”

Turley agrees women want change.

“It’s the women in rural communities saying enough is enough. They own small businesses in towns, they see what’s happening. They are the ones who can tell you there’s no cash.”