GWABEGAR, in north-western NSW, does not rank among Australia's premier farming districts.
The narrow splinter of grazing land running through the middle of the Pilliga scrub is referred to by some as ''mongrel country''.
Other descriptions offered to Fairfax Media by veteran farmers and even locals include ''goanna country'', ''heartbreak country'' and just plain ''shit''.
Little-known and even less visited, the Pilliga scrub - between Coonabarabran and Narrabri - is Australia's biggest inland forest, an eerie wilderness of more than half a million hectares of cypress pine.
The semi-arid climate makes farming in the Pilliga tough. The state forest remains for the simple reason that the settlers couldn't see the benefit in cutting it down.
The rundown settlement of Gwabegar, population 242, sits at the heart of the Pilliga. The village once existed on sawmills - an industry now all but closed - and the rail line that opened between Coonabarabran and Gwabegar in 1923 to transport pine out of the Pilliga, and closed in 2005.
The trees growing through the fallen roofs of the abandoned Gwabegar Pony Club are just one more sign the area's best days are behind it.
It was natural then that the arrival in Gwabegar of a newly minted senator, Barnaby Joyce, in 2006 would set local tongues wagging. Why on earth would a politician from Queensland buy land in the Pilliga?
The senator grew up in Woolbrook, outside Tamworth - about four hours east of Gwabegar by road.
Joyce and his wife Natalie bought their first block in July 2006. Sale records show it was purchased from Brett and Traci Worrell for the sum of $230,000.
The block fronts about 1.5 kilometres of the Gwabegar-Baradine Road and runs approximately 2.5 kilometres west to adjoin the eastern edge of the Pilliga West state forest.
Joyce tells Fairfax Media the purchase was driven by one overriding factor: price. A divorce had forced the Worrells into the sale and Joyce, who had sold his accountancy business in St George, Queensland, for his move to Parliament, saw the property advertised in The Land newspaper while he was driving to Moree.
''My motivation was plain and simple - it was what I could afford,'' Joyce says. ''I came from the land and I want to go back to the land after politics.''
A story in The Age in July 2006 quotes the new senator as saying he was attempting to grow wheat and barley at his new weekend retreat.
''Is it a wheat district? It is now,'' he joked. ''It looks a lot like grass, and apparently if you leave it long enough you can harvest it.''
That experiment must have failed because Joyce now refers to the land as his cattle and sheep station - although there is little sign, when Fairfax Media visits the property, of even a homestead on the block. A small flock of sheep could be seen from the fence line.
In February 2008, the Joyces made another purchase, buying the neighbouring, slightly smaller, block. Sale documents show this purchase was more expensive, bought for $342,000 from Baradine sisters Natasha and Erin Kelley. Joyce says this purchase was to ''square off the block'' - making a total 2400 acres. But the expanded holdings of the senator, whose public profile as a maverick politician was growing, had become a source of some fascination in the surrounding farming communities.
The juiciest rumour - and one still being fanned by Tony Windsor in June before he stepped out of the election battle with Joyce for the seat of New England - was that the land would have to be bought back to build the inland railway, which is a long-term infrastructure policy of the National Party.
The proposed 1700-kilometre line would in fact cut through Gwabegar in a section between Coonamble and Narrabri, according to the government's most recent rail alignment study.
However, there is no indication in detailed local mapping by rail engineers dating back to 2006 that the line would actually cross the Joyce properties. It would run just metres away from the front fence using a section of the abandoned Gwabegar line.
The other theory among locals is that Joyce must have bought with plans to cash in on mineral wealth in the area.
Denis Todd, a farmer from nearby Baradine and a Warrumbungle Shire councillor, recalls a conversation he had with Joyce at a petrol station in about 2009.
''I asked him, 'Why did you buy that mongrel country out there? You could have bought better grazing land closer to St George [four hours away from Gwabegar by road],''' Todd says.
According to Todd, he asked Joyce if he had bought to take advantage of the coal known to run throughout the Pilliga. Todd says Joyce responded: ''The coal's too deep but there's plenty of gas there.''
''I don't know whether he bought it because of coal seam gas or what.
''I thought they would put a coal mine there but they didn't,'' says Todd, who supports coal seam gas and would happily allow miners on his property.
Fairfax Media spoke to a successful farmer and exporter from a nearby area. The man, who did not wish to be named, said he was anonymously posted an aerial photograph of the Joyce properties and other title deed information.
''This is scalded country. It could not support the number of animals that would be needed to make a return on investment,'' he says. ''It is a strange buy, put it that way.''
Joyce says he knew nothing of coal seam gas in the area at the time he bought both properties and ''denies categorically'' he had any knowledge of anything that could drive up the value of the land.
Like many other farmers, he says, he would be surprised and upset when a coal seam gas company came knocking at his gate five years later.
A year before the Joyces came to the Pilliga, a company called Eastern Star Gas had begun pursuing in earnest a mission to make the Pilliga a resource for NSW to rival South Australia's giant Moomba gas field.
The Pilliga forest grows on sandstone, filtering water entering the Great Artesian Basin. But along with the sandstone there is coal below the Pilliga.
The pockets of methane that the coal produces - referred to as coal seam gas (CSG) - could power the state for hundreds, if not thousands, of years if tapped, or create billions in export dollars.
In 2005, Eastern Star revealed it had already spent $50 million exploring the Pilliga, mainly around Narrabri, since 2001.
At a time when few people had even heard the term ''coal seam gas'', the company had plans for 1100 gas wells dotted across the Pilliga, feeding a $150-million pipeline to the Hunter Valley. CSG wells are normally spaced 500 metres to one kilometre apart, so the area of the Pilliga to be tapped would be vast under Eastern Star's plans at that time. By 2005, Eastern Star was already feeding into the northern NSW electricity grid through its CSG-fired Wilga Park power station.
In February 2007, the company boasted in an update to the Australian Securities Exchange that it had conducted one of the largest ''fracking'' programs in Australia by drilling nine wells and fracturing the coal seam to access the gas.
Fracking has since become a byword for environmental vandalism by CSG companies and is banned in NSW.
Those wells were located in the Bibblewindi state forest on the eastern edge of the Pilliga - perhaps 40 kilometres from Gwabegar through the forest.
Joyce's property at Gwabegar lies inside the ''petroleum exploration licence'' (PEL) areas that Eastern Star - before it was sold to Santos - owned the right to explore. Gwabegar is on the edge of PEL 238 and PEL 428, co-owned by Eastern Star with a company called Comet Ridge.
At this time, both companies were issuing positive announcements to the stock exchange in relation to the size of the gas resource in the area.
Another company, Gas Star, owned in Houston, released a statement about promising reserves in PEL 433 and 434. This meant that by 2007 - between the first two purchases made by the Joyces - CSG companies were boasting of gas reserves to the east, west and south of the properties.
All indications at this time were that the gas rush was coming.
In October 2007, Eastern Star Gas Limited announced that the former deputy prime minister (but then still-serving MP) John Anderson had been appointed chairman of the company. Anderson stepped straight out of Parliament and into the boardroom at Eastern Star to oversee its planned rapid growth phase.
Commenting on the appointment, Eastern Star managing director Dennis Morton said at the time: ''John Anderson assuming the role of ESG chairman is coincident with the transformation of the company from a natural-gas explorer to a major gas developer.''
Anderson is a political ally and personal friend of Joyce.
The former Nationals leader is working as Joyce's campaign manager in his bid to win the seat of New England in the current election.
It is the close relationship between Anderson and Joyce that has some wondering why it took Joyce until 2011 to realise he had bought into the epicentre of what was then envisaged as NSW's coming gas boom.
Anderson had been appointed chairman of Eastern Star before the Joyces' second purchase.
It was four years later at a parliamentary inquiry into CSG in July 2011 that Joyce first stated publicly that Eastern Star had an exploration licence over his property and that his neighbour had been informed that the company wanted to drill test wells in Gwabegar.
Neighbour Bruce McConaughey, who owns an 3238-hectare stud cattle farm and sheep station, says Joyce was as shocked as him.
''He was definitely against it. He rang me right back and said don't sign anything, don't do anything.''
Contacted by Fairfax Media, Natasha Kelley, who runs the Baradine Butchers and sold Joyce the second parcel of land, said she was not willing to talk about any local ''gossipy shit'' about why the Joyces came to Gwabegar.
Joyce maintains he had ''no knowledge at all'' that the Pilliga would be at the eye of the CSG rush when he bought his land.
In a recorded interview, he says, jokingly: ''I'm happy to sell it, it's for sale.'' Adding: ''If someone wants to take it off my hands and make a million dollars, go right ahead.''
Later, Joyce reveals that he has instructed a local land agent to sell if he can get the right price. He says he understands the ownership could be ''viewed as a conflict of interest''.
Before any investor jumps at the ''goldmine'' being offered by Joyce, it should be understood that the situation in 2013 is a lot different to 2007 when Eastern Star dreamed of well heads dotted across the Pilliga.
In November 2011, gas giant Santos bought out Eastern Star. By December that year it conceded that the company had breached environmental controls in its hurry to expand. Santos committed $20 million to clean up test sites in the Pilliga - some of which had killed animals and left polluted water behind on the surface.
As it faces bitter opposition to its plans in more fertile and more populated areas, such as the black soil Liverpool plains, Santos has recently resumed its focus on the Pilliga area.
But at this stage, the first expansion will occur in the eastern Pilliga close to Narrabri - its first choice reserve.
A Santos worker who spoke to Fairfax Media said drills further west had proved less promising than at Bibblewindi, where the company sought state government permission in June to add a further 18 core and test wells. A test drill at Come By Chance, north-west of the Joyce property, did not indicate reserves that had been hoped-for five years ago.
It remains to be seen whether Gwabegar will play a part when the big expansion in CSG progresses.
Whether it be beneath the pasture at home or in ''lock the gate'' blockades across NSW, the CSG issue will not be going anywhere for Joyce or the Nationals in the coming years.
Party elders, including Anderson, have been criticised for aligning too closely with mining interests over the traditional farming constituency. Mark Vaile, who succeeded Anderson as National Party leader, became a chairman of Nathan Tinkler's ill-fated Aston Resources when he left Parliament. Former NSW leader Ian Armstrong worked as a lobbyist for AGL.
The party has bled some support to the Greens over the issue of CSG. Penny Blatchford, a cotton and grain farmer from an area south of Moree, will line up third on the Greens senate ticket in NSW.
Joyce has never expressed outright opposition to CSG.
Since the parliamentary inquiry of 2011, he has spruiked the need for prime agricultural land to be left alone, water resources to be left untainted but, most importantly, according to him, that the landowner is well remunerated for mining his or her land.
Joyce has proposed that a landowner get 1 per cent of the well head revenue of a CSG well.
The best performing well in Queensland produces $1 million a day but an average CSG well is worth about $60,000 a day.
At that metric, a single well would earn a landholder more than $200,000 a year before tax - enough to completely reshape the value of land in marginal areas throughout the Pilliga - like Gwabegar.
Joyce points out there are mining exploration licences over large swaths of NSW and coal and gas under a property is no assurance that it will ever be mined. ''There's coal under everywhere, that's just a statement of fact. If you find coal, you find gas.''
