Indi, the north-east Victorian electorate of mountains and river valleys that became the sensation of the last federal election when Liberal firebrand Sophie Mirabella was defeated by independent Cathy McGowan, is about to become an intriguing political battleground anew.
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This time the National Party - parts of it at war with itself during the bitter 2013 campaign - is gunning for both Mrs Mirabella and Ms McGowan.
The Nationals, who haven't contested Indi since 2001, are expected to choose a candidate in mid-July.
Mrs Mirabella, who lost the seat in one of the more peculiar voting counts in Australia's history, and became the only sitting Liberal to be unseated in the 2013 election, is vowing to "get back to the grassroots and listen to local voters".
Despite declaring last year she wouldn't try to return to Parliament, Mrs Mirabella won Liberal Party pre-selection at the weekend when she presented herself as a changed character and promised pre-selectors she would devote "110 per cent" of her energy to the people of Indi.
"You don't go through such a brutal and personal campaign [as 2013] without affecting you and changing you," Mrs Mirabella told Fairfax Media.
"I've had the opportunity to re-shape my priorities in a personal and political sense."
Ms McGowan, who benefited in 2013 from the votes and preferences of traditional Liberal, National and Labor voters, maintained a characteristic calm.
"The community's going to have a good choice, aren't they?" she said.
"I've got no idea what's going to happen - it's all new ground for me. What is clear is that the electorate has a choice between the way forward with an independent candidate or the same old thing with a traditional party. There's so much disillusionment with the traditional parties."
The Labor Party also has a candidate, 21-year-old Wodonga councillor Eric Kerr, though he is given next to no chance of winning the historically conservative electorate.
The wild card is the National Party, which hasn't run a candidate in Indi against its Coalition partner, the Liberal Party, since 2001.
The candidate from that year, Don Chambers, said the rural voters of Indi now needed to be represented by the National Party, because both the Liberals and Labor were "city-centric" and run from the big population centres.
Mr Chambers, president of the Rutherglen Nationals' branch and a prominent member of the party's Benambra district branch, said he was aware of several prospective candidates, but "it's up to them to come out and declare themselves".
He said he was speaking independently of his party positions, but promised to do everything he could to ensure the Nationals won Indi.
Without a candidate, the Nationals' vote in Indi was split in 2013 between Mrs Mirabella and Ms McGowan - herself previously close to the Nationals.
The conservatives were in uproar when one of the Nationals' most prominent figures, Ken Jasper - for 34 years a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly - publicly aligned himself with Ms McGowan during the last election campaign.
Mr Jasper, still a party member, declined to comment on Monday when asked whether he would support Ms McGowan or his own party's candidate at the next election.
Mrs Mirabella, whose vote in Indi had been declining steadily since 2004, lost the electorate in 2013 after an incorrectly labelled box of ballot papers was found to contain 1003 votes for Ms McGowan.
