The senator, known as Wacka, was shocked.

He admits he was also scared.

He'd known his friend for 30 years and was aware he had been suffering from Parkinson's disease for the past four years or so. But he wasn't prepared for the fellow's appearance.

"He was a wreck," says Wacka, a self-described "broken down old shearer" who doesn't mince words.

"I know Parkinson's affects people differently and over different time periods, but seeing him, I thought, I can't hide any more."

He went home and told his wife of eight years, Nancy, that he felt he ought to go public about his own health.

He'd been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in June 2016, and his own GP had suspected it for a year before that, but he'd kept it a private matter, shared only with close friends and colleagues.

Now he realised that if things went south, he didn't want people being blindsided.

"Nancy said 'well, you've always been a straight shooter, you may as well just tell everyone the truth'." Williams honours his wife's opinion. He calls her "the media tycoon" because she owns two small country newspapers - the Bingara Advocate and the Warialda Standard - and he jokes that far from any conflict of interest, "I sleep with the editor and can hardly get my name in the paper."

And so Wacka phoned friends in the broader media - Fairfax Media's Adele Ferguson, Janine Perrett of Sky News and Piers Ackerman of News Corp, among others. He'd confided in them months ago, and it says something about the respect he commands that no one had broken his confidence.

Within minutes of appearing on Perrett's Sky News show with Ferguson and Ackerman last Friday and announcing he had the disease, Williams found his phone's text memory filling fast. The last of 50 or 60 texts that evening arrived at 11:49pm. It was from the singer Kamahl, who signed off as "your friend in need". Tony Abbott was among numerous politicians who sent messages, and the following morning, Bill Shorten phoned. More than 100 Facebook friends posted comments, wishing him well and urging him to stay strong.

Wacka Williams tends to inspire friendships across political divides. Loyalty, too.

When he arrived in parliament, a newly minted Nationals senator for NSW in July, 2008, he chose four staffers, all of them from Inverell.

Greg Kachel and his wife Debbie, both of whom had worked on radio in the town for decades, Heather Morris, who'd worked in the Commonwealth Bank in Inverell and had helped Williams during a long battle with the bank over foreign loans, and Garry Lamrock, an old mate, were recruited. Nine years later, the same four still run Wacka's office. It's likely no other MP or senator in Canberra can boast of any such continuity.

"Either jobs are hard to come by in Inverell, or I'm not a bad boss," chuckles Wacka. "Probably jobs are scarce in Inverell."

Soon after arriving in parliament, Williams was taken aback to discover he and all his other colleagues were to get an increase of $4800 in what he considered was an already-generous electoral allowance. He decided to donate the money to establish a scholarship for country-based students to study dentistry in the hope they would return to the bush as qualified dentists. He signed off on the eighth such scholarship on Monday.

Wacka Williams, a boy from a modest farm near Jamestown, South Australia, who excelled at economics at school, learned something about success and setback over the years.

He worked as a shearer, driver of livestock and grain trucks, and bookie at bush tracks before he and his brother bought large adjoining properties near Inverell. The two brothers did the work of four men building up their farming businesses, running 7000 sheep and a thousand pigs before, in 1988, the federal government allowed imported pigmeat to begin killing Australian piggeries.

"The hardest of all these experiences on the land was when we [the Williams family] decided to take a foreign currency loan in Swiss francs in 1985, after some great sales pitches from some in the Commonwealth Bank," Williams said in his first speech to parliament. "I soon found out that I was in more trouble than the early settlers."

A decade of fighting ended in a win in appeals court. By then, however, the farms were gone. Five generations of Williams farming was finished.

Williams says he never came to parliament with an axe to grind. The fact remains that he has made his name in politics by exposing and forcing inquiries into the behaviour of banks, insurance companies, financial advisors and liquidators that have cost small people their businesses and often, their health.

"I run on a theory that life is based on fairness - you do a fair day's work for a fair day's pay and you treat people fairly along the way," he says.

Wacka doesn't curse his latest affliction, and hopes researchers might find a cure.

"I don't like it, I didn't ask for it and I don't know why I got it, but I'm going to go on 'till I can't," he says.

"Unless my life turns to total crap I'm not leaving here until my term expires on the 30th of June, 2019."

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