Apollo & Thelma by Jon Faine
About the author
Jon Faine is an award-winning journalist who, until October 2019, hosted the agenda-setting morning broadcast for ABC Radio in Melbourne for more than twenty years. Before joining the ABC in 1989 to host The Law Report on Radio National, Jon had practised for seven years in both commercial litigation and as a legal aid/human rights advocate. He regularly contributes to major newspapers with opinion pieces, has been nominated for three Walkley awards, and does countless conference presentations, panel moderations, guest lectures and public events. His best-selling travel book was published by ABC books. Jon is well known for his provocative and probing debate, quick wit and thought-provoking ideas.
Review
Kylie Northover
Friday 15 April, 2022
The Sydney Morning Herald
When broadcaster Jon Faine retired after 30 years at the ABC, a memoir seemed inevitable. He was approached by several publishers, but he knocked back all offers, not wanting to finish one job and immediately start reliving it.
“I think I’ve done a decent job and I’ve helped people, I’ve been useful, I’ve made a difference, but I’m not Kerry O’Brien. I’m not that calibre of media significance,” he says. “I held down one shift on one radio station in one city for a few years…I don’t have visions of grandeur.”
Instead, when the pandemic put his post-ABC plans on hold – a part-time gig as a vice chancellor’s fellow at the University of Melbourne, and work with the Papua New Guinean government among them – Faine turned his attention to a story he’s been sitting on for 40 years. Apollo & Thelma: A True Tall Tale is an old-school yarn about the type of Australian characters you can’t believe haven’t yet been immortalised in film or a TV series.
Apollo was legendary Melbourne strongman Paul “the Mighty Apollo” Anderson, famous for decades for his extreme feats of strength, including pulling trams with his teeth, being run over by cars, and having an elephant stand on him. Thelma was his sister, a pioneering woman publican at one of the most remote pubs in the Northern Territory.
Faine met Apollo and his family when he was a 26-year-old commercial lawyer at a city firm, tasked with finalising Thelma’s estate after her death in 1981. What seemed like a straightforward case turned into a complicated matter involving dodgy Territory cops, creative bookkeeping practices and a local barfly who claimed he’d been promised half the pub when Thelma died. A pain for the young Faine, case-wise, but it kept him involved with the Anderson family over several years, and their larger-than-life story enthralled him.
“I always knew I was going to tell this story, and that I needed to gather everything I could. People were dying, disappearing, so I’d grab things whenever I could and interview people, throw things into a box,” he says. “The box got moved and moved, up on top of the shelf, at the back of the shelf.”
Having his post-ABC work cancelled by COVID-19 gave him the chance to finally delve into the box.
Apollo was something of a pioneer of modern gymnasiums, credited with encouraging women in the art of self-defence and introducing martial arts to Australia. He initially set up a gym in the CBD, where Melbourne Central is now, moving later to an old factory building in industrial West Melbourne, its facade adorned with his name and the classes he once offered: “Body building, commando unarmed combat, sauna, karate.”
After the strongman’s death in the 1990s, the building had several reinventions, but the old-school paintwork remains, and is now home to the Apollo Café, which celebrates his life. A laneway next door has been renamed Mighty Apollo Lane.
There was never any question of where Faine and I would meet for lunch.
It’s a far cry from the days when Faine would visit the top floor of the gym to meet Apollo, who also lived in the building in shockingly modest accommodations.
When he first visited, Faine had no idea of Anderson’s life as a showman who performed at travelling tent shows and fairs, and who had broken several weightlifting and other records – and he didn’t, at first, believe him.
“But he’d pull out these meticulously kept scrapbooks and he had all this photographic evidence, page after page. He knew what he was doing was exceptional,” Faine says. “Apollo was vain but also, in his own way, he was very matter-of-fact about it. To him, it was like, ‘well, that’s me’ - for everyone else it was, ‘you’re kidding!’”
Faine was a regular visitor to the Apollo café and was pleased to see some Apollo-themed meals on the menu. I order the Apollo Benedict, which comes with Jamaican spiced ham hock and a lime hollandaise; he has the Mighty Apollo – poached eggs with Kaiserfleisch, black pudding, mushrooms and spinach. “Obviously I have to get that,” he says.
Both are delicious, although Faine says he’s not used to eating much fatty meat.
“And in case you can’t tell, I need to lose at least five if not 10 kilos – COVID kilos!”
While Faine’s book is a celebration of two extraordinary lives, it’s also a story of hard times. Thelma and Apollo grew up in poverty in Clifton Hill (where Apollo, a man of only just over five feet, taught himself to fight after being bullied), and a different era. Thelma’s story took her to the remotest part of the country where she ended up a pioneering publican in an era when few women worked, while Apollo lived an equally unusual life chasing the spotlight and claiming an almost supernatural gift as the root of his superhuman strength. He sought fame while Thelma wanted fortune. But neither seemed to achieve what they hoped for in their lifetimes.
When Anderson’s wife left him for one of his martial arts instructors, she also left their three sons behind – permanently. After Apollo suffered what would now be regarded a nervous breakdown, his boys were put into care, where they remained until they were 18 years old. They share their stories in the book, and Faine consulted them all the way; the Anderson story is a complicated one.
“Their lives were often very brutal, and I want them to know that they have every reason to be proud of their father and more than anything, I want to make sure his legacy is recognised and preserved,” he says. “Apollo at least is now immortal, which is what he desperately wanted. But I’m acutely aware that for me it’s a book but for his sons, it’s their lives.”
In many senses though, Apollo & Thelma is also about Faine’s life. The book takes several tangential paths, among them chapters about the struggle for Indigenous land rights, the late Frank Hardy and his involvement with the Gurindji walk-off at the Wave Hill cattle station (regularly serviced by Thelma’s pub), and another in which Faine reveals that his stepson (his wife Jan’s son) is a Bundjalung man.
“It’s a bit of a genre-bender in that sense,” says Faine. “It’s not neat, but life’s not linear or neat, so I’ve woven some of my stories in there, but it’s all in context. I’m not trying to do a humble brag but I’ve got some stories that I think need to be told – some of them are in this book and some of them aren’t. The book goes off in directions that will…catch people unawares, but I reveal the reasons why, and why certain things, like what happened with the Gurindji, matters so much to me, why it’s important to stop pretending some of these things in our colonial past didn’t happen.”
There are also stories from his radio life, although these are probably less surprising to his long-time listeners. He pays tribute to former prime minister John Howard – “such an impressive and successful politician, whether you like his politics or not” – and talks about his run-ins with former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, in particular his infamous 1999 interview about Kennett’s former press secretary Stephen Mayne and his Jeffed.com website.
“He was so crass, so blunt, so aggressive, and personally abusive to me, and I thought ‘well, I’m not going to hold back’,” Faine says. “Someone suggested I am ‘settling scores’ but I’m not – I’m telling a true story. It happened, and people need to know it happened,” he says. “I’m not going to go so far as to say you have an obligation to, but if you have the opportunity, then you have to tell the story fearlessly.”
He doesn’t know if Kennett has read the book.
Does he miss his radio career?
“God yeah. It’s addictive. But I wanted to leave at a time of my choosing, not someone else’s and before people started saying, ‘Oh, he’s not as sharp as he used to be.’”
He doesn’t miss getting up at 4.15am (“although I was on that clock for such a long time that my mind knows I don’t have to go to work, but my bladder doesn’t!”) but he misses the audience, his colleagues and the banter.
“I loved what I did. It was an incredible privilege – people throw that around and it’s become a cliché, but it’s true.”
More than a job, he says it was “a lifestyle”. “But I was turning 65 and there’s still time to do some other interesting things before I retreat into the garage and start breaking things on old cars,” he says, referring to his hobby of restoring vintage Citroens.
“Right now I try to do that one day a week,” he says. “It’s cheaper than a shrink!”