Jon Faine was going to call his book Dear Cretin. It would be a collection of letters he’d been sent when presenting Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne, annotated to explain the context: the particular topic or opinion of his that had inspired so much rage. But then ABC management “went nuts”.
“They tried to tell me it was [down to] copyright [over the letters], to which I said, ‘No – they’ve sent it to a public broadcaster’,” Faine says. It was one of regular spirited clashes with management over his 30 years at the station. “We had all sorts of arguments. In the end they just begged me not to do it. They said it’ll just inspire more.”
And so, Faine is talking to Guardian Australia about a very different book, Apollo & Thelma: A True Tall Tale. It’s a yarn that’s enthralled him for 40 years, studded with rabble-rousing moments from his own career as a lawyer and broadcaster.
It started when Faine was 26 and a “baby lawyer”, and professional strongman Paul “The Mighty Apollo” Anderson sought his help in the resolution of the estate of his sister Thelma, herself a formidable character who ran an outback pub.
Faine’s fascination with this larger-than-life family intersected with his long connection to the Northern Territory – he wrote a previous book, Lawyers in the Alice, about the early days of Aboriginal legal aid. As such, Apollo & Thelma takes fascinating side roads into the Gurindji walk-off and land rights activism, where Faine befriended figures such as author Frank Hardy. “There’s an amazing photo of me and Gough Whitlam just before he turned around and wept on my shoulder – and I wouldn’t clean that suit for years,” Faine says of Hardy’s memorial service, for which he was MC.
“There’s also a reveal that our eldest son [wife Jan’s son, Faine’s stepson] is Bundjalung, which I’ve never talked about, but it’s in context here and with his permission … I’ve always been a fairly private person but I tell things in this book that had to be negotiated with my wife and kids.”
If Apollo’s feats of strength with buses and elephants are amusing, so are Faine’s bouts of mischief as a law student and legal aid activist. Take the “shit-stirring” stunts aimed at embarrassing the Fraser government, such as making High Court of Australia Fan Club T-shirts with a cartoon of an ass in a judicial wig; parading a donkey around with a mop on its head; and performing a street theatre take of Oliver, but with a legal aid worker begging “Please sir, could I have some more?”
Not long later, in 1982, Faine flew to Darwin to investigate Thelma’s estate and narrowly avoided getting busted for two joints in his luggage during a security search in Brisbane – which could have set him on a very different path to that of esteemed social commentator.
The book also “sets the record straight” about some of Faine’s high-profile run-ins during his Mornings tenure. At one point, he was told he was the most complained-about ABC Radio presenter. “And I was proud of it. I said, ‘You mean no one else is doing their job to the point that people complain?’ The fact that people complain means, first of all, they’re listening, and secondly, they care. How good’s that?”
When Faine left the ABC, he was eulogised in the media and sent off with a farewell show at Melbourne Town Hall. Faine says he’d planned something more modest, but when Red Symons, the former Breakfast host, left after his contract wasn’t renewed, there was anger from the audience about the way it had been handled. “So I was pretty much told, we’re going to use your departure as a bit of healing. I said, well in that case, if you’re going to make it what you are, I’m going to invite Red on the stage. I think he got a standing ovation. A lot of love.”
Never short of a political opinion
Faine is known for his fearless interrogation of politicians, and has interviewed the Victorian premier, Dan Andrews, since his days as a junior minister.
“He’s not a friend, although he’s someone I’ve got a lot of regard for. I think he’s quite a remarkable political figure and an enduring one, much to the disgust of people who thought they run this place, by which I mean the Herald Sun and 3AW.”
With Victoria heading to the polls in November, Faine says the opposition leader, Matthew Guy, has yet to offer up a convincing agenda.
“He has to give people a reason to think he will do a better job than just being a critic. Andrews got elected on level crossing removal. It’s about the most unsexy piece of infrastructure imaginable, but people went, ‘Oh, yeah. I get that’.”
On a much grander scale, there’s now the proposed $50bn suburban rail loop, which threatens to swamp any other infrastructure plans.
“That’s going to soak up pretty much all the funding for decades,” Faine says. “There’s no doubt, federally and state [wise], that the GST is going to have to go up. Why don’t you just square with us and admit it? You’ve got two choices. You can either do what Shorten wanted, which is get rid of negative gearing and all the tax breaks for middle class and rich people, or you can put up the GST. But the attitude now is you can’t do tax reform from opposition, you can only do it from inside government. So whoever wins the [federal] election will start softening us up for a 15% GST I reckon.”
And who does he think might win that federal election?
“I think it’s possible for the government to lose, there’s no doubt about it. Memo to Scott Morrison: governments lose elections, oppositions rarely win them.
“I was quite surprised at the miracle win that Scott Morrison pulled out of the bin fire last time. I will be equally surprised if he does it again. In a nutshell, they’re a minority government, young people laugh at them, women don’t like him, the Chinese ethnic community think he’s been targeting them unfairly.
“They’re going to lose seats in Victoria, in Western Australia, Melbourne and Perth. Jacqui Lambie says they’ll lose seats in Tasmania; there aren’t that many to pick up in Queensland or in South Australia and in New South Wales.”
Calling out ‘human rights’ converts
Much of the past two years in Melbourne media has been dominated by debate over Covid lockdowns. When asked if Andrews’ press conferences during lockdowns became a performance, he counters, “They didn’t become a performance, they always were. No doubt at all [journalists] were told, ‘See if you can rattle him’. It was appropriate to grill him; I would have done the same myself. He was making announcements that had enormous ramifications … It absolutely needed to be scrutinised.”
In terms of the wider media response to the pandemic, Faine doesn’t think anti-vaxxers have been created by the press, but giving them prominence has been unhelpful. I mention a column he wrote for The Age in which he criticises Victoria’s shadow treasurer, David Davis, for addressing the protesters, “albeit as props for the TV cameras”. Isn’t it the job of a politician to listen to the people?
“No. His job is to be an alternative government, not to pander to the fringe,” says Faine. If you’re going to go cuddling up to an extremist fringe, you’re never going to be able to, in any way, sell your brand to the centre, because you’ve poisoned your brand.”
Faine himself talked to some protesters at the time. “I wrote a column and I called them saboteurs. I still get hate mail saying, ‘how dare you call us saboteurs, we’re just citizens standing up for our rights’ – to which I went, you’ve never cared about anybody else’s rights. I’ve been a human rights advocate and activist for all my working life. Where have you been?”
Moving on with life
Three years after retiring from the ABC, Faine still gets enraged missives, ranging from antisemitic screeds to death threats. He pulls out his phone to read out the latest. Still, he does miss the show, although he doesn’t regret leaving.
“Like the footballer who does one game too many, I never wanted someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Jon, it’s time’. I’ve seen so many colleagues have that experience and it destroys how you see yourself and it takes a long time to recover, if you ever do.”
When the pandemic hit and all his engagements were cancelled, he felt sorry for himself for a bit before throwing himself into the book.
“You’ve got to remember, I’ve spent my whole working life being incredibly busy and then six months after I leave I don’t have a single thing in my diary for the rest of my life,” he says.
How did that feel?
“Terrible. I don’t want to make a big deal of this, but I got pretty down. And then after a bit of that I went, pull yourself together, there’s a lot of people much worse off … Stop looking back, stop regretting and find something else to do.”
Apollo & Thelma is published by Hardie Grant on Wednesday, 6 April.
