For someone so easily recognisable, Tony Armstrong is surprisingly unaccustomed to being famous. When he opened his front door to find paparazzi outside his house in Brunswick, his first thought was that they were birdwatchers. Rather sweetly, he walked up to ask them what bird they’d spotted: “I was like, ‘Hey, is there something cool in that tree? Oh, shit!’”
Armstrong may not be used to fame but he does politely endure it. As we walk around Brunswick more than one person gawps at the 35-year-old, so recognisable with his curls and that moustache as he strides along a mural-lined laneway while wearing the most Melbourne of uniforms to boot: a garish Wah-Wah jumper accessorised with a takeaway coffee cup. “I just need a fixie with a loaf of sourdough and some pet-nat in the basket,” he jokes.
Brunswick, with its graffitied houses, web of tram lines and concentration of bougie cafes and wine bars, has been his happy home for almost a decade. He helpfully points out the “good Coles” and “shitty Coles” but refuses to show me around the monolithic Barkly Square shopping centre: “I don’t want to have a panic attack.” Somehow it has survived Brunswick’s gentrification, which now manifests in peculiar ways: think community radio stickers on $100,000 cars.
“Like, there’s a Porsche,” Armstrong says incredulously, pointing at a car outside his local pub. The next car is also a Porsche. “Fucking hell, that’s a Maserati,” he says, pointing at the next, openly appalled.
We meet on the precipice of two bastions of democracy: a week before the federal election and two weeks before Eurovision. Armstrong is buzzing about the latter, as he’s about to fly to Switzerland to cohost the SBS broadcast with the drag queen Courtney Act. “Eurovision is like The Hunger Games meets Rock Eisteddfod but everyone has a bazillion bucks to make the biggest, campest thing they can,” he says. “It’s awesome.”
On the spectrum of Eurovision acts, Armstrong enjoys the camp oddballs more than the warbling divas: “Give me, like, Käärijä from Finland any year. Cha cha cha!” As for Australia’s entry this year, Go-Jo’s innuendo-heavy techno bop Milkshake Man, “I’m still wrapping my head around it. I think Go-Jo was built in a lab?”
Eurovision is his perfect assignment: low-stakes fun, unfettered creative expression and very likely to feature pyrotechnics. As a sort of ambassador from the hetero-masculine world of Australian sport – he was an AFL player before becoming a sports broadcaster and TV personality – it is Armstrong’s hope he can lure in people who wouldn’t normally watch something so queer, absurd or earnest.
“There’s nothing cooler than people who have a fucking crack,” he says. “If you have a go, I’ve got respect coming out the wazoo. But the kids at school who loved Eurovision had no social cachet. They were outsiders – so was I, until I got good at sport. I get what it’s like to not be the cool kid.”
Armstrong “grew up as an only child” – a distinction he makes carefully, having met his father for the first time in late 2023. “I met Dad and with him came a half-brother and two half-sisters,” he says. “I didn’t know of their existence. I don’t want to pretend they don’t exist, but I also grew up without dad around, or siblings.” He doesn’t want to say more yet: “It’s just so new and we’re still working through it. Not in a bad way but it is big – I am still working out how I feel.”
The weather takes a turn for the wintery so we duck into Armstrong’s local: a cosy pub with kitsch patterned carpets and roaring fireplaces. Armstrong remembers when it used to be “a real dark old shithole – I loved it”. Over one hour four people who know Armstrong walk over to our table to say hello, while one stranger cheerfully raises his pint in exaggerated approval, which Armstrong graciously acknowledges.
These days he tends to avoid pubs when the footy is on. “That would be wanting to be seen.” Does he mind being recognised? “I don’t love it,” he says “Being recognised means you are doing a good job in my business, fucking annoyingly. I’m very conflict-averse so it has taken me ages to learn how to shut down conversations… and, if people have a few beers, they start forgetting they only know you through a screen.”
Between 2008 and 2015 Armstrong played 35 games for the Adelaide Crows, Collingwood and Sydney Swans but he was never that famous then. “I was lucky that I sucked,” he smiles. But you were a pro! I protest. “No, no, I sucked,” he says cheerfully. “Call a spade a spade.”
He likens his footy career to a backing singer – doing the same work as the stars but always on the periphery – which allowed him to watch how the high-profile players bore intense public scrutiny. “Fame is not natural,” he says. “If we ever meet again and I say, ‘I am so used to this’ – I want you to whack me.”
The brutality of professional sport taught him how to accept rejection, which has also helped him in media. “This business is who can eat the most shit and who can remain sane whilst doing it the longest,” he says. Since he left ABC Breakfast last year, he worries whether the phone will keep ringing; he jokes that he regularly shakes his partner, the Kaytetye music producer Rona, awake to check: “Can we keep the lights on?”
After his AFL career ended he spent four years trying on various hats – advertising, mentoring, being an agent – until a chance conversation with the former Brisbane Lions player Chris Johnson lead to Armstrong trying out as a commentator on the National Indigenous Radio Service. He immediately loved it. “I’m so passionate about commentating,” he says. “I never imagined this would be my job. But I’m so lucky that it has turned out to be a blend of my skills and passion.”
This led to him being hired by the ABC, reading sports news on breakfast television for three years. But he struggled to warm to the work. “I had to keep reminding myself that it was important,” he says, then pauses. “I don’t want to shit on the industry that gave me everything, particularly when I want to keep working in it,” he clarifies. “Look, I just didn’t find news creatively fulfilling. For two and a half minutes, every 15 minutes, I just basically read out results. What it meant for people to see someone who looked and sounded like me doing that job – that was important. That was what gave it meaning.”
A couple of (very early) mornings towards the end, Armstrong found that he couldn’t get out of bed, unable to bear going to work. “I was supposed to be on air way more than I was at the end. But I knew news wasn’t going to be forever, because I didn’t love it enough for it to be for ever. And I was really struggling, because I was trying to do all these other things – books, documentaries.”
He was “desperate and stupidly competitive”, stretching himself thin until, “I couldn’t get out of bed at all. I’d never really taken time off – if I wasn’t on air, I was shooting something else.” The first morning he couldn’t get out of bed, “That was what I knew. Time’s right.”
Even now he always seems to be hosting another show, or writing another kids book. But he gives himself space for downtime. He has seen a psychologist since his footy days – another vulnerability he’s happy to be open about in the name of doing some good – and makes time for his favourite comforts: “Meaningless TV, anime and mid-90s action movies.”
“There’s nothing quite like falling asleep to that soothing sound of explosions and gunfire,” he says, laughing. He can also, finally, enjoy sport again.
As we sit in the pub, neither of us yet know that Australia will resoundingly reject Peter Dutton’s culture wars at the election but Armstrong is wary of how politics and discourse has changed, beyond the campaigns.
“We’re seeing rights being walked back all around the world and freedom of speech being wrongly defined as tolerating hate speech,” he says, adding: “I can viscerally feel the tone of the world shifting. It is fucking crazy – the way that I’m getting spoken to now is wild.”
Armstrong has always been unafraid to expose the racism he has copped but it is only getting worse. “Way worse – I’m just incredulous about the brazenness,” he says.
But he would never go into politics. “Fuck no,” he says, immediately. “I’m too radical for politics. I want to shoot from the hip every now and then.
“I think my value is being where I am now.”
Eurovision, hosted by Tony Armstrong and Courtney Act, airs on SBS. The semi-final two, featuring Australia, will begin at 7.30pm on 17 May. The final will begin at 7.30pm on 18 May
