Tony east of Harden on Thursday, April 3 on his way towards Cunningar before Binalong and Yass.
Kevin (Tony) Apps is the son of Kevin ‘Snowy’ Apps, Tony is (pictured with his special cart).
Kevin ‘Snowy’ Apps was a well-known Harden Hawk who has since passed away. Tony is part of the way through a mammoth walk to raise funds for a cause close to his heart. He is walking from Melbourne to Brisbane to raise funds for Neuroblastoma Australia.
He spent time in Coota on Tuesday with family where the Times caught up with Tony just before he headed to Mitre 10 to get 4 new wheels on his cart. A cart he didn’t have until part of the way into his journey.
Tony was hoping to come through Cootamundra to Harden on Wednesday before moving on to Binalong on Thursday. “That’s my target. I’ve got four flat tyres at the moment on my trolley, so I’m just trying to organise to get that going again.
“I’ve just arrived at Coota. I stayed at Junee last night. I’ve got relatives over here so they actually came and got me this morning. Tony came across as a down to earth, humble and positive man. He will be celebrating his next birthday this week.
“I’ll be 63 on Friday, 4th April.” He said, “I was born in Murrumburrah Hospital. I went to school at Murrumburrah Primary and then I think we spent Year 7 at Murrumburrah High and then they built the new high school and we moved there. I left in Year 10, and went down to Sydney for a while.
“I came back in April, caught up Year 11 and finished Year 11. Then I went into the Navy in 1980. I did almost eight years in the Navy so I sort of signed back up after six years then got engaged to a lady in Queensland, Susan McMahon.
Tony then spent much of his career working for some very well-known companies.
“I worked for a company for a while called Computer Micrographic Services. We used to convert the old microtapes to microfish and then that got bought out by Bell and Howell. I worked for them for a while, doing the same sort of thing and then I started doing some store work for them when their foreman left.”
In 1990, Tony joined Ampol lubricants and he worked for Ampol. They were bought out by Pioneer Australia. The name changed to Australian Petroleum as well, and then Caltex bought it out in the year 2000.
“We became a joint venture between Caltex and BP manufacturing lubricants for them. The joint venture went until 2015 and Caltex decided they wanted to pull out so we pulled everything apart again. I took a redundancy and took a contract with BP to set up the bulk oil terminal in Queensland. That was a 12 month contract and lasted for about two and a half years.”
After that, Tony tried his hand at Uber but quit due to Covid.
“I quit Uber after COVID, probably about six months after COVID, it had just changed too much.”
Tony took a break before heading down to Melbourne for a couple of months where he worked with Freedom Kitchens, the kitchen group down there.
“My daughter and her husband, they both work for the company. She actually does a lot of designing when they do The Block, she often appears as a designer on The Block.”
“Morgan’s been on it for the last three years in a row I think as a designer.”
Tony went back to Brisbane, his daughter had a little girl early last year.
“I just decided that I’d look after her three days a week and work two days a week just doing some forklift work.”
“Halfway through the year, my mate in Melbourne told me that his grandson had been diagnosed with neuroblastoma, and he was only two and a half at the time.”
“Hearing about that, he had a pretty rough trot. When they pick it up, unfortunately, because it’s such young children, it’s already at stage four, so they put him very quickly into chemo. He had his first run of chemo and then they operated on the eye and they got the cancer and then they had another dose of chemo again and he came out after that at Christmas time. He was in remission and then in January he started radiation therapy, he actually managed to finish the radiation therapy whereas several of the children who were in the same course with him couldn’t finish it because they got too sick from it. Out of 10 kids, there was only one kid that actually did the whole therapy and that was young Sammy and now his next stage is to do immunology to try and rebuild his system.”
“The other thing that happened was in November my other daughter had a baby. So I got two little ones in the same age group, so I decided to try and raise awareness.”
Tony’s original idea was to do a Go-FundMe page to raise funds for the parents because the husband had taken the whole year off to spend in hospital with his son and his wife was pregnant with their second child, who was born in September.
“It was a lot on their hands and neither one of them could work.”
“Luckily both of them had leave to cover them. So they sort of said, no, we’re okay, we don’t need the Go-FundMe and I asked them, I said well, instead, how about an organisation that’s been helpful for you guys and they all just recommended it outright, Neuroblastoma Australia because they bring everyone to get into the research because 50% was the survival rate and they want to get that up to other cancer rates, which are like 70 and 90%. The cancer predominantly affects the cranium or the head and those sorts of organs continue within.
“What Greg was telling me when he told me about it was that they picked it up on Sammy because there was something odd between his eyes and it was his eye that they did the operation on, but there must have been a link back to the kidney or the liver as well.”
The journey for Tony started out as just a backpack with everything on his back, something he remedied early on in his trip. It’s been a one man show from the get go but compassion has been found along the way.
“It’s a solo effort. Originally I started out with a backpack and everything on the backpack so I had the swag and self-inflating mattress and all that on the back pack and basically my legs weren’t coping too well. I was only doing a 15k day before I had, had it, and what I did was when I got to Broadford in Victoria, there was a day where it was just raining, so I went to the railway station court to the train to Seymour and went to Bunnings. I spoke to one of the guys there and he went through some of the options there and I finished up getting a Gorilla cart and that’s what I’ve been pulling behind me so I’ve just got like a cover over the top of it to protect it from the rain.
“When I went to Bunnings I’d already paid for it and one of the guys set it up for me in the building area so I could put it together. And while I was there I was talking to some of the guys telling them the story and after I put it all together, one of the guys came over and said, “Have you paid for that yet”? And I said, yeah, I paid for it. He said, “Well, I want to organise you a credit because I want to buy it for you.” “The generosity of people has been amazing. It was $140.”
The body of an older person may slow down but it’s often the life experience and commitment that has seen Tony reach 63 that has given him the hard edge to continue.
“Yeah, I’ve had massive blisters, so I’ve been using a lot of Bandaids and they’re coming good or they are well covered now so that the blisters aren’t so bad. It’s more just the plantar fasciitis now.”
“I’ve got some sleeves that I put on at night time that are compression sleeves and that sort of alleviates it a bit overnight and then once I start walking again the next morning it comes good for a while. I get about 18 to 20K out of it.”
Tony remembers his father playing footy for the Hyphenates in the 70s.
“I do remember going to lots of football games. Likely Group 9 games like 1976, there was a grand final at Turvey Park. I think he got an award after that and that was the last year that he played.”
Tony’s family links run deep through the area and his uncle is Steve Pinney and cousin to Mel, Dianne Brunton and Michael and Chad. Nephew to Peggy Short.
If you would like to donate to Tony and help a local out on his quest to raise money to fight a terrible disease you can do so by heading to the-very-long-walk.raiselysite.com or by using the QR code. So far he has $3,705 and is aiming for a goal of $10,000. With the distance covered and the distance to go, as well as his local connections in the area, you can jump in now to donate.
Tony said, “When people do donate they should look in their spam folder as often the receipt goes in there.”
All the best Tony we will keep our readers informed on your journey.
** Meet Sammy, Sammy was like any other little boy, he loved animals, being active and running around. All that changed in mid 2024 when a headache and some mild changes in eye movement brought us into emergency. The next five days were a blur of tests and procedures, finally culminating in meeting our amazing oncology team, receiving a diagnosis of high risk neuroblastoma and starting chemotherapy. Sammy’s treatment is on-going, but is showing promising results. We are so grateful for the many communities that have rallied around us, including Kevin, as he seeks to raise awareness and research funds for this rare cancer. -Aaron, Sammy’s dad.
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