Peter Anthony is not one to mince words. “How are you?” I ask tentatively, hovering at the doorway of his Fitzroy terrace. “Dying,” he replies pithily and then, with his trademark bonhomie: “Come in”.

Until a shock diagnosis of terminal gastric cancer late last year, Anthony was one of the custodians of The Age’s barometer of public opinion: the letters to the editor page.

He developed relationships with Melbourne’s most prolific and impassioned letter writers – “Angry of Alphington, Furious of Fitzroy,” Anthony quips, “Happy of Heidelberg just doesn’t write in” – his sonorous voice booming through the newsroom as he painstakingly checked facts and suggested edits.

Peter Anthony.Credit:Scott McNaughton

Anthony is many things to many people; journalist, chef, father, brother, son and friend, erstwhile rock and roll musician in New York (Borders Books and Music once described him as Lou Reed meets Pete Seeger), purveyor of truffles with childhood pal Simon Friend and raconteur with a sense of the absurd.

“Who else could describe his first dose of chemotherapy as a hint of diesel with lingering metallic back notes?” The Age’s production editor Wade Pearce said in a farewell speech, delivered to Anthony (via Zoom) in his hospital bed.

Anthony has agreed to a Lunch With to discuss his life and its final dénouement at his Fitzroy home.

The irony of having lunch with a man with gastric cancer is not lost on either of us.

Peter Anthony and Iron Chef Italian Masahiko Kobe.

These days Anthony’s diet is mostly puréed vegetables and chicken and fentanyl; a regimen especially galling for a foodie, for whom Iron Chef Italian Masahiko Kobe once whipped up a five-course feast in Tokyo.

“I’m just going to be interested to see if the scars from the irony bypass have healed by the time I die,” Anthony says.

What food does he miss the most?

“Probably steak. I was just going through the fridge and saw a Tooborac wild rabbit pie, I’d forgotten it was even in there. I miss that. Pasta I miss, bread, toast with Vegemite. Food. I miss food.”

Anthony grew up in Lakes Entrance in the 1960s, the son of newsagents. As a six-year-old he was tasked with selling newspapers in caravan parks.

“These giants would come out of their tents, they would throw money at me and if there was something big going on they’d be yabbering in quite an agitated state to each other. I remember the thought crossing my mind that these newspapers were really something.”

The impact of newspapers on the yabbering giants stayed with him and in 1977 Anthony applied for a cadetship at The Age. He was hired and spent the bulk of the next 13 years at the masthead before moving to the US.

Two decades later, Anthony returned to The Age.

Investigative journalist Nick McKenzie once described Anthony as “the glue that holds The Age together”.

While in the US Anthony was an associate editor at Forbes magazine – a gold standard of fact checking – and he brought this rigour to The Age.

Regular Age letter writer Norman Huon (Perspicuous of Port Melbourne, perhaps?) recalls being taken by surprise the first time Anthony rang to check sources and gently suggest an edit.

“He was a fastidious fact-checker,” Huon says. “It’s certainly improved my approach, I’ve been very careful to now go back and check sources whenever I put pen to paper, which is often.”

The two developed a rapport; Anthony would ask after Huon’s health, after he mentioned his voice was raspy due to tumours on his throat.

“I felt that it wasn’t just a surfacey sort of inquiry … I would have loved to have shared a few bottles of red with him and swapped notes on his experiences in the States.”

‘A fastidious fact-checker’: Peter Anthony has been an ambassador for The Age and its letters page.Credit:Scott McNaughton

Anthony saw his role at The Age as ambassadorial, sometimes startling disgruntled letter writers by ringing them to defend the masthead and explain his decision-making.

“They would be wondering why we didn’t run enough letters supporting the push for the canonisation of John Howard. Apart from the fact that he is Protestant and it would never happen, I would get hold of some of them and say ‘You’ve got to understand we have to run a bunch of balances’.”

The Age’s letters page is a finely calibrated affair, Anthony would explain, which aims to publish a range of opinions. There are rare exceptions: “If someone writes in that the Earth’s a spherical object in an elliptical orbit around the sun, I’m not going to feel obliged to drum up a letter from a flat-earther for the sake of balance.”

The topics which most exercise Age readers, he says, are refugees, the state of education, access to housing and global warming.

Anthony’s engagement with readers meant he often had a better idea of how people would vote in elections than opinion polls. Former Sunday Age editor Duska Sulicich recalls him confidently predicting Scott Morrison would win the 2019 election, a victory that blindsided many political commentators and pollsters.

I have been given an eclectic shopping list of food that Anthony can eat: smoked trout, camembert, caviar and dips (eaten with a spoon – he can’t manage crackers or bread), and champagne.

“What would you recommend for a man who has received a terminal diagnosis?” I ask at a bottle shop in Queen Victoria Market. “J-M Sélèque ‘Solessence’ Extra Brut,” the sales assistant replies, with so little hesitation that I wonder if he’s had this request before.

Anthony makes approving noises; we look the Brut up on the Vivino app, which rates it among the top 3 per cent of wines in the world.

Food fit for a dying man.Credit:Scott McNaughton

But I mess up with the cheese. I buy truffle brie; a nod to Anthony’s side hustle supplying truffles to high-end restaurants with fine food company Friend and Burrell.

Anthony has one mouthful and looks aghast. “Urgh, I can’t eat that, this will have something in it called 2,4-dithiapentane. It’s Friend and Burrell’s sworn enemy. My reputation would be shot if I was seen with this.”

2,4-dithiapentane, it turns out, is a chemical compound used to flavour many commercial truffle oils. Anthony laughs uproariously at my gaffe, as he swiftly replaces the maligned truffle brie with his own camembert: “We might pretend this never happened.”

When his marriage collapsed in the early 1990s, Anthony quit his job editing the Hartford Business Journal in Connecticut, where he had been “working my arse off”. “F— it,” he thought, “I always wanted to give rock and roll a try.”

For two years Anthony performed at coffee shops, theatre restaurants and biker bars in upstate New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

“Borders Books and Music called me a distinctive vocal stylist. What that means is 99 people out of 100 cannot stand your voice. But one person will drive all night to hear you, and in America that is a living.”

Peter Anthony performing onstage at CBGB in Manhattan’s East Village in 1992.

He had three things on his music bucket list: play at CBGB, a famed punk rock venue in Manhattan’s East Village; get on a bill with rock singer Graham Parker; and meet guitarist Steve Forbert. “I did all three,” he says.

Anthony’s still listening to music. These days it’s The Killers’ Sam’s Town – “I find that oddly reassuring” – a bit of Billy Bragg and Allison Moorer’s “Heal”, “which is as near to God-bothering” as his funeral is going to get. The service will end with Paul Kelly’s “It’s All Downhill From Here”. “That’s what people will march out to. There will be songs I won’t be listening to anymore that I love hearing.”

Anthony’s life had been in a purple patch when he was diagnosed with inoperable gastric cancer in November.

For the first time in years his much-loved four children are all living in Melbourne. He’d planned to spend time with them and with friends, slowly wind down at The Age, forage for mushrooms.

He’s still only 63.

“The overwhelming feeling now is sadness,” he says.

But as much as Anthony’s diagnosis came as a ghastly shock – “it’s only recently I haven’t woken up and thought ‘dang it’s not a dream’” – the one thing it has given him, he says, is time.

His grandfather was younger than he is now when he died suddenly of a heart attack.

“Nana said she just heard ‘Oh my Mabel’, which fortunately was her name, and then a thump. In the two seconds between leaning over to turn the television on and getting ‘Oh my Mabel’ out and dropping dead, he didn’t get a chance to do very much at all.”

By contrast, Anthony says, he’s had the opportunity to do some “karmic housekeeping”. “I’ve had a chance to take stock of how I have behaved. Pop didn’t have that.”

He’s reconciled with someone he fell out with years ago. His phone rings constantly; a friend signs off “Love you brother”.

Anthony’s also recited the general confession with a minister from the Church of England (he’s low church not high, he stresses) and received absolution.

“I believe we are born in a state of grace,” Anthony says. “And then essentially we are left alone by the higher power, and it’s up to us whether we die in a state of grace or not. That’s about all I know for sure.”

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