Michael 'Tarzan' Fomenko

Sources differ as to the year that Fomenko was born. Some sources state 1930, The October Revolution, aka Bolshevik Revolution (part of the Russian Civil War), was already a decade old by the time Michael was born, and their parents' social status reportedly caused issues for the family in the political environment. Michael was a natural athlete, according to ABC News, and excelled in the decathlon, "even being tipped" for the Melbourne 1956 Olympics at one point. Decades later, in the 2010s, while trying to reconnect with her brother, Inessa painted him a pictured entitled "Corina, Corina", after one of his favourite songs from the 1950s. Inessa explained "I painted it to cheer him up, I thought it would remind him of those days in Sydney when we used to have sing-songs around the piano." ==Canecutting in northern Queensland==

Upon leaving school in the mid-1950s, Fomenko took a job as a cane cutter in northern Queensland near Cairns. Fomenko, then 26 and described as a "bearded (..) district canecutter", had set out from the town of Deeral in the canoe on Wednesday 18 July 1956 bound for Cooktown, with a dinghy in tow. and on the same day, the Bundaberg News Mail also published an article about him entitled "Father Tells of "Tarzan" Son". ==Journey to Dutch New Guinea ==

In March 1959, Fomenko reportedly landed by canoe at the Lockhart River Mission, near the tip of the Cape York Peninsula in Queensland, where he was "cared for by the missionaries and staff members" of the facility. He left (the Lockhart River Mission) a few days ago for T.I. and anticipates the journey will take three months. The bewhiskered "Tarzan" wears a lap lap of hassian, held up with a thick leather belt to which are attached two leather sheaths holding what appears to be daggers made from old cane knives. He has no other clothes, carries no food and there is no sail to his canoe, this appears to be a hollowed out tree trunk which he carved himself. His sole effects are a couple of drums of water and some spears. Several weeks ago he met the "Wewak" and the crew gave him sugar, rice and flour. The canoe, which is about 20ft long is fitted with an out-rigger made of rough hewn boughs. His father, who thinks Michael is leading a man's life, has asked that no publicity be given to his arrival on T.I. but the eyes of the south are focused on this man who is braving the elements in this life in the raw manner. Fomenko was reportedly "living with about 100 natives in a settlement on the southern tip of the island" and planned within the coming days to visit Thursday Island to buy some supplies, before continuing on to New Guinea, which lay some 100 miles more across the Torres Strait. He had paddled the canoe 126 miles across open sea, and having initially intended to reach the Solomon Islands, had been "blown off course by strong winds". A spokesperson for the Australian Department of Territories told the Canberra Times that it was "most unlikely" that Fomenko would even be granted permission to enter Australian New Guinea Territories anyway, as he would have to "conform to the usual requirements" to do so, and would be required to "hold a return ticket to Australia, have accommodation and employment or a bond to ensure that he would not become a charge on the Administration." He re-appeared in Hollandia in early February, apparently having spent the previous three weeks living in hills near the town. A spokesman reported that the Dutch authorities were arranging his repatriation to Australia, "Tarzan" Fomenkounderweight and too weak to walk without assistancewas smuggled away from Sydney airport when he returned from New Guinea to-night. Bushy-haired, stubble-faced and gaunt, and wearing only a khaki shirt and trousers with sandshoes, Michael Fomenko talked for almost an hour with his father, Mr. D. P. Fomenko, in the overseas terminal's customs room before leaving. He had not seen his father, a Sydney schoolteacher, since he left home three years ago to begin his canoe journey from Queensland to New Guinea (..) Mr. Fomenko Senior told the Pressmen last night, "Michael is not well. He is very tired after his trip and cannot speak to anyone to-night. It might take several days for him to recover, maybe longer. We are taking him home to bed." ==Return to North Queensland==

Fomenko was treated for anaemia and malaria in Sydney. A week later he was spotted at Armidale railway station waiting for a train to go north once more, this time to the Great Barrier Reef, "to see the places and do some hunting and fishing." Elizabeth Fomenko decided that her son needed help, and "set about having him committed." Renee, living in England at the time as a translator, planned to "eventually" write a book with her brother about his travels. As of 1964, Fomenko was living in the area surrounding the town of Laura, inland of Cooktown, Queensland, and occupied himself in making another canoe. He was also in the habit of begging for food from the local cattle stations on occasion. Sam Elliott, a local prospector, recorded that: He was a big burly bloke, full of goose eggs and rotten pig. He had to be about six foot, naked, and about sixteen stone. Some kids would wake up in the middle of the night screaming in fright... "Menko man! Menko man!" ==Incarceration and electric shock therapy ==

Fomenko was gored by a wild pig around this time, and in an attempt to heal himself, stole medicine and food from a cattle station. Queensland's Director of Psychiatric Services directed that Fomenko's six month prison sentence would be better served at Ipswich Special Mental Hospital (aka Sandy Gallop Mental Hospital), located in the Brisbane suburb of Ipswich. Fomenko was eventually "declared insane" and incarcerated in a series of psychiatric institutions, the first of which being Sandy Gallop Mental Hospital, Brisbane, where he spent two years. Fomenko's mother was "very worried about him" and took him to a doctor at one point, who asked if her son was perhaps schizophrenic. Fomenko was later admitted to Callan Park Mental Hospital in Sydney, where he was given medication, sedated, and eventually electric-shock treatment, a process abhorred by his sister Inessa: They gave him electric-shock treatment which absolutely, that's the thing that absolutely messed him up... that was it. It is the most horrific thing, it is so barbaric - it's going back to Middle Ages, to Dark Ages, you know? Because they don't cure anybody that way, they just stun them into death, you know? A sort of a, a spiritual death. And Michael hated it. Barbara Dunne, a young nurse who worked in Callan Park Mental Hospital at the time, was interviewed in 2018 as part of the ABC radio documentary on Fomenko's life. She recalled seeing Fomenko, who's exploits as Tarzan she had already heard of at the time, who appeared as a "subdued, drugged-up fella sitting there in a shirt and a pair of trousers, watching the TV". Dunne noted that he looked like the "ghost of a person" by that stage, and was "basically a zombie." The ABC radio documentary noted that Fomenko's medical records were still sealed as of time of airing in 2018, and it was not possible to know for how many years he was at Callan Park, but his family recall it as being years rather than months. His sister Inessa eventually took him out, but noted that he never trusted anybody again after that. According to Nina Oom, one of Michael's three sisters, speaking in 1998: The sad thing is, but for all that enforced 'treatment', Michael may well have returned and settled down by now. I think he was running away from a part of himself people couldn't understand, but there was another part of him that would have liked to be ordinary, with a lawnmower and a wife. According to the ABC radio documentary, it took Fomenko "roughly a decade" after his release from Callan Park Mental Hospital to finally return to the place "he felt most at home" (i.e. Queensland). However, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, Fomenko returned to the jungles of Queensland upon his release from hospital in 1969. From that point on, he returned to Sydney just twice more in his lifetime, once being for the funeral of his mother in 1988. ==1980s==

In 1985, Sydney Morning Herald journalist Frank Robson and photographer Arthur Mostead "chanced upon" Fomenko at one of his overnight bush camps near the entrance to the Bloomfield River, south of Cooktown, having been directed to him by an Aboriginal woman. When the two introduced themselves to him, he "rose from the dirt and shook hands formally. "My name's Mister Fomenko." Robson became one of the few journalists to interview Fomenko, who that evening "wore only shorts and his powerful, leathery frame was dark with ingrained grime." During the exchange, Fomenko shared Coca-Cola and chocolate bars with the men, which he had bought from a local store with his disability pension, and demonstrated an unfamiliarity with the goings on of the modern world: With the dirt of the earth ingrained on his leathery skin and erratic tufts of hair about his ears and nose, the perfectly mannered recluse insisted he'd never heard the term 'nuclear war' and was shocked to learn that Johnny Weissmuller had died. Robson recounts that Fomenko told the men "several times" how he missed his mother, who was by then in a nursing home, and how he "sent her shells and boar tusks to let her know he was well." Later that evening, Robson and Mostead invited Fomenko to a hippy party at a nearby property, but he declined, replying "I'd like to (..) But not tonight. I haven't got time." As the pair drove off, Fomenko called after them, thanking them for having visited him. Soon after the encounter, Fomenko's sister Nina Oom travelled to the same area, hoping to meet her brother for the first time in a decade, and guided by Pearl Kendrick, a local shop owner from Ayton. They found him at a bay where he was "putting his latest dugout canoe through sea trials", and Oom ran to hug him, however he did not recognise her, and shrugged her off. Despite this, Oom stayed in the area longer, and a week later, when they saw him again, she wrote on a board "Michael – this is Nina, your sister. I'm staying with Pearl. Come in" and left it on the beach for him to find. Fomenko sent word for her to "come to the tree he was living under", and they "spent several days together before he abruptly disappeared." Oom died in 2008. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that shortly before her death in 1988, Elizabeth Fomenko expressed remorse for having institutionalised her son, and confided in her daughter Nina that she had "been wrong to put him in hospital." ==1990s==

According to the Sydney Morning Herald journalist Frank Robson, around the year 1990, Fomenko relocated from Cape York to an area south of Cairns, where he had first lived in the 1950s after coming north to work as a cane-cutter. Local residents became used to the sight of him "loping effortlessly" along the Bruce Highway between Babinda and Cairns on supply trips, with his distinguishable sugar bag over his shoulder. Robson notes that "as time wore on the lope became a trot, then a shuffle." Then aged in his 60s, Fomenko began spending the worst parts of the wet seasons indoors in empty buildings or budget hotels, but would return to the jungle in the less humid weather of the tropic winter. ==2010s==

By 2010, Fomenko was 80 years old, and still living outdoors for much of the year. Also in 2016, the Cairns Post placed Fomenko at Number 4 in its Top 50 Most Influential People list. Move to a nursing home At some point in 2012, Fomenko disappeared from public life in the Cairns district, and online forums were "full of messages from residents, worried about whatever happened to the ageing bushman", according to the Cairns Post. ==Death==

Fomenko died at Babinda Hospital on 17 August 2018, aged 88. ==Physical description ==

As part of a 2018 ABC radio documentary, Cairns locals were interviewed about Fomenko, and described his personality and physical description in soundbites: "He had a huge reputation in Cairns as just one of these great characters"... "y'know, you asked at shops, newsagentseveryone knew him"... "bronzed skin"... "aw, he was so fit"... "very tall, muscly sort of fella"... "about six foot something I suppose?"... "his hair blowing"... "hard to tell what age (he was)"... "sugar bag on his shoulder"... "knife and a tomahawk"... "he was always bare chested"... "but I liked him, he was quite a nice chap"... "so you know, he was one of those people who was everywhere and nowhere"... Chris Wighton, a Cairns musician, who once gave Fomenko a lift in his car, recollected that "in the passenger seat where he had been sitting, was this perfect outline of him in soot and dirt and probably a couple of twigs too... the smell of the guy was not unattractive, it was like campfire and soot, but it wasn't a bad smell... earthy smell." ==Jung research==

Harold Jung (born circa 1967), described by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2011 as "perhaps the most avid of Fomenko's devotees", died at some point prior to 2015 having collected twenty years' worth of documents, photos and interviews relating to Fomenko. Jung had become "quite friendly" with Fomenko over the years and had been intending to write a book about his life. Following Harold's death, his brother Ingram Jung approached the Cairns Historical Society with his collection in the event they might have a suggestion with what to do with it. The Society put him in touch with author Peter Ryle, who combined the research with information from the National Archives of Australia to spend twelve months writing the book ''"Michael 'Tarzan' Fomenko: The Man Who Dared to Live His Own Exotic Dream"'', which was released in February 2016. Over the course of his research, Ryle discovered that many of the tales which surrounded Fomenko, such as him tackling crocodiles and boars with his bare hands, had no evidence to support them, and notably the supposed connection with Russian royalty was found to have just been a "family allegation". Ryle continued "I learnt most of the stories told about him either didn't happen the way they were said to have happened or... there's no way to know if it happened at all". Ryle admitted, however, that "He did paddle to West Papua, which was then Dutch New Guinea, from the Daintree... it's still a great story." ==See also==