Kalyn Ponga was sitting with a bunch of fellow Newcastle Knights players having lunch at Wests New Lambton.
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Medowie's Rebekah Chessum approached him.
"I just said, 'I'm one of the strongest women in the country. Do you mind if I get a picture lifting you up?' He sort of giggled and said, 'Are you having me on?'," Rebekah said.
"I said, 'No I'm being serious' and he goes, 'OK, yep sure'."
Ponga weighs about 92 kilograms. For most people, he'd be hard to lift. But Rebekah isn't most people. She recently competed in the Official Strongman Games at Daytona Beach in Florida.
"There were 250 athletes from all around the world competing to be the best of the best," she said.
"I came 20th for open women. So I'm currently the 20th strongest woman in the world."
But hang on, why isn't the women's competition called the "strongwoman" event?
"A lot of people want it to be called strongwoman. We're still strong regardless of what it's called," she said.
To help pay for her trip, she and partner Ben [who competed in the men's competition in Daytona] did a fundraiser in which they both pulled a truck.
Rebekah started in the sport only 18 months ago. Since then, she's been cramming in plenty of competitions, taking her to different parts of Australia, as well as the US.
"To have already competed on the world stage [in Florida] is enormous," she said.
She said the sportsmanship and camaraderie of the sport were brilliant.
"If you need something, the people you're competing against will give you the shirt off their back," she said.
There's a lot of co-operation with helping each other to complete a lift.
Surpassing a personal best, she said, can provide a "crazy adrenaline rush".
"You feel on top of the world," she said.
"It's incredible to do something you never thought possible."
She and Ben run a strongman club at Beresfield called Coal City Strongman.
"I'm trying to get more women into the sport," she said.
Asked the heaviest weight she had lifted, she said: "I can carry 260 kilograms on my back".
Lifting Kalyn Ponga, then, was easy-peasy.
Not Just A Coal Town
We reported last week on Steel City Sue's new music video of her song Boom Town.
The song starts like this: Our town is a boom town but you'd never know it was a boom town 'cause the main street is empty and the shops have all closed down.
New Lambton's Ross Greig said Sue was "doing a damn good job in the music world".
"But some parts of this song are way off the mark. I've never heard of this boom town and I've lived here all my life," Ross said.
He said it wasn't true that "the main street is empty and all the shops have closed down".
"Yeah some shops have closed, but that happens everywhere," he said.
"Hunter Street is not empty. Look at the Civic Theatre - there's no theatre better than that anywhere in Australia."
Sue's song had a big focus on coal, but Ross said "Newcastle is not just a coal town".
"We have a world-class university and innovative industries - my dad was a fitter and turner, he worked in a lot of different places," Ross said.
Steel City Sue also spoke about her fondness for heritage and her despair over the design of newer developments in Newcastle. Her take on this reminded us of the Joni Mitchell song, Big Yellow Taxi, in which she sang, "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot".
But Ross reckons Newcastle has "the best of both worlds".
"We've got a city with a diversity of buildings - a mixture of old and new," he said.
"You go to London or Paris, they have the high-rise in one section and the older stuff in another part of town."
He pointed to the courthouse and university building in Hunter Street as examples of innovative, modern buildings.
"Then look at Christ Church Cathedral [which is planned to be done up]," he said.
"And the old DJs department store will actually look better. They're sprucing it up, they're keeping it, not destroying it. Same as the next block - the old Soul Pattinson building. They're going to turn that into a five-star hotel. How good is that?
"With that sort of thing, you'll have a lot more people coming back into the city."
Sue said the new Newcastle had no character. Which, for a faithful Novocastrian like Ross, was going too far.
"We're Newcastle. We'll always have that character. Yes, a lot of industry has closed down, but we've changed into an innovative city in a lot of ways," he said.
There was one part of Sue's song, however, that Ross agreed with. That is, that Newcastle doesn't get enough of a financial return from the coal industry.
We're glad they could agree on one thing, at least.