[4] Cleary went onto play 205 games — second only to Dave Starbuck in Coburg club history — and kick 317 goals.

He was one of the most well-known players in the VFA in his era, and was instantly recognisable from the thick beard he wore throughout his career.

[6] At the Wills by-election of 11 April 1992, caused by the resignation of former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, Phil Cleary was elected as an independent to the Australian House of Representatives from a field of 22 candidates, becoming the only non-Labor member to have ever held the seat.

Wills had undergone a redistribution, by adding territory to the division, which weakened Cleary's notional position against Labor.

[8] While advocating an Australian Republic, he broke with the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) over disagreement about how the President of Australia should be chosen, forming a group called "Real Republic", which advocated direct election of the President as opposed to the model advocated by Malcolm Turnbull of the ARM, under which the President would be chosen by a joint sitting of the Parliament, and which was the model proposed in the 1999 referendum.

[10] In a much-published defamation case in 2010, it was alleged that, in his 2005 book Getting Away with Murder, Cleary had accused barrister Dyson Hore-Lacy of helping a man who killed his own wife to manufacture a provocation defence.