Children of the 1970s who read this site: Did any of you make plates like this in art class? You drew a picture on a circular piece of opaque paper, and then your parents or your teacher sent the drawing off to a company that pressed the drawing into a plastic plate. A week or two after you sent off the drawing, the plate arrived in the mail. I ate off this plate every night for years:

To help the art historians who, decades from now, will be devoting themselves to analyzing the history and motivations behind my artistic output, I will record some background about this drawing—no, this “sculptured culinary tool.” I created this piece in 1976, when I was a seven-year-old kindergarten student. I was still flush with excitement from my recent trip to Australia with my family. There is a boastful, almost preening quality to this piece, as if I am trying to say, “Hey, look at me! I just went to AUSTRALIA! On a AIRPLANE!!!!!” Less-forgiving critics might use the words “sloppy” and “unrealistic” to describe, respectively, the colored line work and the questionable deployment of perspective; I prefer the terms “kinetic” and “imaginative.” Yes, it’s true, one could argue that my placement of my signature in the CENTER of the piece betrays some sort of narcissistic personality disorder, but I would argue that I was merely trying to save people from having to spend time figuring out who created the work. Why not be up front about it? I have never been one for willful obscurity, and this is evident even in my earliest works.

Careful observers will notice that the top instance of “TWA” is spelled backwards. When I was working on this piece, I was so cocky about my ability to write upside down that I didn’t bother to sketch the letters in pencil before finalizing them with magic marker. By the time I realized my mistake, it was too late. This error will surely increase the potential value of this unusual, one-of-a-kind work of art.

UPDATE: Apologies to future historians: I may have given the wrong date for this work. It seems that I must have created it in 1975, or possibly even 1974. I think it was 1975. My college friend Peter, who is the same age as I am, wrote to offer this observation: “Seven-year-old Kindergarten student? Was that some Indiana thing? You date the plate to 1976. Personally, in the 1975-76 school year, I was in the first grade, and in the 1976-77 year, the second grade. Art historians and Hearst-ologists may be trying to clear up the date/grade correspondence for years to come.”

UPDATE II: Wait! Check this out! We have confirmation! In my files I found a notebook I kept during my Australia trip. This notebook proves that the Australia trip took place in February 1975, the month I turned six. The handwriting appears to be my mother’s, not mine. She must have served as the transcriptionist for my muse:

I can now say with great confidence that I created The TWA Plate sometime in March or April of 1975, soon after I turned six.

Following up on the previous post: The official Vegemite site contains lots of weird and interesting stuff, including a gallery of Vegemite print ads dating back to the 1920s and photos of historical Vegemite memorabilia.

The history page gives some background about this weird food:

> Vegemite dates back to 1922 when the Fred Walker Company, which became Kraft Walker Foods in 1926 and Kraft Foods Limited in 1950, hired a young chemist to develop a spread from one of the richest known natural sources of the vitamin B group - Brewers Yeast.

> Following months of laboratory tests, Dr. Cyril P Callister, who became the nation’s leading food technologist of the 1920s and 30s developed a tasty spreadable paste. It came in a two ounce (57g) amber glass jar capped with a Phoenix seal with the label "Pure Vegetable Extract."

> In an imaginative approach, Walker turned to the Australian public to officially name his spread. He conducted a national trade-name competition offering an attractive 50 pound prize pool for the finalists. How the 50 pounds was distributed or who was the winning contestant has unfortunately been lost in history, but it was Walker's daughter who chose the winning name out of the hundreds of entries.

> That winning name was Vegemite and in 1923 Vegemite first graced grocers' shelves. It was described as "Delicious on sandwiches and toast, and improves the flavour of soups, stews and gravies." However, it took 14 long years of perseverance from Walker before Vegemite finally gained acceptance and recognition with the Australian people.

My mother is Australian, but I wasn’t raised with much awareness of Australian culture. My mom occasionally served us Vegemite when we were kids, but that’s about it. (If you’ve never tasted Vegemite, it’s about as gross as you’d think: It has the color and consistency of smooshed ants, and probably tastes about as good. But I remember liking it fine as a kid.)

I still possess one hyper-Australian cultural artifact from my childhood: a mid-’60s album called Join Rolf Harris Singing “The Court of King Caractacus” and Other Fun Songs. The cover is sublime:

Rolf Harris is a household name in Australia, and I think he’s also pretty well known in the U.K. But I’d be surprised if many people here in the United States have heard of him. He sings, he does comedy, he paints, he hosts goofy TV shows for children. His official site has loads of info about his long, oddball career.

I haven’t owned a turntable since about 1991, so it’s been at least that long since I last played my copy of Join Rolf Harris. But a couple of years ago I discovered that an audiophile friend on Echo owns a copy of it, and he was nice enough to digitize it and send me a CD. My desire to hear the record was motivated primarily by nostalgia, but I was amazed to discover that it’s actually a great album. Seriously. He’s a great singer (or he was 40 years ago) and a charming, funny showman. Join Rolf Harris is mostly a collection of Australian and English music hall songs, some of them classics and some of them Harris originals. I loved all of these songs and often sang along to them with great brio. I loved “Gosport Nancy” without having any idea it was about a prostitute (or at least a very, very friendly gal):

Now Gosport Nancy keeps a parlour
Where the lads can take their ease
She’ll wake you, she’ll shake you
She will do whate’er you please
Now all the Gosport ladies
They does the best they can
But at makin’ a bed for a sailor’s head
There’s none like Gosport Nan

The album contains the single best version of “Waltzing Matilda” I’ve ever heard. Because I aim to please, I’m posting it here:

There’s crowd noise on the recording, so it must be from a concert, but it also sounds like some overdubs were added later. Before the song starts, Harris spends a couple of minutes outlining a glossary of some of the terms used in the song.

Join Rolf Harris Singing “The Court of King Caractacus” and Other Fun Songs isn’t mentioned on Harris’s official site, and a Google search only pulls up a handful of references to it. It was probably a compilation assembled specifically for the American market. (My copy says “Printed in the U.S.A.” on the back.)

Here are the liner notes, which are credited to someone named Bob Goldstein:

Rolf Harris is a troublemaker. He makes people nervous. Well, not all people—just the bunch that gets edgy when they see or hear something they cannot easily label. You know the type: they’re the ones who call all popular music “rock and roll,” who dismiss all Broadway shows as “loud and brassy,” and who brand all wearers of shaggy haircuts “Beatles fans.” Well, this bunch is very upset because the only name that fits Rolf Harris is his own, and the only label he’ll readily wear is Epic’s.

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