A trashy poem

The perturbing irony
Of
A heavy metal band's logo
Crudely daubed on the side
Of 
A rusty pink dumpster
Flesh-coloured ego inviting inevitability 
A scenic route to senility
Rust lines etched like varicose veins
Across the garbage receptacle that is your soul
And so remember this
Metallica – synonymous with thrash
But in this place it equates to trash

 

R.I.P. Nathan Robertson

I got to know Nathan through the comments section of Gavin Scott's blog Chart Beats (now a full-blown website), when Gavin was recapping charts of the early 1990s. Often Nathan and I would be the only two people commenting. Although we never met personally, I got to know him and we communicated by email now and then, usually about music or chart-related stuff. (Actually I think we might have exchanged comments on Youtube years before that, but anyway...)

Nathan and I were born in the same year, so although our musical tastes were not the same, the early-to-mid-'80s through to the mid-to-late '90s were the heyday of our music listening. We both used to write the chart listings down each week, although his were more detailed than mine. Our interest in the charts also waned at the same time, at the end of the '90s.

As well as a music lover, Nathan was a charts man. Specifically, the Australian charts – as compiled by the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA) – was his thing. He had a contact at ARIA who he regularly asked for chart stats for particular artists, a few at a time, until he had amassed a sizeable database.

He added me to a mailing list where fellow chart nerds shared their findings, and he shared with me heaps of chart info — albums and singles charts spreadsheets, scans of the Kent Music Report (who compiled the charts prior to ARIA) charts, lists of new releases, and ARIA's own music reports.

Nathan was also a fan of the music video as an art form. He had thousands in his collection, digitized from recording hours and hours of the music video show Rage, many peoples' videotape sources (including mine) and VHS compilations, and was dedicated to preserving the best quality versions of little-known and obscure videos on his Youtube channels. While record company neglect let certain artists and videos fall into obscurity, Nathan and his archives kept their memories alive.

He once said to user AcerBenII on the PopJustice forum, "I think music videos really capture a moment in time; more than just listening to the song. A song can be 'timeless', but a music video rarely is – they're usually quite of their time, which adds a nostalgic element." 

If there's an Australian pop song that exists, chances are Nathan uploaded its video to Youtube at some point. He once won a competition to guest-program an hour of Rage, which went to air on May 1, 2010. Although he wasn't seen on screen like a previous winner, the Rage chyrons included the line "Playlisted by Nathan fron Highton, VIC".

In 2020, Nathan started his own chart recap blog, called Bubbling Down Under, where he recapped only releases that peaked outside the top 100. I designed the logo and background image for the blog. He described it as something of a companion blog to Chart Beats, whose tagline was "A journey through pop", and made his tagline "A journey through flop".

I've never known anyone else with as much knowledge of pop music, chart stats, single releases and music videos as Nathan had. Sadly he lost his battle with cancer on August 9th 2025 at the age of 46, and we are poorer for his loss. My condolences to all of the members of his family. May he rest in peace. 

Mayday – a forgotten character

Have you ever created a character intended for all kinds of comic strip shenanigans, only for nothing to come of it? 

Back in the late ’90s, I created a character called Mayday. I wanted to do a comic strip with a female lead. I was heavily influenced by the series Æon Flux, which was airing on SBS at the time and which I watched religiously, even though I didn’t understand most of what was going on. I had never seen anything like it before (or since). I wanted a world that matched it in bizarreness, if not in subject matter. I sketched out the character, but couldn’t think of any plots, so I put aside that idea. Not too long after that I got into anime. In 1999 I created a character called Juliet Prime and began making comics and stories about her instead.

Mayday was very much a proto-Juliet. They both had similar designs — short in stature with short scruffy hair. They were also both heroines who were out to defeat a totalitarian. Like the early Æon Flux shorts there would be no dialogue either.

She also had a little walrus who followed her around. The setting was a Soviet-looking brutalist hellscape populated mostly by hominids and itinerant salesmen. That’s all I really remember about this proposed comic strip.

There are no drawings of what Mayday looked like, so I did this mock-up to show you, to the best of my memory. The walrus I coloured purple here because Rotor, the walrus character in the Sonic The Hedgehog comics, was the same colour.

Also, my niece has a little walrus bath toy that is also purple. Coincidence???

If you’ve read my book Freefall O’Malley (and if not, what are you waiting for?!), the above drawing of Mayday might look familiar to you. That’s because she never completely disappeared down the memory hole. In designing the character Anna Yamaha, I (probably unconsciously) borrowed several elements from how I remembered Mayday to look. So she never really went away, she was just floating around in the back of my mind, waiting to be found again.

Drawing and watching TV and drawing

It's beneficial and fun to just do rough sketches of heads and faces while watching TV, of people you see. Here are a bunch of them from my sketchbooks.

No, that last one isn't me. Wipe that smirk off your face!

The first time I wore a face mask in public was in Vietnam in 2018. The pollution in Ho Chi Minh City was pretty bad, so I bought some from a convenience store. I felt kinda stupid wearing it, but once I was in the street I realized no one cared. Then a year and a half later the pandemic meant we were all wearing them anyway. Funny how life turns out, in'nit?  

Pictures of me, pictures of you

A while ago someone asked me why there are no photos of me on this blog (there actually are, but you'll have to hunt around to find them). This is an art blog, anyway – so how about some drawings of me? There aren't that many in my archives, but here are some for you to look at. It's always interesting how someone else renders you in artistic form – regardless of their artistic ability!

This one was by Mladen, an accomplished illustrator. He drew it in 2014 at either the first or second monthly comics meetup in Melbourne that I attended. If I remember right, although he was sitting opposite me, he had a basketball player in mind when drawing this! He drew it in ink on textured watercolour paper and was kind enough to give me the drawing when he was finished.

A Japanese girl called Miho drew this one, in 2002. While living and teaching in Japan, as someone of a different culture I was probably drawn a bit differently than the way Japanese high school students usually drew their friends and other people. In this case, with a purposeful stride, schoolbooks under my arm, shoujo manga-esque eyes, and noodle arms and legs! That's me all right.

Another one drawn by a Japanese student, a girl named Mami. Like Miho's drawing above, it was drawn in the corner of a bit of schoolwork. I wonder if these girls drew little caricatures of the other teachers who'd be marking their work?

This was drawn by my 4 year old niece, Aanya. It's a drawing of her, her mum/my sister, and me. You might think the big person in the middle is me, right? Wrong. I am reliably informed that the smallest person, the one on the right with a single long strand of hair, is in fact me. Like most young kids learning to draw faces and bodies, Aanya is used to giving hair to every head. Perhaps she felt sorry for me so she gave me a single long strand instead.

It's another drawing of me looking vaguely dissatisfied (my default expression, it seems), done by Daniel, an attendee of the monthly PCAF comics workshops in Perth, in 2024. As you can see he used magenta and yellow graphic markers to do it and he told me that those are not 'stink lines' above my head, but frustration or worry lines. I tend to make the same facial expression as the character I'm drawing so I can only assume I was drawing a worried face at the time.

Back in 2008 another guy called Daniel did this drawing in Illustrator, depicting him, me, and two of our graphic design classmates, based on Jeremy Plumb's cover of Blur's best-of album, called, oddly enough, Blur: The Best Of. This image looks dodgy because it's a scan of a printout – I don't have the source file for this one.

See that yellow face? According to my cousin Gabby, that's supposed to be me. She drew this when she was 7, and is now 31 (and probably still draws like this). Okay, maybe not.

Another drawing done by one of my students in Japan many years ago, named Ikki. That's him looking in from the right. I'm the one at the bottom left, and I have to say, even though he nailed the caricatures of his mates Shingo and Takahira-kun, he's depicted me in a rather unusual way, complete with blonde hair. I was actually thinking of making this my online profile picture! But that would be silly.