This week’s theme for the Flickr Friday Photo challenge is “birds”. Our almond tree is invaded every summer by rainbow lorikeets, and we’ve also been visited by galahs and cockatoos, but just in case we don’t get any birdy visitors by Friday I thought of another idea.
I’ve been collecting vintage menus for a few years now, mostly from ships and mostly from the fifties and sixties. We sailed on the liner Canberra in 1966 and we have a few menus from then, and over the years I’ve collected more, especially from the ships that I used to visit at Port Melbourne when I was a kid.
The menus usually have beautiful covers, often designed by well known artists, and they were issued in sets that the passengers could collect as a souvenir of the voyage. I have five menus from this series of six by artist Keith Shackleton “depicting some of the beautiful birds that may be seen in and around the countries and oceans served by P & O ships” including this one of beautiful pink flamingoes from what must have been a fun “Wild West Night Dinner” on the liner Orsova in 1969.
