Media Clipping

For the past 28 years Perry Fletcher has engrave the names of the Australian Open winners on the perpetual trophies. Fletcher said it would take him about 30 minutes to etch Serena Williams’ name on the women’s perpetual trophy.

The winners are presented with replica trophies, with the name engraved by computer.

Fletcher will inscribe the names on five trophies – the men’s and women’s singles and doubles and the mixed doubles – next month. And he’s yet to make a mistake.

His work will be shown in a documentary on the history of the Australian Open. “It’s funny when the winner holds up the trophy because I spend more time with it than the winner because it goes back in the cabinet after the publicity shots,” he said.

Herald Sun Australia Clipping

When Perry Fletcher suggested to friend and artist Charlotte Neumann that she needed to paint someone “mad”, little did he think he would be become the subject.

The Armadale painter will submit the portrait of Fletcher for next year’s Archibald Prize, the national award for portraiture.
“She said to me ‘why not, you’re mad’.So we went ahead,” Fletcher said.

Neumann has often painted physicians and other medical people but sought someone with more eccentricity for her Archibald entry.

The traditional oil portrait portrays Fletcher with his two loves- red wine and his four-year-old tenterfield terrier Caviar.

“I like to call her Mrs Rembrandt because she’s just marvellous,” Fletcher, 59, said.

Fletcher also dabbles in painting but he is better known for his professional engraving skill. Not for nothing is he is known as “Fletcher the Etcher”.

After returning from the Vietnam War in 1969, he spent six years creating The Last Supper, which now hangs in the Alfred hospital.

Local Artist bring Da Vinci to the Alfred

Most Alfred staff will have noticed the large engraving of da Vinci’s, The Last Supper on display near the Main Ward Block lifts.
This engraved version of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting was created by artist Perry Fletcher over a six year period ( 1970-1976). It includes borders
containing 370 figures, 500 scrolls and thousands of dots to complement the
main picture.

Perry, who served in the Vietnam War, returned home in 1970. Looking for inspiration and direction, he turned to art.
Recognised as a masterpiece. The Last Supper engraving spent time on display at Parliament House in Melbourne, and has since been commented upon in articles and newspapers around the world.

Earlier this year Perry’s parents, Laurna and Ernest Fletcher, were admitted to The Alfred and were both terminally ill. As a gesture of gratitude to the staff who cared for his parents, Perry loaned his masterpiece to The Alfred in the hope it would comfort and inspire patients and staff.

Those of us who have read Dan Brown’s best selling novel, The Da Vinci Code
look with great interest at the figure on the right side of Christ at the supper table. Perry Fletcher bas faithfully reproduced da Vinci’s image of this figure and all the other disciples.

Is this representing a woman at the last supper?
Could that woman be Mary Magdalene? If these questions fascinate you, take a closer look at the engraving_next time you are walking down the main corridor.

War Service Fires Fletch

War service didn’t cause “Fletcher the Etcher” to lock himself away for size years to create his masterpiece, but it helped.

This Anzac Day, Perry Fletchers’ intricate bronze-backed etching of The Last Supper is in storage needing a suitable gallery where the public can permanently appreciate his craft, the emotion , talent and pain that went into it.

The work, which hung for two years in State Parliament’s Queens Hall, needs a permanent home.

The master etcher, poet, painter, humorist, actor and magician spent the reminder of his youth creating it from 1970 to 1976, amid the distress of community rejection many Vietnam veterans suffered.

But Mr Fletcher, 57, doesn’t believe National Service wasted his youth, far from it, and he thinks compulsory military service wouldn’t harm today’s youth.

I worked in a single room, a flat in Hawthorn, for six years to create that, and people would ask, how can you live like that’?” he said.

“After living unwashed for months in a single foxhole at a fire base, that was fine.”

Today, after winning a battle against the bottle and trauma with the help of the Vietnam Veterans Counselling Service, he look back on the Fire Base Diggers Rest with pride.

Lance Corporal Perry fletcher spend almost three months of his Vietnam……hundred other 9RAR Diggers, you men he considers heroes.

It was on of the longest, unrelieved stints of any Australian battalion in a forward position.

“Without the arm discipline drilled into us, I wouldn’t have been able to keep going to complete The Last Supper, it was crucial,” he said. “It took intense concentration for many years.”

Many of Mr Fletcher’s memories of the bizarre, comical, odd angry shots of Vietnam are like a movie, not unlike Spike Milligan’s war stories.
“We were with Americans towards the end of the stint and they were smoking dope, had their trannies to their ears and, I thought, this will be a movie one day.”

“Australians would quietly reconnoitre a hill, but Americans would go straight in, conquer it and suffer a log of deaths.”

Perry Fletcher was picked as quirky early on , assigned to 9RAR Infantry Intelligence where, at Diggers Rest, he quickly became a key man in securing the fire base.”

“I was giving 90-minute situation briefings to captains and majors, going to the perimeter to be briefed on movement there, ” he said.

“Then at night I’d write poetry or do calligraphy for the blokes replies to Dear John letters they were getting from girlfriends at home.”

Section ambush patrols overnight from NuiDat were the most nerve-racking time of his service, particularly the first contact, with VietCong.

War teaches life’s unpredictability.

As a forward fire base the night Perry Fletcher was convinced they would suffer a mass Vietnamese attack, the medic beside him nervously confided his tactic of running away if any shooting started.

“Back in Australia I saw he had been give a valour award for treating a wounded man as the enemy fired on them. He just kept doing his job saving that bloke, not facing the fire,” he said.
“So there’s all sorts of courage.”

On his way back from Vietnam, the only passengers in the Hercules were Cpl Fletcher, 9RAR mate and a few coffins.

“I tapped one of those and I said, I’ll live for you,” he said.

Now my away days are over.
And I say with a shout and a cheer.
You little bloody beauty
As I down my first draught beer.

Media Clipping – Bob Hart

MELBOURNE engraver Perry Fletcher spent six years creating his masterpiece. And now he would like to find It a home to be on Permanent display. Perry, 51, began his rendition Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper when he was 24 – painstakingly etching It Into a sheet of brass with a dentist’s drill.

He has added bits along the way, like the 370 cherubs and other cheery figures adorning the border of the 153cm x 61cm piece. The etching contains 30,000 dots, took 3000 hours to complete and accounted for more drill b!ls than five dentists would use in a lifetime.

“I defy anyone to copy what I’ve done,” Perry said yesterday “They’d go
mad ‘ Quite so. Perry’s masterpiece hun!( In Parliament House for
three years In the early 1980s, and In St Vincents Hospital in 1994, where it
was Insured for $500,000 But now Perry wants to find it a home and get it out on display again. “I’d like people to appreciate It,” be said. “I’ve lived with it for long enough.””

Perry Was apprenticed to a city engraver at 16, conscripted at 20, and sent to Vietnam. “When I came back I knew I wanted to engrave a masterpiece of some sort,” Perry said. “So I chose The Last Supper. It’s Immortal – an engraver’s dream.”
Perry runs an engraving business In Prahran and each year engraves the names of winners on Australian Open tennis trophies But such things pale beside his Last supper “It’s priceless.” he said. “How can you put. a value on six years or your life?”

Who knows? Because had he remained In the army, he may may have risen to the
Rank of. er, drill sergeant. – Bob Hart

Perry on The Peter Couchman Show

Peter Couchman had heard about the last supper and wanted to meet Perry for a general discussion on the last supper and had the engraving at the TV station so Perry could could explain it. Here is the letter from the show.

Perry Meets ….

Perry meets  The Late Robert Suggett. M L A. and The Late R J Hamer ( Premier of Victoria )