MY GRANDDAD INVENTED VEGEMITE & DIDN’T MAKE A CENT!
Jamie’ s grandfather created this controversial taste of food history
When Jamie Callister looked inside his lunchbox as a schoolboy, it was fairly good odds there’d be a butter and Vegemite sandwich.
“I got sick of it, that’s for sure!” laughs Jamie, 59, as he remembers simpler times growing up in the ’60s across the ditch in rural Victoria.
“It’s such an Australian childhood thing. We all had parents who were really busy and the quickest thing for school lunches was a Vegemite sandwich. But really, we loved it.”
It’s a good thing Jamie turned out to be a fan of the famous salty black paste, because his grandfather was Dr Cyril Callister, the chemist and food scientist who invented it back in 1922.
“I was about six or seven, and we were sitting around the table having breakfast and Dad said, ‘By the way, my old man invented Vegemite,’” Jamie says. “And we went, ‘What, really?!’”
Cyril was a young fatherof-three when Melbournebased food company Fred Walker & Co asked him to create a version of Marmite, the English spread made from b brewer’s ’ yeast that h had h di its supply cut off to Australia after a shortage in WWI.
“My dad [Bill] was probably the original guinea pig,” says Jamie, who now lives on the Gold Coast in Queensland and has three adult children of his own with wife, Libby, 54. “He would put it on so thick it was ridiculous. Nobody loved it more than him.”
But it was a love shared by few in the early days. “When it rolled off the production line in 1923 it was an utter dud,” laughs Jamie, who explains the distinctly flavoured antipodean spread was originally named Pure Vegetable Extract.
“It was so unpopular that by 1925, they actually gave a small jar away with the processed cheese they’d just started to sell.”
It wasn’t until 1939 – 17 years after its invention – that Vegemite i got the h attention i i it deserved after being included in every Australian Army ration book. “That was the real defining moment,” Jamie says.
Sadly, Cyril died from a heart attack in 1949 aged 57, before his invention became a household name. And while he lived a comfortable life, Jamie reveals his poppa or family didn’t see a cent from today’s Vegemite empire because it was created as part of Cyril’s role at work.
Despite this, the devoted grandson has made a point of honouring Cyril’s legacy and remains proud of his accomplishments.
“He persevered through so much hardship, with two of his children contracting polio. It’s one of the great unknown contemporary Australian stories that’s worthy of being told,” beams Jamie.