The Scene of the Crime

by Steve Braunias

  She looked up and smiled. She was very frail. She didn’t seem quite all there.

  3

  Another Australian accused of serious sex crimes, half Harris’s age, was also more or less walking to the door and then sitting back down again in a cage in London. On a Friday morning, I went to the Ecuadorean embassy in Knightsbridge to pay silent tribute to the extraordinary Julian Assange.

  Assange took political asylum in the embassy, which meant he had elected to hide inside a converted women’s bathroom. He owned a table, chairs, treadmill (a gift from film director Ken Loach), laptop, phones, and ‘safety equipment he keeps close to his bed’, according to the Daily Mail. He told the paper, ‘Of course it’s difficult to wake up and see the same walls but on the other hand I am doing good work . . . While I’m imprisoned here, there’s a developing prison where you’re living as well.’

  The theme and point of his WikiLeaks work was freedom of information. But that right was supposedly taken away from Assange in a strange sub-plot to the Australia–New Zealand literary event.

  The first I heard about it was when journalist Steve Kilgallon rang from the Sunday Star-Times in Auckland. He said, ‘What do you know about the New Zealand embassy getting Julian Assange banned from speaking at the festival?’ I knew nuzzink, but it was a thrilling question. I said I’d ask around.

  Kilgallon called again on Saturday morning. I’d made my pilgrimage to the Ecuadorean embassy the previous day. I thought: wouldn’t it be fantastic if Assange appeared at a window, and waved or something? I was a fan, an admirer. But when I looked into the claims of his expulsion from the festival, and wrote about it in the Star-Times, I presented myself to WikiLeaks as just another running dog of the mainstream media, a dunce, a stooge.

  It was my own hopeless little journey. It started well. I went to Harrods, which is in front of Assange’s gilded cage, and bought a lobster sandwich. I stuffed my face with the sensational feast while mooching around the streets of Knightsbridge. A cherry-red Ferrari was parked outside Prada. Giuseppe Zanotti held an anniversary exhibition of its shoes in the front window; each pair was given a name, and boring history — ‘Slim’ was inspired by a beach in wintertime, ‘Venere’ was a fusion of woman and serpent.

  There were two Rolls-Royces on Sloane Street, one white, one burgundy. Dolce and Gabbana, Bulgari, Versace. A serf in a top hat unlocked the gates to a private garden for a man with a greyhound. The mutt galloped inside, and shat on the grass. ‘Spare a pound, please?’ a beggar asked. She was from Brixton. ‘I’m a fucking mess.’

  I got to the embassy. It was on a quiet street in a handsome red-brick building. All of the curtains were drawn. You could probably see Hyde Park and the Thames from the top two levels. I thought that might at least afford the WikiLeaks savant some pleasure, but the policeman out front said Assange’s rooms were on the ground floor. Its only view was the Harrods loading bay.

  He worked 17-hour days, according to reports. He had a personal trainer. He watched TV (The West Wing, 1960s sci-fi series The Twilight Zone), he shredded anything that might leave a paper trail, he waits — for something, anything.

  The officer outside the embassy was feeling chatty. He said three cops kept constant watch from the street. A fourth was on a rooftop. A fifth was inside the building, patrolling the stairwell and lobby — the rest of the building are apartments, and the east wing is the Colombian embassy. ‘All this for a sex offender,’ he said. ‘And we’re not even here because of WikiLeaks and all that. It’s just the sex.’

  4

  It’s just the sex. On the second morning I attended Harris’s trial, he was busy inside his glass cage as the clock ticked towards 10am. He was talking to himself. It looked as though he were practising his lines. Was he perfecting the infinite ways he could mutter, ‘I suppose so’? On his opening day in the witness stand, he gave an astonishing performance — he mimed his amazing wobble board, he imitated the didgeridoo, he sang verses from ‘Jake the Peg’, his 1965 smash hit: ‘I’m Jake the Peg, diddle, diddle, diddle-dum, with an extra leg . . .’

  There would be no repeat performance. After Harris’s strange rehearsal on Thursday morning, he took his seat in the witness box, and Wass said to him, ‘You are a brilliant and polished entertainer, Mr Harris. There’s no question of that, and the Crown have no wish to challenge that.’

  Harris nodded.

  ‘But,’ she said, with dreadful scorn, ‘this isn’t a talent show, is it, Mr Harris?’

  The dry, papery voice said, ‘No.’

  She took away his music. The judge took away his art. Jurors spotted Harris drawing in court; it’s against court regulations, and Harris felt the full weight of justice. ‘The sketches,’ announced Justice Nigel Sweeney, ‘have been confiscated and destroyed.’

  What did that leave him? He had his dignity and he had his defence — that he didn’t molest or abuse anyone. Wass said his victims were groomed, bullied, traumatised. He denied it. ‘They’re all lying.’ His right hand hung over the edge of the witness box. The fingers were splayed. The hand looked like a kind of starfish. Harris, diabetic, with a bad heart, an old man in a damp month, gasped for air.

  Wass leafed through his 2001 autobiography Can You Tell What It Is Yet? and tried to place him at the scenes of his alleged sex crimes. Malta, Cambridge, Portsmouth, London, Hawaii, Hamilton . . . She had placed dozens of yellow and red Post-it notes in the pages. I thought: I’d like to read that book. When I got back to Auckland, I looked it up in the library system. The only copy was at Northcote Library, which has stunning views of the harbour; it stopped me in my tracks, all that blue water sparkling in the sun.

  I took the book home and prepared for the usual happy narrative of fame. Most showbiz memoirs are cheerful, self-satisfied histories of success and happiness. But Harris’s book is a depressing read.

  He admits to a terrible relationship with his daughter. He describes poor old Alwen as arthritic, isolated, with alopecia — her hair started falling out in her twenties. The one time he told his mother he loved her was on her deathbed. ‘I’ve never been very good at discussing anything emotional.’ He dwells on failures in his career, his limitations as an entertainer — his manager once insisted he sing a cover of Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ on live TV, but it was a disaster. He couldn’t remember the words. He concludes he just wasn’t suited to that kind of song.

  In his London Review of Books essay on the appalling Jimmy Saville, Andrew O’Hagan wrote, ‘There’s something creepy about British light entertainment and there always has been.’ In his book, Harris writes about the backing dancers who appeared on his 1960s TV shows: ‘They were dressed in microskirts or hot pants. Whenever they danced you saw a flash of panties, which is why it quickly became known as the Twinkling Crotch Show.’

  There are weird recollections. Bindi’s birth: ‘I gazed at this little naked girl child, marvelling at the minute size of everything. My eyes travelled down from her neck, to her delicate shoulders and the incredibly smooth skin of her stomach. I reached her genitals and skipped that part. My brain was saying, “Don’t be ridiculous. Why are you so uptight about nudity?” I couldn’t help it.’

  The time his mother knitted her own bathing suit, which had tassels: ‘I announced, “They look like pubic hairs.” She swung her hand around and slapped me across the face. Mum didn’t talk to me for two days. I was 30 years old when that happened.’

  Harris left out an even weirder memory. He shared it in an interview in 1974: ‘I grew up in the belief that sex was dirty. When I was 10 or 11 my mother decided I should see her naked to let me know it was all natural and everything. We had a bath together . . .’

  The loveless book, the dismal affairs. He talked in court about sleeping with a penniless lodger. As for Bindi’s friend, Harris claimed they started having sex only after the girl turned 18, at the girl’s prompting: ‘She was flirtatious, coquettish.’ It went on for 10 years. The court heard a brief history of blow-jobs. ‘Sex,
’ said Harris, ‘with no frills.’

  Wass: ‘Ten years, and the only conversation you can recall is about cleaning your sperm from the sheets. It wasn’t a deep relationship, was it?’

  His reply: ‘I don’t suppose it was.’

  5

  Harris and Assange, the two white-haired Australians; the light entertainer from Perth, the most dangerous man alive from Townsville; both brought low by sex scandals — but the comparison is odious. To reduce Assange to Harris’s level is to trivialise him, and distract from his work with WikiLeaks.

  Assange and his supporters are wise to such tactics. Among them is the legendary Australian journalist John Pilger, who wrote a superb column in the New Statesman taking careful note of the ‘lies, spite, jealousy, opportunism and pathetic animus’ of Assange’s critics.

  It was an honour to meet Pilger at the literary festival on The Strand. He was behind a desk, signing a stack of his books for the festival bookseller. A few days before I flew out to the UK, I’d managed to track down a copy of Pilger’s very first book, The Last Day: America’s Final Hours in Vietnam, published in 1976. I took it to London in case I was able to ask Pilger to sign it. The chance arrived.

  He was astonished. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘My first book. How did you get it? American edition! My God.’

  He picked it up tenderly, turned the pages with delicate fingers. He shook his head. ‘My God.’ Pilger, 70, was tanned and in good shape, tall and fit, with luxurious hair and an open, lovely smile. He was deeply moved to see a copy of his book, to hold it. I alerted him to the sticker inside the front cover, listing it as the property of the Nazareth Hospital in Philadelphia, and speculated that it may have passed into the hands of a hospitalised US soldier.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘A Vietnam vet.’

  He signed it, and I said, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘thank you. Thank you so much.’

  I should have asked Pilger if he’d heard Assange was pulled from the festival, but I didn’t want to risk ruining the moment. Festival director Jon Slack was standing nearby. I asked him about it, and he said, ‘It’s bollocks.’ He described it as laughable. He laughed, not very convincingly.

  Paula Morris, a New Zealand novelist who sat on the festival advisory board, also rubbished the claims. She said the board considered the idea of an interview with Assange, but no one was very keen on it. Slack went a bit further, and said Assange would have been ‘a distraction’.

  All of which was kind of pathetic. Assange appeared via Skype at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in March, and discussed the case of Edward Snowden, government surveillance, ‘the military occupation’ of civilian space, and hinted at WikiLeaks releasing fresh information — important subjects, addressed by a well-known international figure who happens to be Australian, which might have made him a speaker worth having at an otherwise rather obscure festival of Australian and New Zealand culture.

  But the point of the rumour wasn’t about programming. It was about political interference. WikiLeaks spread the rumour on its Twitter account: ‘Assange talk blacklisted after pressure from NZ High Commission. Funding threat was twofold: 1) if Assange spoke; 2) if the threat was leaked.’

  It emerged that the source was Australian journalist Andrew Fowler, author of an admiring book on Assange, The Most Dangerous Man in the World, and who was keen to conduct the Skype interview. He said the festival had been ordered to pull Assange from the programme — by the wife of Lockwood Smith, the New Zealand High Commissioner to the UK. Lockwood Smith’s wife! According to Fowler, the threat was made at a cocktail party. A cocktail party?

  It sounded crazy. Closer inquiry suggested it really was crazy. I ran into Fowler at King’s College. He said he wasn’t actually at the cocktail party, but that’s what he’d heard Lockwood Smith’s wife had said, and whether her threat was made directly or indirectly to the festival, it was hard to tell, but the fact of the matter is that Assange would not be appearing . . .

  That weekend, I ridiculed the situation in a satirical diary in the Sunday Star-Times. I invented a monologue for Assange, fulminating at the power and influence of Lockwood Smith’s wife at cocktail parties . . . I tried to balance the stupid column, make it clear that I admired WikiLeaks, that Assange was heroic and brilliant.

  It was all in vain. WikiLeaks on Twitter that day linked to the column with the dismissive comment, ‘Today’s idiotic op-ed trend: fake journal entries from Julian.’ I writhed in shame and betrayal. I was called out as an Assange-hater, a stooge, a dog, a dunce, stuffed to the gills with ‘pathetic animus’. I remembered something Fowler had said at the festival. Unlike his other comments, this one might have been accurate. I asked: ‘Who writes WikiLeaks stuff on Twitter?’ He said: ‘Usually it’s Julian.’

  6

  One of the few times Rolf Harris escaped from his gloom and torment at Southwark Crown Court was when he was shown a photograph of the house where he grew up in Bassendean, near Perth. A plain weatherboard house, surrounded by jacarandas, fig trees, almond trees, box trees, draped with wisteria, on the banks of the Swan River — he climbed the trees and gorged on their fruit and nuts, he swam the Swan like a champ. At 16, he was the junior backstroke champion of Australia, competing in Melbourne in a borrowed pair of silk full-length bathers.

  You could see how the photo relaxed him. That tight, compact body loosened, his thin lips almost smiled. Was it for his childhood and innocence, or was it for the reminder of home? I thought: I know where you live. I know WA. I thought of Perth, Fremantle, the Swan, Cape Leeuwin, Margaret River, the vast distances and flat, baked plains and the exact point where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean. I stored the knowledge, held it like a secret; alone among the pale English in the upstairs courtroom, I was from the same part of the world as Harris. Hang in there.

  He didn’t hang in there. Wass brought her twitching little hand out again when she talked about the similarities in the versions told by Harris’s alleged victims. Harris, reaching inside the bikini pants worn by Bindi’s friend; Harris, with his hand up the skirt of a girl at a restaurant somewhere in New Zealand; Harris, grabbing a 15-year-old girl’s bottom at a hardware store in Hamilton. All hands, wandering, groping, fingering.

  Harris: ‘They’re lying.’

  Wass: ‘Why is it the same lie?’

  Harris: ‘I don’t know. It didn’t happen. I’ve established that they’re lying.’

  Wass: ‘No, you’re just saying they’re lying. You haven’t established that at all.’

  Her hand, grubby and suggestive; his hand, that starfish, hanging on for dear life to the witness stand. In the front row, Alwen Harris, needing help whenever she sat down; two seats along from her, their daughter, Bindi, a tough-looking broad in a leather jacket and a mauve top with butterflies on it. She’d told the court she wasn’t close to her father. ‘We hardly talk, Dad and I.’

  When her friend told her that Harris had started abusing her when she was 13, Bindi phoned her father and challenged him. She banged her head against the wall while holding the receiver. She told him she wanted to stab herself with forks.

  Wass to Harris: ‘She was beside herself?’

  He supposed so, he supposed so, he supposed so. The empty life he described in his mordant book wafted around the upstairs courtroom, Case Number T20130553, where English onlookers with wet hats and warm slippers came to watch the end of the Rolf Harris story. The love of the British people, his good friend the Queen sitting for her portrait — it was all as distant as Perth, as the Swan River, drifting past his house on the edge of that faraway continent glowing in the light of the Antipodes.

  Chapter 11

  Terra nullius: Brad Murdoch

  1

  Assigned, with great pleasure, to tropical Darwin, that vivid, far-fetched town closer to Timor or Lombok than the nearest city in its own country, to cover the trial in December 2005 of Brad Murdoch, who apparently killed and buried English tou
rist Peter Falconio somewhere in the Outback, and tried to do the same and worse to Falconio’s girlfriend, Joanne Lees, a striking beauty who arrived at and left the court building every day in a black Ford Falcon, I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about when I concluded my newspaper story by writing, ‘There is a police crime scene photo taken the day after the murder. The long, straight highway. The red earth, the scrub purple and yellow. Middle of the continent, middle of nowhere; it looks really beautiful, quite hopeless, utterly savage.’

  I’d not been to the scene of the crime or set tyre anywhere on the Stuart Highway, including that fatal part of it, north of Alice Springs and near the Outback town of Barrow Creek, which became known as ‘the Falconio stretch’. The prosecution’s case was that the gigantic Murdoch had signalled for Falconio to pull over his orange Kombi on the moonless night of 14 July 2001, then shot him dead and hid the body. He was also charged with assaulting Lees and ‘depriving her of her liberty’, a rather chaste phrase which she described in court as an act of terrifying violence. Lees escaped; all trace of Falconio was made to disappear. The awful, frantic event, at night, in the Outback — the iconic Australian setting stirred the imagination, gave it what it wanted. Emptiness. Nature, red in sand and dingo claw; the mysterious and beautiful desert. In court, Lees talked about her last day with Falconio, driving through the Outback. They saw a bushfire. They saw kangaroos. They smoked some dope Falconio had bought in Sydney and stashed underneath the dashboard. Stoned, happy, alone, they watched the sunset.