The Best Australian Essays 2014

by Robert Manne

  Last year the record producer Vince Hill bolstered Rolf’s reputation by calling him ‘a national monument’, and in her opening statement in court the prosecutor Sasha Wass described him as a ‘pillar of society’, so irreproachable that the BBC had persuaded the Queen to allow him to paint her; a message on a Facebook page defending him announced ‘In Rolf We Trust’, a paraphrase of the pious assertion ‘In God We Trust’ that is inscribed on every US dollar bill. But gods can let down their believers, and currencies can lose their value. Before the trial began, my accountant told me that his wife’s limited-edition print of a painting by Rolf, a view of Durham Cathedral, had been demoted from its location above their fireplace and stowed in a kitchen corner. ‘If there’s a guilty verdict,’ he said, ‘it goes into the garage forever!’ At Buckingham Palace, oblivion had already overtaken Rolf: after his arrest, his portrait of the Queen conveniently went missing.

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  When Rolf’s agent Jan Kennedy took him on as a client during the 1970s, she remarked that, thanks to television, he had been her companion since childhood: ‘I’ve known him all my life – but then, hasn’t everyone?’ Well, yes and no. If Rolf is a stranger to his own family, the rest of us have little chance of knowing who he really is. It’s even uncertain what he is, since this one-man variety show has had so many successive careers, punctuated by timely self-reinventions.

  With a diffident shrug, Rolf describes himself as a lucky amateur who happens to be ‘good with people’ and owes his success to geniality rather than genius. He is too modest, overlooking the force of will that has driven him all along. At school in Perth – where his parents settled after migrating from Wales in the 1920s – he was always ‘being singled out as the best in the class at this, that and the other’, he remembers. Yet his boisterous over-achieving was not unanimously admired. ‘Nobody likes a show-off,’ snarled one teacher: Australia back then was egalitarian with a vengeance. ‘I was different from other kids,’ Rolf has recalled, adding that his father, Crom – a quiet, withdrawn man, employed as a turbine driver at a power station, which can’t have been much relief from life at home with Rolf the domestic dynamo – encouraged his eccentricity and told him to ‘enjoy your difference’. That’s a little implausible, since Australian parents in the 1930s seldom set out to raise crops of tall poppies. Rolf was his own creation, and his over-exuberant personality exceeded the normal requirements of social life.

  At the age of ten, on a family holiday, he learnt to yodel during the drive across the Nullarbor Plain, and in Sydney terrorised his grandmother by hiding in the bathroom and ululating at her. ‘I never heard that child make a pleasant sound,’ said the tremulous old woman. In those days he often barked like a rabid dog, and he still inserts the occasional ‘woof’ into his conversation. He sings, very nasally, and plays a range of instruments, but for him music was basically an unbridled din. His wife came to tolerate his glottal shunting, snorting and gulping as the soundtrack of their shared existence. ‘Rolf has always made strange noises,’ she once resignedly remarked.

  Performing was a logical continuation of his childish exhibitionism. His first field of endeavour was the swimming pool, where he triumphed as Australian Junior Backstroke Champion in 1946. Out of the water, he successfully auditioned for Australia’s Amateur Hour, regaling radio audiences with the manic scatting that he called his ‘virtuoso boogie-woogie’; as well, at the age of sixteen he precociously entered a painting – a self-portrait, of course – for the Archibald Prize. In a poem written for Rolf’s seventieth birthday, Clive James called him ‘the incarnation of / The Australian spirit, spry yet down to earth’, but that tribute muffles Rolf’s raucously high-spirited behaviour. In his heyday he was not so much spry as bizarre, and far from being down to earth he usually seemed to be in orbit somewhere above it, bounced about by the jolting rhythms of his wobbleboard. Level, taciturn, dun-coloured Australia could not contain this over-energised jester for long.

  In 1952, Rolf sailed off to London to attend art school. On the way, he busked for the captive audience on board the ship; on arrival, he made it his personal mission to enliven the stiff, staid British. At his boarding house in Earls Court, he erupted into the breakfast room each morning, barefoot and wearing only shorts, to greet his fellow lodgers with a megaphonic reveille. ‘How’s it going?’ he used to yell. ‘C’mon, give us a big smile!’ The fortress of frosty reserve did not crumble.

  Rolf’s unglamorous art school in South London bored him, so he strayed into cabaret and performed with his accordion in an expat den called the Down Under Club. Soon, bluffing his way into a studio, he popped up on television, where he began by nattering matily to a puppet called Fuzz. Towards the end of the 1950s came his forays into the hit parade, with the droning ballad ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ and the outback aubade ‘Sun Arise’. By the late 1960s, Saturday evenings on the BBC belonged to The Rolf Harris Show, and on weekday afternoons his cartoon programs made him the nation’s designated child-minder. A flickering box had supplanted the hearth as the source of conviviality in British households; leering cheerily out of it, Rolf doodled caricatures or graphic puzzles, and like a latter-day Welsh bard organised singalongs that were accompanied by the didgeridoo or the jew’s harp or the buzzing Stylophone or a whoop-whooping length of plywood. In addition he whistled, drummed on his face or used his tonsils as a percussion instrument, babbling rhythmically in a nonsensical coloratura that could be transcribed as ‘bumph, dee, bumph, dee, chuph, chuph, bumph, bumph, bumph, brrrrrrr’ or ‘wunna wanna worree wa wether’.

  His body functioned as a magician’s bag of tricks, and for his song about Jake the Peg – reprised, to the prosecutor’s astonishment, at his trial – he grew a third leg, the precursor of Sir Les Patterson’s impertinent trouser snake. When the BBC allowed Rolf to stray into the commercial sector, he advertised house paint, car insurance and the benefits of drinking milk. Purportedly good with people, he seemed to be especially trustworthy with children. He therefore appeared in a video to recommend swimming lessons, splashing in a pool with some under-age playmates, and in 1985 made another educational video in which he advised a group of tiny tots against allowing adults to touch their sacrosanct bodies.

  Throughout all this, Rolf’s most significant achievement may be that he endeared himself to his adoptive country without toning down his larrikin act. When he arrived in London, Australians either had to pass themselves off as Brits or else – like the comedian Bill Kerr, the butt of Tony Hancock’s jibes in the radio series Hancock’s Half Hour – be treated as village idiots. Rolf’s mother had coached him to smooth and round out his vowels, but he resisted her tuition; in London he was told that he sounded like ‘some sort of second-rate cockney’ and advised, if he wanted work on the BBC, to ‘lose that atrocious accent’. When he recorded ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ in 1957, he even had to bully the Australian back-up singers into using their own lazy drawl instead of a fake American twang: ‘I don’t want “tar mah kangaroo dayown, sporrrt”,’ he told them.

  Outfacing the snobs and cultural cringers, Rolf turned his supposed disadvantage into a trademark: he succeeded, as he has declared, by being ‘unashamedly Australian’. Yet this phrase, which he uses twice in his autobiography, is as revealing as his gratuitous confession of guilt to Piers Morgan. It hints that he retains the scars of early humiliations, that he is aware he hails both from the bottom of the world and, as his father sternly warned him, from the bottom class in society – at ease with the children or animals on his television shows, but less confident in the company of grown-ups.

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  ‘Sun arise, she bring in the morning’: that is Rolf’s official gospel. His song personifies the sun as a woman, ‘fluttering her skirts all around’, and relies on the torrid matriarch to brighten the world and dispel its gloom. Such solar good humour can be oppressive. In 2010, captioning a photograph of his geeky seventeen-year-old self, Rolf said that he resembled ‘the sort of guy who’d be all ove
r you like a rash, smiling fiercely at every opportunity’, and admitted that the prospect was ‘scary!’

  This ebullience is not the whole truth about him: the affable Rolf has a shadow self. Over the years he has let slip anecdotes about his past, clues to a covert legacy of guilt and shame. Rolf’s Aunt Pixie intimated that his father Crom had been sexually abused as a fifteen-year-old while working as a cabin boy on a boat bound from Cardiff to South America. Crom returned home after four months, now – in Rolf’s words – ‘absolutely hating’ his own father, who had sent him off on the voyage. Rather than settling down again with his parents, he shipped out to Australia. Something is missing from a tale that Rolf admits is ‘garbled’, because Crom refused to discuss the unforgivable wrong his father had done him. Instead he jokingly passed on the grievance to the next generation, miming a little scene of castration during a portrait sitting: whenever Rolf reached out with his index finger to dab a section of paint or to signal some passing felicity of light, Crom waited till the digit got within close range, then chomped at it with his teeth.

  Rolf’s mother Marge was an ambitious woman, a gold medallist in mathematics at school in Wales and a qualified analytical chemist. Though she found little outlet for her talents in scrubby, flyblown Bassendean, she rigidly upheld genteel standards, and when playing tennis served the ball underarm because she thought it unladylike to expose her armpit. At the age of four Rolf did what he calls ‘a super drawing of a man with no clothes on – he was standing there absolutely naked and urinating’. When his mother saw it, she rewarded him with a hiding. The incident forged a connection between art and indecency: Rolf had imagined what he was not allowed to look at. Even music, pure because abstract, is in his view capable of obscenity. Trying out a didgeridoo on television in 1966, he said, ‘What about that for a lovely sound?’ as an eructation emerged from the tube. ‘It’s used for luring young maidens out into the bush,’ he explained, then quickly added, ‘Sorry, no, forget that!’

  As Rolf approached adolescence, his mother took responsibility for imparting the inflammatory forbidden knowledge to him. As he told TV Times in the 1970s, she decided that ‘I should see her naked to let me know it was all natural’, and at her suggestion ‘we had baths together’. She supplemented the demonstration by buying Rolf an illustrated guide to the facts of life, then ‘stayed in the room while I tried to read it’.

  Since she had seemingly encouraged such intimacy, Rolf reacted in the same way when he saw her in a swimsuit she had knitted, with a fringe of tassels below the waist. In the water, the dangling strands swelled up, which prompted him to say, ‘They look like pubic hairs.’ Affronted, his mum belted him hard across the face. ‘I was thirty years old when that happened,’ he adds in his memoir. It’s the most shocking sentence in the book, and it explains where his song ‘I’ve Lost My Mummy’ comes from: here a child cries inconsolably in a department store, afraid of having been abandoned, only to bawl even louder when his mother returns to collect him and gives him ‘a hefty whack’ as punishment for wandering off. Rolf’s mother did her work only too well. In another song he attests to having lived a spotless life, at least until he met ‘my two good amigos / Nick Teen and Al K Hall’. There’s a coy displacement here, since drink and tobacco were never his vices.

  Marriage and fatherhood came with other, built-in interdictions. In 1958 Alwen brought her pet poodle to the wedding as an honorary bridesmaid, and Rolf had difficulty dislodging it from the nuptial bed. His wife clearly needed its company and its morale-boosting devotion. Rolf much later discovered a diary she wrote in 1959 in Perth, where he was helping to set up the first local television station. Alwen, he found, felt so displaced and ignored, so nullified by the boredom of her castaway life, that she had contemplated suicide; at the time, he simply hadn’t noticed. In 1964, hours after the induced birth of their daughter, he flew from London to New York to start a concert tour. When Alwen joined him shortly afterwards, bringing the baby, he failed to recognise her at the airport, and explained his distraction by pointing out that she had dyed her hair.

  A subsequent episode in Rolf’s autobiography, which he may now regret having made public, deals with transgressive impulses that the law warns us all to control. Bathing Bindi in their New York hotel, after having photographed Alwen as she breastfed the child, Rolf marvels at the ‘minute size of everything’, and lets his eyes travel from Bindi’s neck to her ‘delicate shoulders’ and smooth tummy. Then he nears a border zone, trespasses across it, and backtracks: ‘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 taboo is artificial, but all the same necessary; those who defile innocence may do so because they envy it and want to share in it.

  The Rolf Harris Show featured a chorus line of girls in micro-miniskirts and hotpants, and was nicknamed The Twinkling Crotch Show. Backstage, the shy host says, he ‘tried not to watch – or be seen watching’ the cavalcade of semi-clad young women. Throughout one season he flamboyantly flirted with ‘a tall, leggy brunette called Glor, short for Gloria’, who finally chastened him when they were sitting with some colleagues in a hotel lounge. After listening to a bout of his amorous drollery, she reached across, ‘unzipped my fly, put her hand into my underpants, took a firm grip of my old fella and flipped it out for all to see’. What, she asked, did he intend to do about his supposed infatuation (which apparently hadn’t extended to that flipped, floppy member)? Rolf turned ‘seven consecutive shades of red’, just as he flushed scarlet when his mother slapped him; then, in an image that begs for psychoanalytical exegesis, he wished he could ‘dissolve into a grease spot and soak into the carpet’. Gloria suffered no further harassment.

  A cartoon by Rolf represents grown-up sexual relations as a balance of terror, predicated on the threat of pain. In the drawing, an angry blitz of black scrawls surrounds a glaringly spotlit dental chair. A male dentist aims his drill at the gaping mouth of a prone female patient, whose teeth are as razorlike as a shark’s; she defends herself by grabbing his crotch and squeezing what ought to be his testicles, though it looks as if she has fastened onto a bulbous penis. The rearing organ doesn’t appear to be discouraged, but the drill is paused in midair, hesitating before it ventures into that vagina dentata. The caption to the drawing is ‘We’re not going to hurt one another, are we?’ Cuddles, hugs and tickles, like those to which Rolf initially treated his alleged victims, are – at least in theory – exempt from such nasty adult recriminations.

  In the caricatures Rolf usually adds to his autograph, his face consists of a grinning mouth sandwiched between his goggles and his goatee. His smile is evangelical, as well as something of an artwork: he often warned sulky children who cried or frowned that they were ‘sculpting their faces for the future’ and ruining their chances of looking benign in old age. Despite this amiability, his glasses and beard tell another story, because both, in Rolf’s case, were disguises. Spectacles, as he commented when taking his own off to paint a self-portrait on television, reflect light and thereby deflect attention from the eyes of whoever you are painting; they interfere with your interrogation of another human being. As for whiskers, Rolf first experimented with them in 1949 when cast as a sailor in a musical at teacher’s college in Perth. He grew them again on his way to England in 1952, protectively preparing a face with which to meet the new faces he would encounter there. His beard was a frame for his grin, and it also served, like a garden hedge, as a barricade to deter intruders. His wife preferred him with that cosy camouflage: when she first saw him clean-shaven, Alwen likened him to ‘an American car with all the chrome removed’ – an extraordinary image, which implied that beneath the decorative trim there was only a noisy, revved-up engine and a motorised mouth that puffed out hot air through its grille.

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  Late in the 1980s, when Rolf’s act began to seem antiquated, his cover version of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ updated hi
m. ‘It was very square to say you liked Rolf Harris before that,’ he complacently noted. ‘Suddenly it was very cool to say you liked Rolf Harris.’ Musical performances at the Glastonbury Festival established him as a harmless, gormless figure of fun, immune to the irony of the ovations he was receiving from the muddy mobs of rock fans.

  Rolf’s original audience had grown up, so in 1994 he took on a more avuncular role and began a ten-year run on Animal Hospital. Like Christ, he had suffered the little children to come unto him in Cartoon Time; now, ministering to poorly quadrupeds, he turned into St Francis. In an episode featuring a euthanised Alsatian called Floss, audiences sniffled as a teary Rolf consoled the dog’s sobbing master – ‘the first time,’ he later announced, ‘that viewers in England had seen two adult males unashamedly crying on TV’. Once a festive, mischief-making imp, he had matured into a shrewd orchestrator of the nation’s tenderest emotions. In 2001 he reverted to an earlier vocation, setting up his easel to pastiche Degas and Monet in the first series of Rolf on Art, a long-running show that encouraged and empowered amateur painters. As a result, the ageing Rolf joined the ranks of the Old Masters: in 2012 a Liverpool museum sold record numbers of tickets to a retrospective exhibition of his work. ‘Rembrandt, Rubens and Rolf, all in the Walker Art Gallery now,’ said a fawning BBC reporter.

  ‘The world has learned from him,’ Clive James declared at the end of the birthday poem he addressed to Rolf the moral mentor, ‘and I likewise.’ Accepting his near-priestly status, the Church of England invited Rolf to write a preface to a booklet that explained the notion of bereavement to children: ‘G’day kids’ was his salutation before he brought his little readers the bad news about mortality. His wife’s brother suggests that Rolf may have undergone a conversion when he witnessed the healing feats of the Indian ‘godman’ Sathya Sai Baba (who was himself accused of sexually abusing his young male acolytes, to whom he offered his penis as a token of blessing). Short of performing miracles, Rolf said that his purpose on earth was ‘to spread a little love and affection wherever I can’ and ‘to talk to everyone and be accessible’. Accessibility, however, is a two-way street, and in several of the incidents described by the prosecution in its case against him a child’s request for an autograph allegedly led almost immediately to molestation.