The Best Australian Essays 2014

by Robert Manne

  In 2005 his painting of the Queen conferred respectability on Rolf, but during the sessions he did his best to be unrespectable, as if still teasing his prim mother. Rolf’s music is about his body’s cheeky production of sound, and painting licenses him to make an almost scatological mess. Explaining his technique, he told the Queen that when he confronts a pristine canvas his first move is to ‘kill the white’, dirtying it with a puddle of colour. ‘Extraordinary,’ she remarked with her usual equanimity. To cover up his missteps, Rolf tends to splash turpentine around, so he asked the Queen if she disliked the smell. Unfamiliar with its resinous stink, she gave a wary reply: ‘Well, we’ll tell, won’t we, soon?’ Later, flicking his brushes, he whispered to himself about the risk he was taking: ‘Imagine if I sloshed paint all over the Queen!’ She remained unblemished, but Rolf’s banter – about domestic pets relieving themselves on the carpet, and the stench of dissected horses in the studio of the eighteenth-century equine painter George Stubbs – flirted with impropriety.

  By now Rolf had attained the rank of national treasure, but rumours circulated about his octopoid gropings, and detractors who resented his ineffable good humour teamed up to vilify him on a scurrilous internet forum. One anonymous poster claimed to have seen him twist a puppy’s paw on camera to make it squeal, another imagined him shooting sparrows with an air rifle in his garden beside the Thames near Windsor. A conspiracy theorist, having read The Da Vinci Code too often, decoded ‘didgeridoos’ as an anagram of ‘O did God rise’ and took this as proof that Rolf belonged to the occult sect of the Knights Templar. The most demented of these fantasies sent him on tour to Cambodia, where – as an ‘unofficial roving ambassador of evil’ – he allegedly played cricket with Pol Pot, using human skulls as balls.

  Otherwise Rolf’s audiences took him at face value; he alone dared to let the benign mask slip. He did so on one of his painting programs, while attempting a self-portrait in the style of van Gogh. After two hours of staring at his reflection in the mirror, he noted that his smile ‘starts to crack and eventually falls off with a crash!’ In its absence, the man Rolf painted is an ogre, considerably more baleful than Baron Hardup, the curmudgeon he played in the Christmas pantomime Cinderella. Without glasses, his eyes stare hypnotically, and a brow arches in cold appraisal; his jowls, like a mastiff’s, seem to reverberate with a low and menacing growl; his mouth turns down at the corners, sourly grimacing. Here, in bright acid green and bruised purple, is a glimpse of what the prosecutor at his trial referred to as his ‘dark side’. You can see why the women who testified against Rolf said they were ‘terrified’ or ‘petrified’ of him when, as adolescents, he had them in his grip.

  *

  In a letter written in 1997 to the father of one of his alleged victims, read out in court near the start of proceedings, Rolf quoted the naïve, intimidated teenager’s description of him as ‘the great television star Rolf Harris’. At the time, he saw no reason to disagree with that estimation: he was irresistible because powerful, untouchable because universally popular. But the domestic screen has recently lost the authority it once conferred on its cherished performers. Media today are interactive, with online gossip challenging the impunity that figures like Rolf once enjoyed. A website that conducts a vendetta against child abusers named him as a suspect days before the police announced that he had been questioned, and the first witness at his trial decided to make her legal complaint after seeing him at the Queen’s jubilee concert in 2012: it seemed, she said, that she could not ‘get away from this bloody man’, who was invading her home every time she turned on the telly. She completed Rolf’s humiliation by incidentally disclosing that his penis was ‘very small, very very small’. The prosecutor argued that fame was Rolf’s shield, but it no longer has that protective function: in the tabloids and in courts of law, diminutive old fellas can be hauled out and used in evidence against their wincing owners.

  Giving evidence, Rolf’s accusers and the supplementary witnesses called by the prosecution literally de-famed him. Their accounts alleging hasty, fumbling assaults in Hawaii, Darwin, Auckland, Malta, Portsmouth and Cambridge combined into the sad tale of a primal lapse, a moment when paradise was irretrievably lost: ‘All the happiness was gone,’ said a woman he allegedly molested when she was seven. In her summation, Sasha Wass called Rolf a ‘sinister pervert’, who employed his charm as a form of mesmerism and relished his demonic power over his victims. No longer disseminating sunshine, he was now portrayed as the source of all evil, responsible for the post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, bulimia or aversion to tongue-kissing that had overtaken his accusers in later life. The decade he spent murmuring ‘Poor little blighter’ to the internees on Animal Hospital counted for less when set against his interest in a brusquely canine approach to courtship, exposed by a saucy postcard he sent the first complainant. On the card, a beagle imparts its life lessons, which include a recommendation that if you want sex you should beg, with the added advice that ‘a cold nose in the crotch can be effective’. Twisting the knife, the addressee remarked that when he came to visit during her adolescence, ‘he never greeted the family dog’.

  Rolf’s grovelling letter to this woman’s father seems genuinely anguished, but it still hankers after the sentimental simplicities and quick fixes of his television programs. In Rolf on Art he advises novice painters to use oils, which allows them to wipe out a mistake ‘or let it dry and paint over it’. Off the canvas, erasure is not so easy. As he tells the aggrieved parent in his letter, ‘You can’t go back and change things you have done in this life – I wish to God I could.’ What troubles him most, however, is the damage to his self-esteem. ‘As I do these animal programmes,’ he writes, ‘I see the unconditional love that dogs give to their owners and I wish I could learn to love myself again.’ It’s an obtuse, coldly self-regarding formulation. Dogs do not dote on themselves; misinterpreting animal psychology, Rolf identifies both with the adoring pet and its adored owner, which makes him his own most fervent fan. His appeal to be reprieved from self-loathing so he can love himself again reveals – somewhat crassly given the context – that narcissism is the norm for him.

  Arriving at court each morning, flanked by his wan, strained daughter and his stoical wife, Rolf sported a succession of ever more iridescent ties, bright reminders of the rising sun with her fluttering skirts. Perhaps this blaze of colour proclaimed that he had done nothing wrong: as he says in his confessional letter, the affair with his friend’s daughter ‘progressed from a feeling of love and friendship’. He may still think, as he did when bathing Bindi, that the restrictions we impose on desire and imagination – two forces that collude inside us – are unnatural. Or there might be a more vindictive intent behind the scenarios described by the aggrieved women: were such attacks on innocence meant to console him for his own loss of it? A grey, stooped, portly Peter Pan, Rolf compulsively re-enacts a childhood that ended prematurely the first time around.

  Art is an uncensored playground of fantasy, safe so long as you have a bottle of turps and plenty of rags close at hand; the problems start when art’s rampant liberties extend into life. One of the most perceptive comments about Rolf was made by a conservationist who worked with him on a wildlife program in Scotland. After watching him fraternise with an armada of dolphins, the scientist said, ‘If he wasn’t well known, he’d be quite mad.’ Like Shakespearean fools, celebrities are free to be crazy or zany, and we dispense them from the customary rules about manners and morals. But this permission is apt to be revoked abruptly when the police arrive. Is it Rolf who has double standards, or society?

  The Monthly

  The Breaking Point

  Jessie Cole

  It was the suicide of my older sister Zoe, in all her shimmering teenage glory, that pushed my father to the edge. Perhaps everyone has a breaking point. An incident or event that cannot be overcome, a moment in time that can never be erased. Most of us might get through life without encountering it, but my father
was not so fortunate.

  We lived far outside town, nestled in green hills, on a winding dead-end road a thousand kilometres north of Sydney. Filled with hopes for a new start, a tree-change – another world – my parents had packed up their busy city lives for the freedom of the country. My father, a psychiatrist, worked only three days a week. On days off he toiled in the garden. He began fantastical tasks and finished them in one day. Covered in sweat and dirt, with an aching back and a tired body he came in and told my mother of his progress. A Japanese garden, with a real slated pond and giant lilies, huge boulders and bamboo. An orchard with endless rows of citrus humming with bees. A rainforest, shady and ancient-seeming, strewn with fallen coloured leaves.

  When I was small my father brought me special things he found in the garden. I sat steaming in the bath one evening, naked and easy, the flickering leaves of the growing forest outside whispering wordless secrets in my ears. The bathroom sat among the trees, the sliding glass doors open to the green. Coming in, dirt-speckled and sour smelling, he showed me a tiny white ball. With a delicate tug my father pulled this small sphere apart and thousands of spiders fell, sprinkling down upon me. Minuscule, they spread across the water, floating determinedly towards the edges, their legs braced against the sway of my careful movements. Hurriedly, the masses of baby spiders climbed out and along the top of the old enamel bathtub. With concentrated joy I scooped up the stragglers and flicked them gently from my fingers and out the long open doorway into the forest. I stared in wonder that so many lives had come from such a small white seamless pouch.

  I understood that my father had held the power of their lives – and deaths – in his gentle hands, and felt in a subtle way that he had created them. I searched my father’s face for signs of meaning, but he was unreadable and unexpectedly quiet. My mother came in from the kitchen to see what had caused my squeals, and I checked to see how deep the crease between her brows became when she saw the delicate wafting spiders.

  ‘They’re not biting ones, Mum.’

  My mother’s face broke into a sun-like smile. ‘They’re amazing.’ Her words were soft, and she looked at my father with a gentle warmth. ‘Where did you find them?’

  He motioned out towards the garden and my parents wandered off together in search of the very spot.

  My father was a man living in the moment. Before my sister died I once spotted him doing a lap of the town, ghetto blaster on his shoulder, wearing his bright yellow Esprit shirt, on an afternoon errand. Hanging around on street corners after school as a young teenager, I got a glimpse of him in the distance.

  ‘Isn’t that … your dad?’ my tittering friends asked. When he jogged right past calling ‘Hi, Possum!’ it was a hard question to evade.

  ‘But what is he doing?’

  Now, I suspect he was rushing about trying to get that beloved ghetto blaster repaired, and jogging with it on his shoulder just seemed a natural time management strategy, but the yellow woman’s Esprit T-shirt was harder to explain.

  My father loved that shirt. ‘Esprit is French for spirit!’ he’d proclaim, ‘S-P-I-R-I-T. You know, spirit, life, strength. That’s me!’

  ‘But why does it have to be bright yellow?’

  ‘That’s my favourite colour!’

  ‘But it’s a girl’s shirt, Dad.’ All I got for that objection was a slight roll of the eyes. For my father, gendered clothing was irrelevant, but in my small Australian country town a yellow woman’s shirt was enough to set a man apart. Add a ghetto blaster and a zappy jog, and the word ‘lunatic’ easily sprang to mind. There are advantages to growing up in a family with a high tolerance for eccentricity. Boundaries are loose, undefined. Odd fashion choices are celebrated, experimental artworks championed and socially inappropriate expressions of authenticity never shunned or derided.

  But what happens when your crazy parent turns out to be … well, crazy?

  After my sister’s death my family was in tatters. We were like fish swallowing air. Silence enveloped us. But in time my father’s muted grief turned wild and the tangled threads of his control snagged and tore apart. My mother and I woke one morning to find he had partitioned off the kitchen with a hinged ad hoc wooden screen to which he nailed all his favourite books. ‘Jess, Jess. Look, what do you think? Great, hey?’

  I slid towards the table, trying to sit down among the books. ‘I’m not sure about the John Cowper Powys. Your mum’s always hated that book. Boring, she said. Fucking boring.’ My mother tried not to look at the newly constructed shrine. There was meaning in it somewhere, this fictional crucifixion, but my mother and I were frightened, and we huddled together in a quiet fist of unnamed communion over breakfast.

  Drawing of the author as a child; artwork by the author’s father

  ‘Jess, what about you? You haven’t read any Kafka. You’ve got to, baby! I’ve nailed this one up here. All these books, they’re between me and her. Your sister. Zoe. She’ll know. She’ll know even if you guys don’t. Don’t tell me Kafka’s fucking boring! Jess, your mum does like Kafka, even if she’s not willing to admit it here. Tell her! Zoe will know. So what do you guys think? How do you like it? The end of the hammer broke off last night otherwise I’d add those ones too.’ My father held the broken hammer in his hand, motioning to the piles of books still on the table – ‘Some Mishima, The Leopard.’

  ‘You’ve taken up half the kitchen. There isn’t enough space to sit.’ My mother’s voice was quavering, falling away at the edges.

  ‘What? What are you talking about? Just move those books over and sit down. You have to complain about everything. God, Jess, your mother is such a fucking complainer. I scattered the ashes last night. Out in the garden, it was great, just me and her. I could feel her. She was with me.’

  ‘You scattered Zoe’s ashes? Where?’

  ‘Out there in the garden.’ He gestured behind him. ‘It’s a great spot. You’ll love it.’

  My mother stood up, her mouth pressed together in a tight line.

  ‘Oh what, you have a problem with that too?’ My father’s face was red, his lips jutting forward. Wrapping her sarong tightly around herself, my mother replied quietly, ‘What about us? You can’t do things like that without talking about it.’

  ‘Fuck! She’s my daughter. I know where she should be. You’re such a control freak. You want to control everything.’

  ‘You’re not the only one who’s hurting.’

  ‘All right! But I’m not taking the books down. Zoe knows. She knows what it’s all about.’

  ‘You can’t do this, it’s crazy.’ My mother’s voice was quiet.

  ‘What, now I’m fucking crazy?’ Leaving no space for reply, my father’s words streamed out, relentless and loud. My mother gazed longingly at the green garden sea, as though willing the trees to come inside and rescue her.

  I slipped into the garden and searched the fallen leaves for some sign of the soft grey dust. It lay in little clumps, meagre and exposed, underneath a tree that looked no different to the others. Gathering some up, I hid my sister’s ashes in a little painted wooden box among my jewellery, and avoiding the kitchen and the shrine of books, walked out to the driveway and the hissing doors of the school bus.

  Always a punctual man, my father began to run late for work, and in the office he made phone call upon phone call until his patients, milling about in the waiting room, looked away from each other’s startled eyes. He bought a small rickety house, on impulse, in my one-street country town, with a cheque that he wrote out to friends at three o’clock in the morning, drunk, and he did not tell my mother. He dreamed of building an elaborate marble-floored Italian restaurant in his tiny new house and he drew up the designs and called the architects. He called the bank manager and the builders. He called old friends and acquaintances. His secretary phoned my mother, her voice low and disturbed.

  ‘I’m worried about him. He looks terrible, like he hasn’t slept in days. I can’t get him off the phone.’

  In the e
vening he rang home to say he’d be there soon but he didn’t arrive. He disappeared and my mother’s long skirts swayed as she paced, the crease between her brows a savage line. She thought of accidents and car wrecks and he did not phone and he did not phone. He had vanished into the nearest city, and it took my mother all the next day to track him down. In the consumer complex of that other world he spent and spent, his credit cards bloating.

  ‘My daughter, everyone thinks she’s dead. But she’s not, she’s come back! She’s come back to me,’ he told a stunned woman at the checkout. ‘She was just on holiday. A protracted holiday!’

  On the way home he took twelve hours to complete the two-hour drive, stopping along the way to make more purchases. He bought a new cane furniture suite, a brand spanking leather lounge and more and more presents for my mother, which he claimed post-acquisition were all tax deductible and therefore half price. When he finally arrived home he still didn’t tell my mother about the house he had purchased, and the hefty house-sized cheque. Erratic and wired, my father talked and talked, in endless flooding words. My mother’s lips tightened and she rang his old doctor friends for help and advice.

  ‘He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t eat. I think he’s having some sort of episode.’

  ‘He’s just starting to feel better.’

  ‘No, he’s acting crazy. It’s beyond that.’