The Best Australian Essays 2014 (5 page)

I shake my head.

‘I am very sorry,' he says, presenting me with papers to sign.

I cannot see them clearly. My eyes swim with tears, spilling down onto forms about vehicle registration.

I rest my forehead on the cool clean glass surface of the desk.

‘Perhaps some tea?' asks Nomi.

I brush the tears away, shake my head in a silent ‘no thank you', sign the forms and leave as quickly as I can, stumbling between new cars to the bus stop. I get on the first bus that comes, knowing it is the wrong bus, not caring, just wanting to be taken away from that place as quickly as possible.

*

When I was a little girl I had a plastic steering wheel that attached to the wall by suction. I think about whether a driving toy might help my father regain some fragment of identity, but his carers tell me no. He would only chew on such a thing and hurt his already fragile teeth. On days when we bring him down to the visitors' lounge for tea or when he is calm enough to go on an outing, he gazes at passing traffic with more animation than usual. I watch for a flicker of recognition when a Jaguar goes by, but there is none.

My Mother, My Father

A Rolf in Sheep's Clothing

Peter Conrad

‘Guilty on all counts, Your Honour.' So said Rolf Harris, weeping in contrition.

He uttered those self-incriminating words and shed those remorseful tears on a television talk show in 2011, as he told the smarmily sympathetic Piers Morgan about his neglect of his wife Alwen and daughter Bindi, left behind as he frolicked round the world to further his career and amuse his fans. The solemn plea was a self-dramatising gesture and the tears may have been histrionic too, but here was unexpected evidence that the goofy Rolf – so familiar on television since the 1950s that he had become an honorary member of most British families – might be a less agreeable, more tormented character than he appeared. His daughter, he told Morgan, chastised him when she was a teenager because he was perpetually available to the passers-by who accosted him in the street but never had time for her and her mother. His closest relatives ‘said they didn't know who I was. They said I was a total stranger.' He seemed to be wondering whether they were right: could he also be a stranger to himself?

Rolf was happy to plead guilty in front of a studio audience, whose applause instantly pardoned him. But in January this year, when he was charged with twelve indecent assaults on four young girls, his response was a forthright ‘Not guilty', and at his trial the barrister defending him attacked his accusers, now middle-aged women, as fantasists or gold-diggers and picked apart their fuzzy memories of events that dated back to the 1970s. It was not enough to rehabilitate a man who once proudly called himself ‘everyone's favourite Aussie'.

Following his initial arrest in March 2013, Rolf disappeared from view for a few months. Then in August, just before a bail hearing, he performed at a music festival in Hampshire. A roar of acclaim revived him, and gave him the courage to joke about his legal predicament. ‘I would like to thank you all for my support,' he said. He then corrected the pronoun, smuttily capitalising on his slip with a reference to the cumbersome belts and adhesive pads that used to be prescribed for elderly gents troubled by hernias: ‘Thanks for your support, I will always wear it.' Rolf's British public is, in more ways than one, his truss. That dependency is mutual, and his travails have alarmed and bewildered a country that used to be held together by deference and discretion and is now, after the covered-up horrors exposed by the investigation of Jimmy Savile's crimes, forced to reconsider those questionable principles.

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.

*

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.

*

‘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 over 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.