Can you see what it is yet?
— traditional Australian saying
Ha ha, the survivors of Rolf Harris really got Martin Amis a beauty, didn’t they? Harris dies, and then they wait. A day, a week, 10 days, crouching there, knowing that the master of the modern British grotesque is about to go too. Bam, 24 hours after the death of the author of Money and London Fields is announced, they drop Rolf into the mix, and it’s “Martin who?”. Of course, it didn’t happen that way, but it’s a very Martin Amis-esque fantasy. He just disappeared, as thoughts of the UK and Australia turned to the passing of the real pop culture monster they had jointly created.
The bursts of ritual hatred that greeted news of the death of convicted paedophile Rolf Harris were an attempt to dispel the melancholy with an eruption of energy. Melancholy not at the demise of a man who was both malign and contemptible, but at what whole generations had lost with the revelations of systematic sexual abuse by a whole series of kids and adolescents’ entertainers, who had formed part of the memory of childhood in a society with a mass-produced popular culture.
Given how people like Rolf cultivated a deliberate naffness, it might be difficult for many to see what’s being mourned, in the consideration of a memory now impossible to attach to. But that’s an effect of the shift in pop culture aesthetic values and budgets. At some point, kids’ TV became global big business, and the budgets went through the roof. Before the 1980s, it was held together with spit and tape.
When Rolf became a star, in both Australia and the UK, and served as a living link of Commonwealth fealty, kids’ TV was pretty much pointing a camera at someone in a studio and saying “Go”. He was a genius at it, TV gold, relentlessly kinetic, moving from song to schtick to magic to puppetry to his signature act of the large-scale painting whose true meaning only emerges with the last stroke, and after being turned 180 degrees. Jesus, if that ain’t prologue, hard to know what could be. To a child audience, he was a magic man.
The question is whether he was a predator from the start. He had got into TV early and sideways, in the UK in the early 1950s when it had barely started. Initially, it was a job of work, for an art student, in London at a time when interest in Australian art had become intense. He was the all-Aussie boy in that respect: born in Perth, a swimming champion. He had got a portrait (self) into the Archibald at age 16, but alas, an art career was not in the offing. His work was conventional and realist, later becoming impressionistic, but with none of the mythical heft Brits were looking for in Australian painters.
The Harris look, the goatee and waistcoats, are fossil traces of pre-’60s bohemia, a survival of the memory of pre-war Paris, a time when Acker Bilk was a cutting-edge jazzman. But that life was left behind one evening in the Down Under club, a Chelsea drinking den established by London antipodeans in media and the yartz, when, as part of his regular act, and written in 15 minutes, he performed “Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport”, and had a pathway out of the highbrow life that had palled.
From then on, Harris became Australia for two generations of Brits — and a “local boy made good” here, flitting between the two places for several decades. He had what a class-bound, rained-on island looked for in Australians: a relaxed, gleeful joy, an ease in his own body, an insouciance about precedent. He was hugely responsible for introducing a certain type of children’s TV, the sort of madcap, all-over-the-place style that became universal.
He was, in a way, the junior, cartoonish member of the antipodeans: Clive, Germaine, Barry — and Rolf. Not part of any circle they were part of, and possibly, like all clowns, resenting not merely the skills but their very being as a clown that gets them where they are, and condemns them to never being anything else. Or only the exact reverse, the sentimental populist. He painted the queen’s portrait. Margaret Thatcher named “Two Little Boys” as her favourite song, a measure of the ghastly suburban echt both it, and she, represented.
And with his cod-version of an Aboriginal chant, “Sun Arise”, he became, galling as it might be to admit, the agent by which many Brits understood that there was such a thing as Aboriginal culture. He was the only Australian most Brits knew, for a long time. Coming back the other way, before Olivia, before Acker Dacker and Neighbours, he was the only Australian at the centre of British popular culture, an intermediary by which we were recognised.
So what happened to him? He does not appear to have been a predator from the start, although his favoured mode of malfeasance, the deep grope and more, of teenage girls, was something seen as merely arsehole behaviour, before a certain point around the later 1980s, so it’s hard to tell. The answer might be, for him and other such men, because they could.
From the early 1970s on, there were teenage girls everywhere. Loosed from restrictive homes, sometimes fleeing predatory older men within them, they came to the cities in droves, in a culture that had put the pursuit of desire at the centre of both its existential and moral imperatives. That 30-year period, from the ’60s to the ’90s, saw the birth of the contemporary. At one of the spectrum, joyful sexual liberation. Through the middle, Rolf Harris, Jimmy Saville. At the other, that distinctive ’70s figure, the “thrill killer”, with their nicknames — the BTK, the Green River, and three different figures nicknamed the Highway/Freeway Killer, men largely focused on young women. One signature top 40 hit of 1978, while all this was going on, was “Hot Child in the City”, the film clip an affirmative nod to the Lolita myth.
Harris went through deep depressions in his 40s and 50s, and made a strange and beguiling TV series special about coming home to Perth, in which his dissatisfaction — with his parents, with his past, with his present, with the irresolvable homelessness of the Brit-Australian — was put on full display, a precursor of a certain raw confessional TV. After the kids, adolescents and pop culture stuff, he became Britain’s heart, with the glutinously sentimental vet shows, which he must have regarded cynically from within. The kids’ stuff, the wobble board, the insta-painting — all that was a kind of living pop culture. The rest was schlock.
As to what happened to him, the other side of the answer is that he degenerated. He, and others such, are the incarnation of the degenerate dimension of the ’60s revolution, which accompanied its liberation. Deprived of what he had really wanted — to be a serious artist — he took what he could get, took what he could get, ain’t seen nothing yet.
That’s what happened everywhere. Priests who’d lost God, and saw their lives as amounting to nothing, suddenly became super-predators. Political movements whose meaning and purpose have collapsed become sexual harvesting cults. The barely spoken-of element, that makes it all possible, is the desperate desire of a certain type of young woman to attach, and the limited and patriarchal barriers to the exploitation of such that a traditional culture offered.
Once that was stripped away, liberation eventually cedes to predation. Then a surveillance morality is installed in place of the now-vanished traditional culture, and the middle period — the ’60s revolution sitting at the centre of the 20th century’s second half — is then extensively re-evaluated. Girls and women who would once have been, and were, told to go away, were listened to. As they should be.
But what can’t be denied from all that is a profound discontinuity that brings into cultural life the steady disappearance of any past, frivolous or grounded, that one can attach to, or that the culture can see itself as a succession from. In that gap, morality starts to take the place of desire, and the sort of deeply pleasurable fun that someone like Rolf Harris once embodied and represented.
To make up for that gap, a sort of ritual damning at the man’s very name has taken over in everyday conversation, a stupid “cursed be his name” recitative, which is as unsatisfying as it is bitter. In a manner far beyond the talents of Martin Amis to portray, at least in recent decades, the life and death and the self-annihilation of Rolf Harris sketch the outlines of a wider cultural dilemma. Or, rather, removes the certainties we once had, with no forecast of what will remain. Can you see what it isn’t yet?
If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. Survivors of abuse can find support by calling Bravehearts at 1800 272 831 or the Blue Knot Foundation at 1300 657 380. The Kids Helpline is 1800 55 1800. In an emergency, call 000.
Nobody likes to be tricked & fooled, we felt we were by Harris. The fact that he was chummy, funny, avuncular & entertaining to a wide audience afforded him a dependable persona. When we discovered he’d banked on his media appeal while also being lascivious it rattled our confidence. Whether a fan or not, if you couldn’t rely on a likeable geezer like Rolf Harris who was left to trust?
Also agree with Exactly! (comment above) that Harris attracted extra venom which Saville richly deserved but dodged in death.
Suggesting that sexual predation followed coming unmoored by the sixties – for Rolf Harris, and for predatory priests – is baseless rubbish. Priests were abusers long before the sixties, and at the same or higher rates: and Rolf Harris seems never to have changed his spots throughout his career.
Gotta agree. An elderly relative I know (a young girl in the early 1950s) remembers being warned darkly about an uncle, and to make sure she was never left alone in the house with him.
The family kept it all quiet, though, because to do otherwise would’ve been to invite shame on the family.
I suspect there were just as many predators around pre-1960s, but nobody heard about them because the families that housed them were too embarrassed to admit it, and the children they preyed on would have been scorned/disbelieved by the wider society had they spoken out.
And to think, some long for the “good ol’ days.
In the 80s the wildly successful Comedy Company’s Uncle Arthur seemed to have been modelled on Harris – how we all larffed….
Not forgetting the kultural appropriations of Con de Fruiter, Magda’s sharpie or Kyle Mole (isn’t urban bogan now a protected group?)
Careful what you applaud – attitudes change and leave certainty marooned in a woked sargasso sea.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/24/head-of-met-police-vip-paedophile-ring-inquiry-faces-investigation
They obviously didn’t teach comprehension and grammar back in the good ol’ days. Maybe they were worried kids with language skills might be able to communicate with others?
Even further, the grand scale of paedophilia in organised religion had nothing to do with priests who had “lost god”. Predators like Pell leaned on their conviction that absolution was available through trivial penance, allowing them to maintain their faith in the face of the horrors (to regular folk) that they perpetrated. While celebrities abused children because they could, priests abused children on a grand scale because it was part of the basic ethos.
I don’t reckon Pell ever believed in God.
I found out from my first cousin at my father’s funeral that our grandfather molested her. It wasn’t a huge shock, because I was asking her about some other rumour connected with him, we lived interstate so didn’t see them often. Maybe the 60s loosened sexual abuse up because girls were less sheltered and there was this belief that sex was liberating, which was a con anyway, but from what I know, sexual abuse of minors has always happened. People pretended it didn’t , ’nice’ people didn’t discuss sex. Our family were ‘respectable’ too, teetotallers and church goers.I never like Rolf Harris, I thought he was a creep.
Agree with this thread. Also, I thought the comment about ‘the desperate desire certain types of young women’ was a repugnant thing to write. We are talking here about sexual violence against children.
Agreed. Portraying children like that is exactly what perpetrators do. They want survivors to be seen as contributors to abuse. What types are you referring to? Maybe try articulate what types of ‘women’ you believe exist out loud and listen to yourself.
And again Guy’s usual keen insights on politics and culture seem to disappear when it comes to women and sexuality. Too much misinterpreted Freud? Too much rejection?
Of course I noticed that tacked-on little ‘observation’ by GR, and had a weird reaction … somewhere between a hissy-fit and a ‘let me think about that a minute longer’, because there were two more words in that sentence: “to attach”. I think once they’re added back in, the idea maybe has more grunt.
As a teen, I was groomed and predated upon by a teacher and then by my legal guardian. The wounds, as so many girls learn, last into womanhood. But.
In retrospect I understand my deep, desperate need for a proper father (the original died when I was at the pivotal age of 12). If fawning, as we know it today, was what it took to get the support that I needed … then I fawned. The consequences ruined my self-esteem.
So when GR uses the word “attached” it has particular relevence for me – children who are not at least adequately attached by vigilant, aware and loving parenting can become sitting ducks for predators AND can enter that dark cave willingly.
“Let me abos go loose Bruce,
Let me abos go loose,
They’re of no further use Bruce,
So let me abos go loose”
Remember that verse? I felt embarrassed and nauseated hearing it as a school kid; others must have been too because it was soon whitewashed out. But it was there.
Both the kangaroos and the ‘abos’ are in bondage, when you think about it … and Rolf certainly got his hide tanned in the end.
“Vale Rolf Harris – Not with a Click – but a Whisper!”
I have been toiling over my memoirs from the mid -’fifties, at present describing “Shearing Time: A Symphony in a Tin Shed”. Lots of interesting stuff has emerged, including a number of fallacies.
Rolf Harris recorded “Click go the Shears” in a bit later – in 1964– and it was enormously popular.
Here is the excerpt from my memoir, apropos Harris:
While the mythical clicks of hand-shears had faded from the sheds a full-half-century before my time, this false memory had been kept fresh by the choruses of generations of school children and late-night drunks and by Burl Ives, the American folk singer who visited Australia in the early-‘fifties. (Rolf Harris’s version was about a decade later).
But, despite the embedding of the song in the National psyche, there was never a rhythmical clicking of shears through creamy fleeces – that’s not how it worked.
Certainly – a clicking sound was easily made by fully closing the shears’ two blades, thus bringing the small bend at the base of each blade into contact.
But a good shearer rarely did this as it jarred their hand, causing it to tire. Instead, the blades opened and closed just widely enough to engage the uncut fleece and cut it away in an almost continuous action.
The actual sound was an abrasive whisper, which, if listened to closely, increased and decreased in pitch as the blades closed and opened, with the sound radiating from the part of the blade between the point of contact and tip of the blade.
“Whisper go the shears, boys, whisp, whisp, whisp.” No – that would never cut it!
(I’ll comment later on an error in McCubbin’s painting.
Jedi, hope I do, are published, these memoirs of yours, one day. Delightful tone and content! Keep at it.
Well, thanks for that, J. I have been in shearing sheds, of course with no clicks, but I never thought about the song.
As a kiddie down from the TV-free Territory in the Sixties, I loved Rolf. Initially. He knew how to mug for the camera, and his show had a cheerful friendliness to it. He became naff after a couple of years, but he always seemed to be a kind of cultural ambassador for Australia. And then he joins Saville, Gary Glitter, Cosby, and a host of other dark figures, and a bit of Australian innocence went with him.