Read Online The Best Australian Essays 2014 by Robert Manne - Free Book Online Page B

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.
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    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,