Rolf Harris dies unmournable and a bored culture wobbles

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.