Can we separate the art from the person who made it? Not in the case of a monster like Rolf Harris | Paul Daley

6 hours ago 6

I’m not convinced by the old adage that we should never meet our idols because they are bound to disappoint us. I’ve never wanted to approach human exceptionalism quite so cynically.

Yes, I’m acutely, painfully conscious that the world is replete with terrible events and bad people. But I’m counting myself fortunate that purely by dint of birth I live somewhere (and I don’t just mean my neighbourhood) where human capacity for kindness, generosity and, yes, civility, are not the exception.

Journalism gives otherwise pretty regular people unique access to fame and celebrity. And across four decades in journalism I’ve had the privilege, one not afforded to so many others, to meet some of the people I’ve most admired. And I’ve got to say that probably eight out of 10 times I haven’t been disappointed. Maybe I’m lucky to have struck such odds!

Actors and musicians. Former and serving prime ministers and senior government members. Sports people. Visual artists. Australia’s most celebrated novelists, playwrights, and film and theatre directors. Other people who are simply famous for being famous. For the most part they have lived up to my expectations.

There have been let downs of course.

But the biggest, most disappointing, and the most striking personal experience of where an entertainer’s carefully cultivated public image was so evidently at odds with their actual persona, came 20-something years ago when I met entertainer Rolf Harris in London.

This was at least a decade before Harris was exposed as an alleged, later convicted, paedophile – a serial groper of women and girls who shamefully abused his stratospheric fame as a children’s performer to access and groom victims.

There was nothing in our fleeting crossing of paths at a London event attended by many Australians that hinted at his to-be-exposed sinister side, although as the recently released two-part ABC documentary Rolf Harris: Primetime Predator discloses, rumours about the entertainer’s sleaze around women and girls were legion.

It was simply one of those personal moments that made you check your childhood memories, and how they can hold fast into adulthood.

I grew up (figuratively) with Harris as a central figure in my childhood cultural world, along with Play School and Mr Squiggle. His wizardry on TV as Jake the Peg (with the extra leg), his infectious songs, his magic with the wobble board and skill as a visual art caricaturist, were totally mesmerising. He seemed the perfect childhood entertainer for his epoch.

I’ve previously recounted how one of my warmest memories as a kid was of sitting in a stall with my elder sister, between Mum and Dad, in one of Melbourne’s grand old Victorian-era theatres. I was perhaps four or five. Spot-lit on the stage singing Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport, was Rolf Harris – my idol from (black and white, late 1960s) TV.

Together with my first day at school, it had long been an enduringly comforting adult memory of my very distant childhood, one full of warmth for all of its laughter, applause and, not least, family togetherness.

I couldn’t help but take my fondness for Harris into adulthood. He was the Australian who’d made it big in London. He’d painted a portrait of the queen. He’d even made a daggy rendition of Led Zep’s Stairway to Heaven kind of cool.

I wasn’t alone. A generation of Australian (and British kids) loved Harris. He seemed (most deceptively) safe and trustworthy, his humour clean – the entire package wholesome. He was riotously successful in the UK; given the British-antipodean colonial cringe, that was a reason for Australia to celebrate Harris for decades. Until for all the worst reasons possible, it wasn’t.

At that long ago social event in London I wanted to tell him, to thank him for bringing such joy to my childhood. It felt like something I owed him, the debt of happiness he had brought to my childhood. “Oh yes,” he said, arrogantly, with a studied, cold diffidence before turning away.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so saddened and shocked. Perhaps he was just weary of the fame that others wore with so much grace – tired of Aussie expats stopping him on the cocktail circuit to say what a delightful part of their childhoods he’d been?

Recently, in light of the shocking Primetime Predator documentary (which illustrates, among other things, just how much social leeway fame afforded Harris and how cynically, how hideously, he abused it), I’ve shared this anecdote with others who’d met the bloke. It seems I was not alone in my drastically changed impression of him. So many talked about his imperious don’t-you-know-who-I-am?-style of fame, his overt entitlement and hyper-indulged arrogance.

A journalist friend who also met him in London around the same time described him as “a totally obnoxious, up-himself arsehole”. This was kind, given the rest of it. Just the social tip of a predatory iceberg.

The growing list of traumatised women and girls that Harris abused (because they trusted him due to his fame and when he abused it in the worst way possible, felt entrapped because of it) should be celebrated for their courage in coming forward.

Meanwhile, those of us who had fleeting if memorable interactions with him are left to ponder the social and emotional prudence of meeting our idols – and if we can truly separate the art from the artist.

Sometimes, perhaps, we can and we should. But not in the case of a monster like Rolf Harris, who turned fond memories into dust, fame into infamy and trust into abuse.