in the class at this, that and the otherâ, he remembers. Yet his boisterous over-achieving was not unanimously admired. âNobody likes a show-off,â snarled one teacher: Australia back then was egalitarian with a vengeance. âI was different from other kids,â Rolf has recalled, adding that his father, Crom â a quiet, withdrawn man, employed as a turbine driver at a power station, which canât have been much relief from life at home with Rolf the domestic dynamo â encouraged his eccentricity and told him to âenjoy your differenceâ. Thatâs 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. âI never heard that child make a pleasant sound,â said the tremulous old woman. In those days he often barked like a rabid dog, and he still inserts the occasional âwoofâ 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. âRolf has always made strange noises,â 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 Australiaâs Amateur Hour, regaling radio audiences with the manic scatting that he called his âvirtuoso boogie-woogieâ; as well, at the age of sixteen he precociously entered a painting â a self-portrait, of course â for the Archibald Prize. In a poem written for Rolfâs seventieth birthday, Clive James called him âthe incarnation of / The Australian spirit, spry yet down to earthâ, but that tribute muffles Rolfâs 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. âHowâs it going?â he used to yell. âCâmon, give us a big smile!â The fortress of frosty reserve did not crumble.
Rolfâs 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 âTie Me Kangaroo Down, Sportâ and the outback aubade âSun Ariseâ. 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 nationâs 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
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. âI never heard that child make a pleasant sound,â said the tremulous old woman. In those days he often barked like a rabid dog, and he still inserts the occasional âwoofâ 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. âRolf has always made strange noises,â 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 Australiaâs Amateur Hour, regaling radio audiences with the manic scatting that he called his âvirtuoso boogie-woogieâ; as well, at the age of sixteen he precociously entered a painting â a self-portrait, of course â for the Archibald Prize. In a poem written for Rolfâs seventieth birthday, Clive James called him âthe incarnation of / The Australian spirit, spry yet down to earthâ, but that tribute muffles Rolfâs 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. âHowâs it going?â he used to yell. âCâmon, give us a big smile!â The fortress of frosty reserve did not crumble.
Rolfâs 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 âTie Me Kangaroo Down, Sportâ and the outback aubade âSun Ariseâ. 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 nationâs 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
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