The Best Australian Essays 2014 by Robert Manne Page A

jew’s harp or the buzzing Stylophone or a whoop-whooping length of plywood. In addition he whistled, drummed on his face or used his tonsils as a percussion instrument, babbling rhythmically in a nonsensical coloratura that could be transcribed as ‘bumph, dee, bumph, dee, chuph, chuph, bumph, bumph, bumph, brrrrrrr’ or ‘wunna wanna worree wa wether’.
    His body functioned as a magician’s bag of tricks, and for his song about Jake the Peg – reprised, to the prosecutor’s astonishment, at his trial – he grew a third leg, the precursor of Sir Les Patterson’s impertinent trouser snake. When the BBC allowed Rolf to stray into the commercial sector, he advertised house paint, car insurance and the benefits of drinking milk. Purportedly good with people, he seemed to be especially trustworthy with children. He therefore appeared in a video to recommend swimming lessons, splashing in a pool with some under-age playmates, and in 1985 made another educational video in which he advised a group of tiny tots against allowing adults to touch their sacrosanct bodies.
    Throughout all this, Rolf’s most significant achievement may be that he endeared himself to his adoptive country without toning down his larrikin act. When he arrived in London, Australians either had to pass themselves off as Brits or else – like the comedian Bill Kerr, the butt of Tony Hancock’s jibes in the radio series Hancock’s Half Hour – be treated as village idiots. Rolf’s mother had coached him to smooth and round out his vowels, but he resisted her tuition; in London he was told that he sounded like ‘some sort of second-rate cockney’ and advised, if he wanted work on the BBC, to ‘lose that atrocious accent’. When he recorded ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’ in 1957, he even had to bully the Australian back-up singers into using their own lazy drawl instead of a fake American twang: ‘I don’t want “tar mah kangaroo dayown, sporrrt”,’ he told them.
    Outfacing the snobs and cultural cringers, Rolf turned his supposed disadvantage into a trademark: he succeeded, as he has declared, by being ‘unashamedly Australian’. Yet this phrase, which he uses twice in his autobiography, is as revealing as his gratuitous confession of guilt to Piers Morgan. It hints that he retains the scars of early humiliations, that he is aware he hails both from the bottom of the world and, as his father sternly warned him, from the bottom class in society – at ease with the children or animals on his television shows, but less confident in the company of grown-ups.
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    â€˜Sun arise, she bring in the morning’: that is Rolf’s official gospel. His song personifies the sun as a woman, ‘fluttering her skirts all around’, and relies on the torrid matriarch to brighten the world and dispel its gloom. Such solar good humour can be oppressive. In 2010, captioning a photograph of his geeky seventeen-year-old self, Rolf said that he resembled ‘the sort of guy who’d be all over you like a rash, smiling fiercely at every opportunity’, and admitted that the prospect was ‘scary!’
    This ebullience is not the whole truth about him: the affable Rolf has a shadow self. Over the years he has let slip anecdotes about his past, clues to a covert legacy of guilt and shame. Rolf’s Aunt Pixie intimated that his father Crom had been sexually abused as a fifteen-year-old while working as a cabin boy on a boat bound from Cardiff to South America. Crom returned home after four months, now – in Rolf’s words – ‘absolutely hating’ his own father, who had sent him off on the voyage. Rather than settling down again with his parents, he shipped out to Australia. Something is missing from a tale that Rolf admits is ‘garbled’, because Crom refused to discuss the unforgivable wrong his father had done him.