The Best Australian Essays 2014 by Robert Manne Page B

Instead he jokingly passed on the grievance to the next generation, miming a little scene of castration during a portrait sitting: whenever Rolf reached out with his index finger to dab a section of paint or to signal some passing felicity of light, Crom waited till the digit got within close range, then chomped at it with his teeth.
    Rolf’s mother Marge was an ambitious woman, a gold medallist in mathematics at school in Wales and a qualified analytical chemist. Though she found little outlet for her talents in scrubby, flyblown Bassendean, she rigidly upheld genteel standards, and when playing tennis served the ball underarm because she thought it unladylike to expose her armpit. At the age of four Rolf did what he calls ‘a super drawing of a man with no clothes on – he was standing there absolutely naked and urinating’. When his mother saw it, she rewarded him with a hiding. The incident forged a connection between art and indecency: Rolf had imagined what he was not allowed to look at. Even music, pure because abstract, is in his view capable of obscenity. Trying out a didgeridoo on television in 1966, he said, ‘What about that for a lovely sound?’ as an eructation emerged from the tube. ‘It’s used for luring young maidens out into the bush,’ he explained, then quickly added, ‘Sorry, no, forget that!’
    As Rolf approached adolescence, his mother took responsibility for imparting the inflammatory forbidden knowledge to him. As he told TV Times in the 1970s, she decided that ‘I should see her naked to let me know it was all natural’, and at her suggestion ‘we had baths together’. She supplemented the demonstration by buying Rolf an illustrated guide to the facts of life, then ‘stayed in the room while I tried to read it’.
    Since she had seemingly encouraged such intimacy, Rolf reacted in the same way when he saw her in a swimsuit she had knitted, with a fringe of tassels below the waist. In the water, the dangling strands swelled up, which prompted him to say, ‘They look like pubic hairs.’ Affronted, his mum belted him hard across the face. ‘I was thirty years old when that happened,’ he adds in his memoir. It’s the most shocking sentence in the book, and it explains where his song ‘I’ve Lost My Mummy’ comes from: here a child cries inconsolably in a department store, afraid of having been abandoned, only to bawl even louder when his mother returns to collect him and gives him ‘a hefty whack’ as punishment for wandering off. Rolf’s mother did her work only too well. In another song he attests to having lived a spotless life, at least until he met ‘my two good amigos / Nick Teen and Al K Hall’. There’s a coy displacement here, since drink and tobacco were never his vices.
    Marriage and fatherhood came with other, built-in interdictions. In 1958 Alwen brought her pet poodle to the wedding as an honorary bridesmaid, and Rolf had difficulty dislodging it from the nuptial bed. His wife clearly needed its company and its morale-boosting devotion. Rolf much later discovered a diary she wrote in 1959 in Perth, where he was helping to set up the first local television station. Alwen, he found, felt so displaced and ignored, so nullified by the boredom of her castaway life, that she had contemplated suicide; at the time, he simply hadn’t noticed. In 1964, hours after the induced birth of their daughter, he flew from London to New York to start a concert tour. When Alwen joined him shortly afterwards, bringing the baby, he failed to recognise her at the airport, and explained his distraction by pointing out that she had dyed her hair.
    A subsequent episode in Rolf’s autobiography, which he may now regret having made public, deals with transgressive impulses that the law warns us all to control. Bathing Bindi in their New York hotel, after having photographed Alwen as she