Spy, tourist, unable to think of anywhere I’d rather be during a few days to kill in London, I got the last vacant seat in the public gallery at Southwark Crown Court where I attended the trial of Rolf Harris. It was a media sensation. But there was something else going on, something with a deeper resonance — a narrative about Australia and the colonies. England had given Australia its convicts; now Australia was returning the favour.
I pondered such shifts of history as I legged it from London Bridge Underground station towards the courthouse. I expected something with an Old Bailey vibe, but Southwark was modern and large, a tremendously ugly fortress. Inside, the place was a dump. There were torn vinyl chairs, notices drooping on boards because they’d run out of drawing pins, holes in the carpet.
Harris’s jury trial was upstairs. I took my seat, looked around, and felt at home. The layout of the courtroom was identical to the lower order of criminal courts in New Zealand. There were the rows of tables for counsel, and there were the press benches. I smiled at the sight of the British press — they looked just like Kiwi journos, nicely dressed young men and women with narrow eyes and thin lips, dying to do away with the word ‘alleged’ whenever they wrote of Harris as a paedophile.
Eventually, I realised that the old man with white hair, sitting by himself in a glass cage in front of the public gallery, was Rolf Harris. He was dressed in a blue suit. He stood up. He wore his pants high around his waist; he was trim, dapper, with pink skin and a thin mouth. He walked to the door. He tried the door handle. It was locked. He bowed his head, and stood there, trapped, nowhere to go, an exhibit for everyone to look upon and question their childhood. People loved him when they were children. How could they have been so deceived? And now they knew, what ruin did his crimes visit on their innocence? Harris was found guilty, sentenced to five years and nine months’ jail. He was stripped of his CBE, his name ‘erased from the Register’. In his Trews commentary ‘Rolf Harris: What should we think?’, Russell Brand mused, ‘You have to revise your own childhood. You have to go, “Oh, right, so what was going on then when I was enjoying that stuff?”’
As an Australian, Harris’s success and genius as a children’s entertainer was received with a special kind of enthusiasm in New Zealand. He wasn’t an exotic, like he was thought of in Britain; he was just an Aussie joker, our familiar neighbour. We spoke the same not-Queen’s-English language. We knew him. We knew his ways . . . We didn’t know anything.
The usual crackle of celebrity that snaps around the silhouette of the famous had a different, weirder feel to it when I watched Harris in his glass cage that Wednesday in May. It was a damp summer’s morning, five to 10. He tried the door handle again. It was locked. Eventually, he walked back to his seat, and sat down. The glass cage; the eyes watching his hopeless little journey to the door and back; the small, blonde prosecutor Sasha Wass QC (‘Cool as ice’, The Times) all set to stab him and stab him and stab him with her latest accusations — Rolf Harris, 84, in hell, in public.
The spectators wore raincoats, corduroy, big woolly jumpers. One old character changed into a pair of slippers. The two men next to me struck up a conversation.
‘Never smoked or drank in my life,’ said the older man, about 70, who was in superb physical shape.
‘A drink’s all right,’ said his neighbour, who rested his hands on his large stomach.
They fell silent.
‘What’s in there, then?’ asked the younger man, pointing at the plastic bag that the teetotaler had taken out of his raincoat pocket.
‘A hat.’
‘A hat?’
‘A wet hat.’
‘This rain.’
‘Terrible.’
‘All stand,’ said the court clerk. The judge entered. Harris was released from his glass cage, and led to the witness box. It was his second day on the stand. He was accused of 12 counts of indecently assaulting four underage girls in the UK between 1968 and 1986 — there were also similar allegations involving two girls in New Zealand. The court would hear about that, in particular about a day in Hamilton; it would also hear about a day at the beach in Australia.
New Zealand and Australia, like remote, bright backdrops to the miserable business of Harris in court. Across town, at King’s College on The Strand, was the first Australia and New Zealand Festival of Literature and Arts ever staged in London. I was a guest speaker at three events, and also got roped in at the last minute by Witi Ihimaera to play a role in an excerpt from his play set in World War I. It was performed in a beautiful chapel. There was a haka. I enjoyed myself tremendously, but it was such small beer. The forlorn hope was that New Zealand and Australian
