He admits to a terrible relationship with his daughter. He describes poor old Alwen as arthritic, isolated, with alopecia — her hair started falling out in her twenties. The one time he told his mother he loved her was on her deathbed. ‘I’ve never been very good at discussing anything emotional.’ He dwells on failures in his career, his limitations as an entertainer — his manager once insisted he sing a cover of Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ on live TV, but it was a disaster. He couldn’t remember the words. He concludes he just wasn’t suited to that kind of song.
In his London Review of Books essay on the appalling Jimmy Saville, Andrew O’Hagan wrote, ‘There’s something creepy about British light entertainment and there always has been.’ In his book, Harris writes about the backing dancers who appeared on his 1960s TV shows: ‘They were dressed in microskirts or hot pants. Whenever they danced you saw a flash of panties, which is why it quickly became known as the Twinkling Crotch Show.’
There are weird recollections. Bindi’s birth: ‘I gazed at this little naked girl child, marvelling at the minute size of everything. My eyes travelled down from her neck, to her delicate shoulders and the incredibly smooth skin of her stomach. I reached her genitals and skipped that part. My brain was saying, “Don’t be ridiculous. Why are you so uptight about nudity?” I couldn’t help it.’
The time his mother knitted her own bathing suit, which had tassels: ‘I announced, “They look like pubic hairs.” She swung her hand around and slapped me across the face. Mum didn’t talk to me for two days. I was 30 years old when that happened.’
Harris left out an even weirder memory. He shared it in an interview in 1974: ‘I grew up in the belief that sex was dirty. When I was 10 or 11 my mother decided I should see her naked to let me know it was all natural and everything. We had a bath together . . .’
The loveless book, the dismal affairs. He talked in court about sleeping with a penniless lodger. As for Bindi’s friend, Harris claimed they started having sex only after the girl turned 18, at the girl’s prompting: ‘She was flirtatious, coquettish.’ It went on for 10 years. The court heard a brief history of blow-jobs. ‘Sex,’ said Harris, ‘with no frills.’
Wass: ‘Ten years, and the only conversation you can recall is about cleaning your sperm from the sheets. It wasn’t a deep relationship, was it?’
His reply: ‘I don’t suppose it was.’
5
Harris and Assange, the two white-haired Australians; the light entertainer from Perth, the most dangerous man alive from Townsville; both brought low by sex scandals — but the comparison is odious. To reduce Assange to Harris’s level is to trivialise him, and distract from his work with WikiLeaks.
Assange and his supporters are wise to such tactics. Among them is the legendary Australian journalist John Pilger, who wrote a superb column in the New Statesman taking careful note of the ‘lies, spite, jealousy, opportunism and pathetic animus’ of Assange’s critics.
It was an honour to meet Pilger at the literary festival on The Strand. He was behind a desk, signing a stack of his books for the festival bookseller. A few days before I flew out to the UK, I’d managed to track down a copy of Pilger’s very first book, The Last Day: America’s Final Hours in Vietnam, published in 1976. I took it to London in case I was able to ask Pilger to sign it. The chance arrived.
He was astonished. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘My first book. How did you get it? American edition! My God.’
He picked it up tenderly, turned the pages with delicate fingers. He shook his head. ‘My God.’ Pilger, 70, was tanned and in good shape, tall and fit, with luxurious hair and an open, lovely smile. He was deeply moved to see a copy of his book, to hold it. I alerted him to the sticker inside the front cover, listing it as the property of the Nazareth Hospital in Philadelphia, and speculated that it may have passed into the hands of a hospitalised US soldier.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘A Vietnam vet.’
He signed it, and I said, ‘Thank you.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘thank you. Thank you so much.’
I should have asked Pilger if he’d heard Assange was pulled from the festival, but I didn’t want to risk ruining the moment. Festival director Jon Slack was standing nearby. I asked him about it, and he said, ‘It’s bollocks.’ He described it as laughable. He laughed, not very convincingly.
Paula Morris, a New Zealand novelist who sat on the festival advisory board, also rubbished the claims. She said the board considered the idea of an interview with Assange, but no one was very keen on it. Slack went a bit further, and said Assange would have been ‘a distraction’.
All of which was kind of pathetic. Assange appeared via Skype at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in March, and discussed the case of Edward Snowden, government surveillance, ‘the military occupation’ of civilian space, and hinted at WikiLeaks releasing fresh information — important subjects, addressed by a well-known international figure who happens to be Australian, which might have made him a speaker worth having at an otherwise rather obscure festival of Australian and New Zealand culture.
But the point of the rumour wasn’t about programming. It was about political interference. WikiLeaks spread the rumour on its Twitter account: ‘Assange talk blacklisted after pressure from NZ High Commission. Funding threat was twofold: 1) if Assange spoke; 2) if the threat was leaked.’
It emerged that the source was Australian journalist Andrew Fowler, author of an admiring book on Assange, The Most Dangerous Man in the World, and who was keen to conduct the Skype interview. He said the festival had been ordered to pull Assange from the programme — by the
