It sounded crazy. Closer inquiry suggested it really was crazy. I ran into Fowler at King’s College. He said he wasn’t actually at the cocktail party, but that’s what he’d heard Lockwood Smith’s wife had said, and whether her threat was made directly or indirectly to the festival, it was hard to tell, but the fact of the matter is that Assange would not be appearing . . .
That weekend, I ridiculed the situation in a satirical diary in the Sunday Star-Times. I invented a monologue for Assange, fulminating at the power and influence of Lockwood Smith’s wife at cocktail parties . . . I tried to balance the stupid column, make it clear that I admired WikiLeaks, that Assange was heroic and brilliant.
It was all in vain. WikiLeaks on Twitter that day linked to the column with the dismissive comment, ‘Today’s idiotic op-ed trend: fake journal entries from Julian.’ I writhed in shame and betrayal. I was called out as an Assange-hater, a stooge, a dog, a dunce, stuffed to the gills with ‘pathetic animus’. I remembered something Fowler had said at the festival. Unlike his other comments, this one might have been accurate. I asked: ‘Who writes WikiLeaks stuff on Twitter?’ He said: ‘Usually it’s Julian.’
6
One of the few times Rolf Harris escaped from his gloom and torment at Southwark Crown Court was when he was shown a photograph of the house where he grew up in Bassendean, near Perth. A plain weatherboard house, surrounded by jacarandas, fig trees, almond trees, box trees, draped with wisteria, on the banks of the Swan River — he climbed the trees and gorged on their fruit and nuts, he swam the Swan like a champ. At 16, he was the junior backstroke champion of Australia, competing in Melbourne in a borrowed pair of silk full-length bathers.
You could see how the photo relaxed him. That tight, compact body loosened, his thin lips almost smiled. Was it for his childhood and innocence, or was it for the reminder of home? I thought: I know where you live. I know WA. I thought of Perth, Fremantle, the Swan, Cape Leeuwin, Margaret River, the vast distances and flat, baked plains and the exact point where the Indian Ocean meets the Southern Ocean. I stored the knowledge, held it like a secret; alone among the pale English in the upstairs courtroom, I was from the same part of the world as Harris. Hang in there.
He didn’t hang in there. Wass brought her twitching little hand out again when she talked about the similarities in the versions told by Harris’s alleged victims. Harris, reaching inside the bikini pants worn by Bindi’s friend; Harris, with his hand up the skirt of a girl at a restaurant somewhere in New Zealand; Harris, grabbing a 15-year-old girl’s bottom at a hardware store in Hamilton. All hands, wandering, groping, fingering.
Harris: ‘They’re lying.’
Wass: ‘Why is it the same lie?’
Harris: ‘I don’t know. It didn’t happen. I’ve established that they’re lying.’
Wass: ‘No, you’re just saying they’re lying. You haven’t established that at all.’
Her hand, grubby and suggestive; his hand, that starfish, hanging on for dear life to the witness stand. In the front row, Alwen Harris, needing help whenever she sat down; two seats along from her, their daughter, Bindi, a tough-looking broad in a leather jacket and a mauve top with butterflies on it. She’d told the court she wasn’t close to her father. ‘We hardly talk, Dad and I.’
When her friend told her that Harris had started abusing her when she was 13, Bindi phoned her father and challenged him. She banged her head against the wall while holding the receiver. She told him she wanted to stab herself with forks.
Wass to Harris: ‘She was beside herself?’
He supposed so, he supposed so, he supposed so. The empty life he described in his mordant book wafted around the upstairs courtroom, Case Number T20130553, where English onlookers with wet hats and warm slippers came to watch the end of the Rolf Harris story. The love of the British people, his good friend the Queen sitting for her portrait — it was all as distant as Perth, as the Swan River, drifting past his house on the edge of that faraway continent glowing in the light of the Antipodes.
Chapter 11
Terra nullius: Brad Murdoch
1
Assigned, with great pleasure, to tropical Darwin, that vivid, far-fetched town closer to Timor or Lombok than the nearest city in its own country, to cover the trial in December 2005 of Brad Murdoch, who apparently killed and buried English tourist Peter Falconio somewhere in the Outback, and tried to do the same and worse to Falconio’s girlfriend, Joanne Lees, a striking beauty who arrived at and left the court building every day in a black Ford Falcon, I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about when I concluded my newspaper story by writing, ‘There is a police crime scene photo taken the day after the murder. The long, straight highway. The red earth, the scrub purple and yellow. Middle of the continent, middle of nowhere; it looks really beautiful, quite hopeless, utterly savage.’
I’d not been to the scene of the crime or set tyre anywhere on the Stuart Highway, including that fatal part of it, north of Alice Springs and near the Outback town of Barrow Creek, which became known as ‘the Falconio stretch’. The prosecution’s case was that the gigantic Murdoch had signalled for Falconio to pull over his orange Kombi on the moonless night of 14 July 2001, then shot him dead and hid the body. He was also charged with assaulting Lees and ‘depriving her of her liberty’, a rather chaste phrase which she described in court as an act of terrifying violence. Lees escaped; all trace of Falconio was made to
