Rolf Harris (30 March 1930 – 10 May 2023) was an Australian musician, television personality, painter, and actor. He used a variety of instruments in his performances, notably the didgeridoo and the Stylophone, and is credited with the invention of the wobble board. He was convicted in England in 2014 of the sexual assault of four underage girls.
Harris began his entertainment career in 1953, releasing several songs, including "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" (a Top 10 hit in Australia, the UK and the United States), "Sun Arise", "Jake the Peg" and "Two Little Boys", which reached number 1 in the UK. From the 1960s, Harris was a successful television personality in the UK, later presenting shows such as Rolf's Cartoon Club and Animal Hospital. In 1985, he hosted the short educational film Kids Can Say No!, which warned children between ages five and eight how to avoid situations where they might be sexually abused, how to escape such situations and how to get help if they are abused. In 2005, he painted an official portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.
After the Jimmy Savile sexual abuse scandal, Harris was arrested as part of the Operation Yewtree police investigation regarding historical allegations of sexual offences in 2013. Harris denied any wrongdoing and was placed on trial in 2014. In July 2014, Harris was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison after being convicted on twelve counts of indecent assault on four female victims, who were between the ages of eight and nineteen at the time that the offences took place between the 1960s and 1980s. Following his conviction, he was stripped of many of his honours and re-runs of his television programmes were pulled from syndication.
Harris was released on licence in 2017 after serving nearly three years at HM Prison Stafford. The conviction involving an eight-year-old girl in Portsmouth was overturned as unsafe in 2017. He applied for permission to appeal against his convictions concerning the three other girls, but this was refused.
Harris was born on 30 March 1930 in Bassendean, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, to Agnes Margaret (née Robbins) and Cromwell ("Crom") Harris, who had both emigrated from Cardiff, Wales. He was named after Rolf Boldrewood, the pseudonym of an Australian writer whom his mother admired. After his later fame, Harris was often referred to within Australia as "the boy from Bassendean". As a child, he owned a dog called Buster Fleabags, about whom he later wrote a book (for the UK Quick Reads Initiative).
Harris attended Bassendean Primary School and Perth Modern School in Subiaco, later gaining a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Western Australia and a Diploma of Education from Claremont Teachers' College. When he was 16, and still a student at Perth Modern School, his self-portrait in oils was one of the 80 works (out of 200 submitted) accepted to be hung in the Art Gallery of New South Wales as an entry in the 1947 Archibald Prize. He painted a portrait of the then Lieutenant Governor of Western Australia, Sir James Mitchell, for the 1948 Archibald Prize. He won the 1949 Claude Hotchin prize for oil colours with his landscape "On a May Morning, Guildford".
As an adolescent and young adult, Harris was a champion swimmer. In 1946, he was the Australian Junior 110 yards (100 metres) Backstroke Champion. He was also the Western Australian state champion over a variety of distances and strokes during the period from 1948 to 1952.
Career in television, music, and art
Harris moved to England in 1952 and became an art student at City and Guilds of London Art School in South London, aged 22.
He went on to illustrate Paper Magic, Harbin's first book on origami, in 1956. In 1954, Harris was a regular on BBC Television programme Whirligig, which featured a character called "Willoughby", who sprang to life on a drawing board, but was erased at the end of each episode.
By this stage, Harris had drifted away from art school as a slightly disillusioned student. He then met his longtime hero, Australian impressionist painter Hayward Veal (1913–1968), who became his mentor, teaching him the rudiments of impressionism and showing him how it could help with his portrait painting. At the time that he was working with Veal, Harris was also entertaining with his piano accordion every Thursday night at a club called the Down Under, frequented by Australians and New Zealanders. At the Down Under venue, Harris honed his entertainment skills over several years, eventually writing what later became his theme song, "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport".
Although Harris chiefly appeared on the BBC, he was also on the British ITV network, and when commercial television started in 1955, he was the only entertainer to work with both the BBC and ITV. He performed on the BBC with his own creation, Willoughby, a specially made board on which he drew Willoughby (voiced and operated by Peter Hawkins). The character would then come to life to engage in a comedic dialogue with Harris as he drew cartoons of Willoughby's antics. On Associated Rediffusion's Small Time, Harris invented a character called Oliver Polip the Octopus, which he drew on the back of his hand and animated. Harris then illustrated the character's adventures with cartoons on huge sheets of card.
Harris returned to Perth in Australia when television was introduced there in 1959 after he was headhunted. He subsequently produced and starred in five episodes of a half-hour weekly children's show, as well as his own weekly evening variety show. From 1959, he worked on TVW-7's first locally produced show, Spotlight, and during this time he recorded "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" on a single microphone placed above him in the television studio.
The song was sent to EMI in Sydney, and was released shortly afterwards as a record, becoming both his first recording and his first number one single. The song was successful in the UK. Harris offered four local backing musicians to split 10% of the royalties from the song, but they decided to take a recording fee of £7 each (equivalent to A$233 in 2022), because they did not think the song would be successful. The novelty song was originally titled "Kangalypso" and featured the distinctive sound of the "wobble board".
The fourth verse – "Let me abos go loose, Lou/Let me abos go loose/They're of no further use, Lou/So let me abos go loose" – became increasingly controversial, because of the use of what later became regarded as a racial slur, and was removed in later versions of the song. In 2006, four decades after the song's release, Harris expressed his regret about the original lyric.
At the end of 1960, he toured Australia sponsored by Dulux paints and singing his hit song while doing huge paintings on stage with Dulux emulsion paint. While painting on stage, one of his catchphrases was, "Can you tell what it is yet?" After Harris and his wife returned to England, they visited Perth to meet family and for tours of Australia, where he spent around four months travelling with his band.
After returning to the UK in 1962, he was introduced to George Martin, who re-recorded all of his songs the following year, including a remake of "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" which became a huge hit in the US, and "Sun Arise", an Aboriginal-inspired song Harris had written with Perth naturalist Harry Butler. The song reached number two in the UK charts. Harris met and worked with the Beatles after they started recording with Martin, and he compèred their 16-night season of Christmas shows at London's Finsbury Park Astoria Theatre (later the Rainbow Theatre) in 1963. Harris sang "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport", with the Beatles singing backing vocals, for the first edition of the From Us to You BBC radio show in December 1963. Harris changed the original lyrics to create a version that was specially written for the Beatles.
Harris was the presenter of Hi There and Hey Presto it's Rolf in 1964. By the time The Rolf Harris Show was broadcast in 1967, lasting until 1974, on BBC1, he had gained a high profile on British television. He was the commentator for the United Kingdom in the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest.