Rolf Harris dead: For decades he could do no wrong, but he was not the man we thought he was

For decades the Boy from Bassendean could do no wrong.

Rolf Harris’ was a name that was instantly recognised across Australia and overseas, especially in Britain.

And although Harris had left Perth as a young man and made a home and a life in England, he was ours. He was a homegrown star. A national treasure.

His career twisted and turned and roamed across the worlds of music, art and television.

And it perhaps reached its pinnacle when he was commissioned in 2005 to paint a portrait of Queen Elizabeth to mark her 80th birthday.

But away from the spotlight there was a trail of women who knew what the rest of the world did not — that Harris was not the man we thought he was.

He was a sexual predator.

And yet after years during which his victims kept the awful truth to themselves, the wall of silence was finally pierced.

And the wall came tumbling down all around Harris.

But it took a long time. It took decades.

The Rolf Harris story began in 1930 when he was born into the art and music-filled household of Welsh migrant couple Cromwell and Agnes Harris.

Named after Australian writer Rolf Boldrewood, as a lean, loose-jointed teenager Harris was a fine swimmer, a national junior champion backstroker and State champion in a number of distances and strokes.

Academically bright, he was a student at the prestigious Perth Modern School and became the youngest artist, at the age of 15, to exhibit in the Archibald Prize, when he sent in a self-portrait.

He told The West Australian years later: “I painted the portrait wearing my school blazer, which I had earned as a swimmer.”

“I’d won the right to wear the blazer by winning the 440 yards Open swim, so I was very proud of myself.”

He gained a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Western Australia before switching his focus to education with a Diploma of Education from Claremont Teachers’ College.

Harris first moved to England in 1952 to study art, and earnt a living by performing cabaret and working on children’s television shows.

He met Welsh sculptress Alwen Hughes, whom he married in 1958. Their daughter Bindi was born in 1964.

It was while back in Perth on a visit that Harris got his big break, and his life changed for ever.

It was during the early days of TVW7 that his song Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport became his first big recorded hit.

He did a recording at TVW studios and sent it to EMI in Sydney, who released it as a record in 1960.

“It went to number one in Australia and then went on to be number one in England and got to number five in America. It was just amazing, and it changed my whole life,” Harris said later.

The song featured the distinctive sound of his famous wobble-board — a piece of hardboard that he moved back and forth.

The song later attracted controversy due to the use of a racist term to refer to Indigenous Australians which was removed from later versions of the song.

He went on to build a repertoire of hits including Six White Boomers, Sun Arise, which Harris co-wrote with Perth naturalist Harry Butler, (a version of which was recorded by rock star Alice Cooper), Jake the Peg — a crowd favourite at concerts when Harris performed it wearing his famous third “leg” — and Two Little Boys.

The latter was an unexpected hit, he recalled, and stayed at number one in the British charts for seven weeks as “the last hit of the 60s and the first hit of the 70s”.

Invited to the inaugural concert to open the Sydney Opera House in 1973, Harris became the first person to perform in the iconic venue’s concert hall.

His song Back to WA became the unofficial tune for WA’s 150th anniversary celebrations in 1979.

On into the 1990s and Harris’ star rose again when his version of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven — created for Andrew Denton’s comedy show The Money or the Gun — propelled him back into the pop charts at the age of 63.

As he became a cult figure to the young people who had grown up watching him on TV, Harris was invited to perform at the Glastonbury rock festival. At his first Glastonbury outing, a crowd estimated at more than 80,000 people gave him a rousing reception and he went on to play the iconic festival six times.

In 2008 Harris was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame, declaring how rewarding it was to be acknowledged in his home country after his years in England.

To be unashamedly Australian and be successful was a revelation, he said.

In 2009 he recorded a Christmas single with Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt based on his memories of eating a traditional hot turkey dinner in the scorching heat in Perth, and went on to record also with Kate Bush.

And he famously sang at the concert which marked the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012.

Along the way his quirky painting style gathered a legion of fans too, and popularised painting as entertainment, first with his hyperactive mix of chatter, music and rowdy brushwork on his Australian and British television shows in the 1950s and 60s.

Harris became a household name after starting the TV series the Rolf Harris Show in 1967. It featured Harris painting huge murals and asking “Can you tell what it is yet?”

He later became a fixture on British television screens, in 1989 hosting the series Rolf’s Cartoon Club, followed by Animal Hospital (from 1994) and Rolf On Art (from 2001), and Star Portraits.

Rolf on Art rated six times higher than any other British art program.

His profile surged with his painted portrait of the Queen and a subsequent screening of a documentary on the project attracted more than seven million viewers in the UK.

Harris completed the portrait in less than two months from two sittings. The Queen described it as “a very friendly painting”, which was a relief to the royalist Harris who, in its early days, thought it made her look “like a pork butcher from Norwich”.

He became a Member of the Order of Australia in 1989 and a Commander of the British Empire in 2006 and Officer of the Order of Australia in 2012.

But his fall was near.