Rolf Harris (1930)



Rolf Harris, CBE, AM (born 30 March 1930) is an Australian musician, singer-songwriter, composer, painter and television personality.

Born in Perth, Western Australia, Harris was a champion swimmer before studying art. He moved to England in 1952, where he started to appear on television programmes on which he drew the characters. He also began a musical career initially with the piano accordion. He wrote the famous song "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport", and when performing in Canada he introduced his popular routine Jake the Peg. He often uses unusual instruments in his performances: he plays the didgeridoo, has been credited with the invention of the wobble board, a rhythmic percussion instrument, and was associated with the Stylophone, a small electronic keyboard instrument.

From the 1960s he has become a popular television personality, presenting shows including Rolf's Cartoon Club, Animal Hospital and various programmes about serious art. In late 2005 he painted an official portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, which was the subject of a special episode of Rolf on Art.

Early life
Named after Rolf Boldrewood, an Australian writer his mother admired, he was born in Bassendean, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, to Cromwell ("Crom") Harris and Agnes Margaret Harris (née Robbins) who had both emigrated from Cardiff, Wal e s. He is the nephew of Australian artist Pixie O'Harris (1903–1991). As a child he owned a dog called Buster Fleabags. A book of the same name was written for Quick Reads in 2010.

As an adolescent and young adult, Harris was a champion swimmer, being the Australian Junior 110 yards Backstroke Champion in 1946 and Western Australian state champion over a variety of distances and strokes during the period 1948–1952. Harris attended Perth Modern School in Subiaco, and the University of Western Australia. He met his wife, the Welsh sculptress and jeweller Alwen Hughes, while they were both art students, and they married on 1 March 1958. They have one daughter, Bindi Harris (born 10 March 1964), who studied art at Bristol Polytechnic and is now a painter.

Music and art
See also: Rolf Harris discographyHarris moved to England as an art student at City and Guilds Art School, Kennington, South London at the age of 22, getting into television with the BBC in 1953, doing a regular ten-minute cartoon drawing section with a puppet called "Fuzz", made and operated on the show by magician Robert Harbin. He illustrated Robert Harbin's Paper Magic (1956). He also had a few acting roles in British television programmes and films as Harry in The Vise and as Pte Proudfoot in the 1955 Tommy Trinder film You Lucky People.

When commercial television started in 1956, Harris was the only entertainer to work on both BBC and ITV, performing on 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 and hold a comedic dialogue with Harris as he drew cartoons of Willoughby's antics.

On Associated Rediffusion he invented a character called Oliver Polip the Octopus which he drew on the back of his hand and animated, as well as illustrating Oliver's adventures with cartoons on huge sheets of card.

He had drifted away from art school as a slightly disillusioned student and had luckily met his longtime hero, Australian impressionist painter Hayward Veal, who took Harris under his wing and became his mentor, teaching him the rudiments of impressionism and showing him how it could help with his portrait painting.

At the same time, Harris was entertaining with his piano accordion every Thursday night at a club called the Down Under, a haunt for homesick Australians and New Zealanders. Here, over the next several years, he honed his entertainment skills, eventually writing the song which was later to become his theme song, 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport'. He also appeared regularly at Clement Freud's "Royal Court Theatre Club" in Sloane Square, where he sat at the piano and entertained débutantes and their escorts.

Harris was headhunted to return to Perth when television was introduced there in 1960. There he produced and starred in five half-hour children's shows a week, as well as starring in his own weekly evening variety show. During that year he recorded in the TVW studios the song he had written for the Down Under Club in London, 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport'. It was released by EMI and became his first recording and his first number one. At the end of 1960 he toured Australia for Dulux paints, singing his hit song and 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?"

He and his wife Alwen went to Vancouver in Canada by mistake, and had a huge success there, working two shows a night at the Arctic Club, where he was held over for 31 weeks until the club accidentally burnt down on Christmas Eve, 1961. He was immediately transferred to the huge "Cave" theatre restaurant to great critical acclaim.

He returned to the United Kingdom early in 1962 and was introduced to George Martin, who re-recorded all Harris's songs including "Sun Arise", an Aboriginal-type song Harris had written with Perth naturalist Harry Butler. The song went to number 2 in the UK charts, losing the number 1 spot to Elvis Presley. He met and worked with the Beatles when they started recording with George Martin, and compèred their Christmas show in Finsbury Park Empire in 1963.

He and his wife have lived permanently in the United Kingdom since 1962, and he has regularly returned to Vancouver to entertain ever since. He has also regularly returned to Perth over the years for family visits and to the rest of Australia where he has spent as much as four months every year touring with his band.

In 1973, Harris performed the very first concert in the Concert Hall of the newly completed Sydney Opera House, to huge acclaim.

Since the late 1960s Harris had been performing top-rated variety television shows on the BBC in London, shows which were also shown in Australia and New Zealand, creating great support for his many tours in both countries as well as in South Africa.

Harris has been credited with inventing a simple homemade instrument called the wobble board. This discovery was accidentally made in the course of his work when he attempted to dry a freshly painted hardboard with added heat, from hearing the sound made by the board as he shook it by the short edges to cool it off. He suggests the effect can best be obtained through faint bouncing of a tempered hardboard or a thinner MDF board between the palms of one's hands.