The Rolfoclasts with their attempts at Rolfoclasm are at it again!

Somebody stop them!

In 1986 Rolf Harris painted for Warrnambool’s Lighthouse Theatre a lovely mural in vivid tones of ‘outback red’ and ‘charcoal black’, presumably supplied by  British Paints. The mural, with its artful paint drips and edge-of-the-brush paradiddles, has roots reaching deep down through Pro Hart and Eric Jolliffe, picking up some hints of panel van on the way.

Yet through a primitive idolatorous thinking that comes from the dark ages, some equate the  painting of a  landscape by a pedophile with the act of pedophilia itself. Purely to expiate their own unresolved anxiety over the epidemic they equate a painting with the man, and want to erase both. They are putting pressure on the Warrnambool City Council, who have already voted to cover the mural up. That was never going to work. “Hiding the mural behind perspex is exactly what’s been happening with sexual abuse,” Warrnambool City Councillor Peter Hulin said. “We’re covering it up and pretending it’s not there.” But the iconography of  bush hut and blasted sapling seems innocent, is there something secretly encoded in the onanistic brushwork?

Of course covering the mural does nothing to address the issues that cause pedophilia. I’m sure I’ve gone to restaurants where paedophiles have worked, driven on roads they have built, and so on and so on. And covering a mural is one thing, erasing Rolf from my psyche is quite another. You only have to whisper ‘Caractacus’ in my ear and Rolf’s interminable version of Court of King Caractacus starts up all over again in my head. Once seen, Jake the Peg cannot be unseen. Will everybody who, like me, was a television addict in the 1970s have to submit to neurological erasure?

Rolf painting the mural in 1986

The mural before its cover up, now threatened with total destruction