Free The Best Australian Essays 2014 by Robert Manne

alcoholism, bulimia or aversion to tongue-kissing that had overtaken his accusers in later life. The decade he spent murmuring ‘Poor little blighter’ to the internees on Animal Hospital counted for less when set against his interest in a brusquely canine approach to courtship, exposed by a saucy postcard he sent the first complainant. On the card, a beagle imparts its life lessons, which include a recommendation that if you want sex you should beg, with the added advice that ‘a cold nose in the crotch can be effective’. Twisting the knife, the addressee remarked that when he came to visit during her adolescence, ‘he never greeted the family dog’.
    Rolf’s grovelling letter to this woman’s father seems genuinely anguished, but it still hankers after the sentimental simplicities and quick fixes of his television programs. In Rolf on Art he advises novice painters to use oils, which allows them to wipe out a mistake ‘or let it dry and paint over it’. Off the canvas, erasure is not so easy. As he tells the aggrieved parent in his letter, ‘You can’t go back and change things you have done in this life – I wish to God I could.’ What troubles him most, however, is the damage to his self-esteem. ‘As I do these animal programmes,’ he writes, ‘I see the unconditional love that dogs give to their owners and I wish I could learn to love myself again.’ It’s an obtuse, coldly self-regarding formulation. Dogs do not dote on themselves; misinterpreting animal psychology, Rolf identifies both with the adoring pet and its adored owner, which makes him his own most fervent fan. His appeal to be reprieved from self-loathing so he can love himself again reveals – somewhat crassly given the context – that narcissism is the norm for him.
    Arriving at court each morning, flanked by his wan, strained daughter and his stoical wife, Rolf sported a succession of ever more iridescent ties, bright reminders of the rising sun with her fluttering skirts. Perhaps this blaze of colour proclaimed that he had done nothing wrong: as he says in his confessional letter, the affair with his friend’s daughter ‘progressed from a feeling of love and friendship’. He may still think, as he did when bathing Bindi, that the restrictions we impose on desire and imagination – two forces that collude inside us – are unnatural. Or there might be a more vindictive intent behind the scenarios described by the aggrieved women: were such attacks on innocence meant to console him for his own loss of it? A grey, stooped, portly Peter Pan, Rolf compulsively re-enacts a childhood that ended prematurely the first time around.
    Art is an uncensored playground of fantasy, safe so long as you have a bottle of turps and plenty of rags close at hand; the problems start when art’s rampant liberties extend into life. One of the most perceptive comments about Rolf was made by a conservationist who worked with him on a wildlife program in Scotland. After watching him fraternise with an armada of dolphins, the scientist said, ‘If he wasn’t well known, he’d be quite mad.’ Like Shakespearean fools, celebrities are free to be crazy or zany, and we dispense them from the customary rules about manners and morals. But this permission is apt to be revoked abruptly when the police arrive. Is it Rolf who has double standards, or society?
    The Monthly

The Breaking Point
    Jessie Cole
    It was the suicide of my older sister Zoe, in all her shimmering teenage glory, that pushed my father to the edge. Perhaps everyone has a breaking point. An incident or event that cannot be overcome, a moment in time that can never be erased. Most of us might get through life without encountering it, but my father was not so fortunate.
    We lived far outside town, nestled in green hills, on a winding dead-end road a thousand kilometres north of Sydney. Filled with hopes for