Robert Francis Harris

Burnett Street

Robert Francis Harris was born on 11 August 1943 at the Royal Hobart Hospital, the second of three children of Francis Joseph Harris and Dorothy May Harris née Pitt. His father, born in 1910, was a stagehand and flyman at the Theatre Royal in Campbell Street, and was in New Guinea with the army when his son was born. He came home in 1945 to a boy of nearly two who did not know him and would not go to him for a month. His mother, born in 1915, worked a shift at a jam factory in the city and kept the family afloat while her husband was away.

The Harrises rented a narrow weatherboard cottage in Burnett Street, North Hobart, with an outside toilet and a copper in the yard. Robert's elder sister, Joan Dorothy Harris, was born in 1939, and his younger brother, Kevin John Harris, in 1947. Francis was a quiet, practical man who drank at the Empire Hotel on Friday nights and said very little about the war. Dorothy was sharper and more ambitious, and she wanted her children to do better than a rented cottage and a backstage wage.

From the age of eight Robert spent his Saturdays and school holidays at the theatre with his father, sweeping the stage, coiling ropes and running messages for touring companies. He saw everything from the wings: pantomimes, variety acts, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the concerts of the young Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. In 1953, at ten, he stood in the dark beside a pile of flats and heard a visiting violinist play the Bruch concerto, and he went home and told his mother he wanted a violin.

The Wings

There was no money for one. Dorothy found a battered three-quarter-size instrument in a pawnshop in Liverpool Street for four pounds and paid for it at a few shillings a week. One of the orchestra's second violinists, who knew Francis from the theatre, agreed to teach the boy in exchange for Robert cleaning his car and mowing his lawn. Robert practised in the woodshed behind the cottage because his father could not stand the noise.

He was not a prodigy. He was stubborn, he listened well, and he practised more than anyone his teacher had known. At Hobart High School he was an indifferent student in everything except music and English, and he left in 1960 with a scholarship to the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music in Sydney that his teacher had pushed him to apply for. His father thought it was a waste of time. His mother sewed his clothes for the journey and cried at the airport.

Francis came round, in his own way. When Robert played his first concert as a student in Sydney, a recital in the Conservatorium's hall in 1962, his father took three days' unpaid leave and travelled up on the overnight boat from Devonport and the train from Melbourne without telling anyone. He sat at the back, left before the end, and never mentioned it. Robert only found out from his mother years later.

Sydney was the making of him and very nearly the end of him. The scholarship covered his fees and little else, and he worked nights as a stagehand at a theatre in the city to pay for a room in a boarding house in Surry Hills. He was often exhausted, frequently hungry and always conscious that the other students had money, teachers at home and fathers who did not carry scenery. He completed his diploma in 1964 and stayed on in Sydney, freelancing in theatre pits and radio orchestras and teaching the children of the eastern suburbs to make the money last.

Margaret

In 1968, at an exhibition opening in a gallery in Paddington, Robert met Margaret Whitfield, a twenty-three-year-old painting student at the National Art School. She was from Hobart, the daughter of Justice Henry Whitfield of the Supreme Court of Tasmania and his wife Constance, a patron of the arts who sat on half the cultural committees in the state. Robert had grown up a mile from the Whitfields' house without ever having seen it. Margaret was clever, funny and quick to anger, and she was the first person he had met in Sydney who did not seem to notice where he came from.

Her parents noticed. Justice Whitfield was civil and cool, and Constance, who knew enough about music to know that orchestral violinists were not well paid, asked Robert at their first dinner what his father did. He told her. They married in 1969 at St David's Cathedral in Hobart, and the Harrises sat on one side of the church in borrowed suits while the Whitfields' friends filled the other.

Robert auditioned for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra later that year and joined the second violins at the start of the 1970 season. In 1971 the couple bought a Federation house at 47 Fitzroy Place in Sandy Bay, with broad verandahs, leadlight windows and a coach house at the back. They could not have afforded it on a violinist's salary. Margaret's father made up the difference without being asked, and Robert never entirely forgave either of them for it. He spent the rest of his life in a house he loved and did not feel he had earned.

Fitzroy Place

Their son, Daniel James Harris, was born on 17 November 1972. The birth was hard, and in the months afterwards Margaret sank into a depression that neither of them had words for. She stopped painting, stopped eating properly and spent whole days in bed with the curtains drawn. Robert, who knew nothing about babies, learned quickly. His mother came across from North Hobart most afternoons, and Constance Whitfield sent a nurse. Robert played in the orchestra in the evenings and walked the floor with Daniel at night. It was a year he did not talk about afterwards, and Margaret came out of it slowly.

Sandra Elizabeth Harris was born at Calvary Hospital in Lenah Valley on 22 March 1975, two weeks early, after Margaret went into labour at the kitchen table over a pile of Year 11 art essays. Robert remembered the mints and the camera and forgot her dressing gown, and the family never let him forget it. Their third child, Rebecca Louise Harris, was born on 9 July 1977.

The house at Fitzroy Place became what Margaret's mother had always wanted hers to be: a place where painters, musicians and writers came to dinner and stayed until two in the morning. Visiting soloists and conductors ate at the long table in the dining room and played afterwards on the Steinway that Margaret's parents had given them. Robert had the back room soundproofed at a cost the family could not afford, and it leaked Brahms and Bartók into the rest of the house regardless. Margaret turned the coach house into a studio and returned to painting, and to part-time teaching at a Hobart secondary school.

The Steinway

Daniel showed musical talent before he was five, when Robert found him picking out Mozart on the Steinway with one finger. Robert, who had fought for every lesson he ever had, gave his son everything he himself had lacked: the best teachers in Hobart, hours of practice before school, competitions and summer schools on the mainland. He meant it as a gift. Daniel, intense and anxious, took it as a weight, and practised before dawn and wept over every imperfect performance. Robert did not see what it was costing him until it was too late to undo, and the two of them were never entirely easy with each other afterwards.

Sandra, the middle child, became the household's peacemaker, and Rebecca its noise. Robert was a warm, distracted and occasionally explosive father, generous with his time when he remembered to give it and impatient with anything he considered slovenly. He was happiest in the music room with the door shut, and his children learned to judge his mood by what he was practising.

Margaret's health began to fail in the 1980s. She developed an autoimmune illness that the doctors treated as something close to lupus, and it brought periods of swollen joints, exhaustion and weeks in bed. Robert was a better husband in a crisis than in ordinary life. He cooked, badly, drove the children everywhere and kept the household running, and he never once suggested that Margaret stop painting, which she said later was the kindest thing he did for her.

Second Desk

Robert's career in the orchestra was long, steady and unspectacular. He moved from the second violins to the firsts in 1976 and sat in the first violin section for more than thirty years without ever being offered the concertmaster's chair, and he told himself that he did not want it. He was a reliable, intelligent section player with a good ear and a short temper with conductors who wasted time. Younger players learned to sit near him because he would tell them, quietly, when they were behind the beat.

He composed in the gaps. He wrote chamber music, songs and a handful of orchestral pieces, most of them performed once and filed away. His Derwent Nocturne for strings was premiered by the orchestra in 1984 and was played occasionally in Tasmania for the next twenty years. He also taught, privately and at the Conservatorium, and he was a demanding, sometimes harsh teacher who mellowed with age.

From the middle of the 1980s Robert ran an informal string quartet from the music room at Fitzroy Place with three of his orchestral colleagues. It had no name and no fixed membership. It played at salons, festivals, funerals and weddings for twenty years, and its fees paid for the soundproofing several times over. Among its engagements was the wedding reception of his daughter Sandra to Charlie Edward Claiborne, a police constable from Melbourne, at the Grand Chancellor in Hobart on 15 May 1997.

Sons-in-Law and Strangers

Robert liked Charlie Claiborne at once, which surprised everyone, Margaret most of all. At the wedding reception he found himself talking to Charlie's father, Thomas, a Melbourne builder in failing health, about the years he had spent humping scenery in Hobart and Sydney. It was the longest conversation he had at his daughter's wedding. Charlie, who knew nothing about music, asked him intelligent questions about it, and Robert decided that this made him more interesting than most of the people at the Whitfields' dinner table.

Robert had met Richard Rothschild years before, at a parents' evening at St Michael's Collegiate, when the young history teacher had told him that Sandra's project on convict prisons and the French philosopher Michel Foucault was the best piece of work he had marked that year. The two men did not become friends. They were, in the way of Hobart, aware of each other for the rest of their lives, and Robert's path crossed the Rothschilds' again in time through Richard's daughter.

The grandchildren came. Sandra's son, Liam Thomas Claiborne, was born in 2001 and her daughter, Amelia Rose Claiborne, in 2003, and Robert and Margaret took them for days at a time while Sandra recovered from a difficult first birth and Charlie worked shifts. In 2005 Daniel married Elizabeth Anne Chen, a Hobart violinist eight years his junior who had trained at the Royal Academy of Music in London and joined the orchestra on her return. Robert, who had sat beside her in rehearsals, approved of the marriage more openly than he had approved of anything Daniel had done for years. Their daughter, Sophie, was born in 2007 and their son, Michael, in 2010.

The Last Seasons

Elizabeth was appointed concertmaster in 2007, and Robert, in his last seasons, found himself sitting behind his daughter-in-law. He was proud of her and occasionally irritated, and he did not hide either. In 2008 he sat on the audition panel that appointed a young violist named Amelia Rothschild, back from London, and took an interest in her that she did not at first understand. He told her she sat as though she expected to be asked to leave. He lent her music from his library, invited her to play on Sunday afternoons in the music room, and introduced her to the people she would need to know.

He retired from the orchestra at the end of the 2009 season, at sixty-six, after forty seasons. The following year Elizabeth formed The Tasman Strings with Amelia, the second violinist James O'Sullivan and the cellist Thomas Andersen, and they rehearsed in Robert's music room. He sat in on most of their rehearsals that first year, saying little and stopping them occasionally to ask who was listening to whom. It was the closest thing to a successor his own quartet ever had. In 2012 he gave a speech at Amelia's wedding in her mother's garden that no one had asked him to give.

His family's troubles in those years were harder to sit through than any rehearsal. Charlie came out of a hostage siege in 2010 with an injury nobody could see, and Robert watched his son-in-law change from a distance he did not know how to close. In 2016 Sandra and the children spent three months in hiding in Strahan while Charlie gave evidence about corruption in the police, and Robert and Margaret were not told where they were. In 2018 Robert went to Richard Rothschild's funeral at St David's and sat at the back.

The Music Room

Robert's hearing began to go in his seventies, the high frequencies first, after fifty years beside the brass and the timpani. He could no longer hear the top of his own violin properly, and he stopped playing for anyone but himself. He spent his afternoons in the music room with scores, recordings and a hearing aid he hated, and he wrote, slowly, a set of pieces for string quartet that he never finished.

Margaret's illness worsened in the same years. Her kidneys failed in the end, and she died at the Royal Hobart Hospital on 4 June 2021, aged seventy-five, with Robert and their three children with her. Her funeral was held at St David's Cathedral. Robert, who had spent fifty-two years married to a woman he had never quite believed had chosen him, found the house at Fitzroy Place unbearably quiet and refused every suggestion that he leave it.

On 15 March 2024 Elizabeth was killed in a car accident on her way home from a performance in Launceston. She was forty-three. Daniel was left alone with two teenage children, and Robert, at eighty, could do very little for him except be there. Father and son spent more time together that year than at any time since Daniel was a child, much of it in the music room and most of it in silence. It was not a reconciliation, exactly, but it was the nearest they came to one.

Robert Francis Harris had a stroke in the music room at Fitzroy Place in July 2025 and was found by Sandra later that afternoon. He died at the Royal Hobart Hospital on 26 July 2025, aged eighty-one, with Daniel, Sandra and Rebecca with him. His funeral was held at St David's Cathedral, where he had married and where he had buried his wife. The three surviving members of The Tasman Strings played, with a guest first violinist, for the first time since Elizabeth's death. Daniel played the Steinway, which had been moved from Fitzroy Place for the day, and got to the end of the piece.