‘Hey. Hey! Wake up. WAKE UP!’

Someone was shaking my foot. What the …

My eyes finally opened to see a bloke standing at the end of my bed. Who the hell was he and what was he doing in my room?

‘C’mon get up.’

My eyes were still focussing, my head was fuzzy and still catching up with what was going on. What was going on?

‘I’m a detective with the Northern Territory police. There’s been a sexual complaint.’

What the … Did I hear that right? Is he saying rape?

What is he talking about? A complaint?

‘You’re kidding me,’ I finally rasped something out.

‘It’s no joke. Get UP NOW!’

Okay, okay. I’m up, putting clothes on. I can hear someone else in the apartment. Rowan. He’s blowing up deluxe.

‘This is BULLSHIT!’

I seek him out. Righto, calm down Brewy. We’ll get to the bottom of this. We haven’t done anything. You’ve done nothing wrong, I’ve done nothing wrong …

And now I hear things a lot more clearly. My head suddenly isn’t that fuzzy. The hangover sweat is icy on my forehead. My guts are churning for real.

A complaint of sexual assault! If it wasn’t dry beforehand, I’ve got a serious case of cotton mouth now.

I can see in the corner of my eye the towering trellis that is Peter George. He looks bewildered and a bit scared. Someone is talking to him, there are khaki uniforms and some blokes in plain clothes who look in charge.

An explanation is taking place … they’re not just popping in. I hear them talking about going to the station and I know it’s not to catch a train.

‘Do we need to cuff you?’ Someone with authority in his voice asks me.

‘Mate, I’m not going to run anywhere. I’ll come and tell you what happened. But we have to get a flight in a few hours.’

Nuh uh. We weren’t going to be getting on a flight anytime soon.

My thinking was catching up to the gravity of the situation now. We had to tell someone. The Redbacks coach Wayne Phillips was in charge of the squad and word was got to him.

Flipper got to the nitty-gritty quickly. Did we do anything wrong? I swore I hadn’t. It was a mistake. It had to be. Okay, Flipper was onto it. Someone would get to the bottom of this for us, surely?

As preparations were made for our squad to go home, minus the three of us, the room was being searched. It was a crime scene as far as the authorities were concerned.

And so there we were. In the Darwin watch house at a time when most people were settling down to breakfast.

It was all a long, long way from having a few beers after winning a cricket match.

It was 2005 and I was in Darwin with the South Australian squad at the annual winter Academies Challenge, which brought teams from each of the states and the centre of excellence together for some preseason matches.

We hadn’t enjoyed the best of trips on the field, but had finished with a win in our last game and were enjoying our last night.

I was contracted to the SACA then and was rooming with Rowan Brewster, a left-handed batsman from NSW who had come to Adelaide in a bid to crack first-class cricket after performing at youth and second XI level and going to the Cricket Academy.

I was twenty-five and Rowan was twenty-four. We got on alright, as teammates tend to do, even if it was a relatively short-term acquaintance. The other roomie was an up-and-coming young cricketer, who was quiet, shy and cautiously making his way in the world. Definitely not a party animal.

It had been a good night, but not an out-of-control evening. We went out as a group and came back pretty much together.

At some point, Rowan had met a girl and she had come back to the apartment too. It was late, and our collective decision-making was not at its clearest, but as I maintained from the outset, nothing happened that I believed was wrong.

If anything, I was confident that just telling the truth would clear things up. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Surely that was all it would take?

So what was going on a few hours later now that we had a room full of police? Instead of the usual mad scramble to pack, get some water into us and be downstairs in time to get to the airport for the morning flight home, we were all told in no uncertain terms that this was serious.

Questioning at the watch house took place for a few hours. There was a rape squad detective and the original detective who had woken me.

That went on for a while. They were direct, and left out no detail from the allegations. I told them what had happened—and didn’t waver from what I had said, even if it was different from what they were trying to suggest might have happened. The others were elsewhere.

Afterwards, we waited. Separate cells. A rubber bench, a toilet bowl in the corner, glass door. Bare walls, strange, disconcerting sounds. It was clean, like it had been cleaned every day, as if the presence of the last person who had occupied the same space had been clinically washed away once they had been moved on to whatever fate awaited them next.

Your imagination goes nuts. I was worrying about getting to Mum and Dad and telling them what was going on. Shit. Dad was supposed to pick me up at the airport … I hope someone has rung them.

One of the policemen who had driven us to the watch house came by. He had seemed a reasonable bloke and I asked what was happening.

Not long now, he assured. Just checking a few more things. Looking pretty good though. An hour later he came back.

Ah no. Not good, not good at all. Rowan and I were going to be charged with sexual intercourse without consent and aggravated assault. Our other young roomie had assisted with inquiries, and was going to be released.

Another blur of cell doors opening and closing, standing in front of some mildly indifferent police officers, for photographs and then fingerprints. It was like television on the surface but underneath, there were no illusions. It was horribly real. We were bailed, and eventually released. It was evening, and the three of us went back to the hotel, shell-shocked, stunned and scared.

I finally got to talk to Dad and told him that we had done nothing wrong. He listened but really just wanted to get me home. At the hotel, we went over the past twenty-four hours. We were still very shaken at how matters had spiralled into a position we would not have dreamed of finding ourselves in.

Both Rowan and I had stuck to our original position and by the sound of it, our accounts matched up. But that didn’t matter. It was a matter of record now, the media had been informed, and word was quickly sweeping around Adelaide and other cricket circles.

Somehow I got a few hours’ sleep and was up to catch the same flight that we had been scheduled to catch the day before. We reached Adelaide and were quickly hustled out a side door and whisked away to an urgent meeting with SACA Chief Executive Officer, Mike Deare, and other senior staff and their legal advisor.

At the SACA, our young roomie’s mum and dad and girlfriend were there. They looked more distressed than him. I went over and apologised that he had found himself involved and assured them he was fine. He had done nothing wrong. We had done nothing wrong. It was becoming a mantra.

The SACA were good. They listened, asked questions and began to work on some plans. There was support for us and for our families, which I was immensely grateful for.

There was plenty of media interest in the case and, as the only SACA contracted player, I was probably the focus of it. One thing that buoyed my spirits was that the vast majority of people backed me and believed me. No-one sledged me on the field about it, at the time or since.

The case was taken to the NT Director of Public Prosecutions. After several weeks of waiting, we got the nod. Charges dropped. I was at a preseason camp in Mildura with the Redbacks when I was tracked down with the news.

There was immense relief, but also some anger. I got cranky when the SACA wanted to issue a statement immediately, when I wanted to come back to Adelaide to speak in person to the media the next day. I was overruled and, with my emotions running high, perhaps that might have been a sensible call. But it didn’t make me any less upset.

Our legal team told us afterwards there had been threats made against us during and after the period when we were waiting to learn our fate. Apparently someone close to the complainant had a gun and was keen to show us if we came back to Darwin.

I know now that there are no winners in a case like this. I don’t know what happened to the girl who lodged the complaint, nor did I ever find out what compelled her to go to the police.

I was single at the time and I took a long time to trust people again. I didn’t go out in public for a fair while—I’d stay in, or go to a mate’s place, but not out.

One of the first times I went out with a girl again afterwards, I toyed with asking her whether she would agree to let me record her on my phone … saying she was going out with me of her own accord. Not really a conventional way to start a first date off, and an idea I abandoned quickly as being just too weird.

I did agonise about raking this all up again, even if it is a matter of public record. I hate talking about it, my wife Cherie hates it being brought up, and there will be members of our families who were blissfully unaware of any of this until now.

It was over and done with and in the pasts of all concerned. All I can offer is that telling this is part of my story, for better or worse, and I would not have been true to myself had I simply pretended it happened to another Ryan Harris, and this chapter never saw the light of day. I had a few flashbacks when Leader of the Opposition Bill Shorten addressed a historic complaint against him of a similar nature during 2014. One thing that he said during the coverage resonated with me: ‘That’s not who I am.’ I would offer the same response to anyone who wanted to revisit things in my case.

Each of us moved on. Rowan ended up moving to Brisbane a few years after I did, and played first grade with one of the Brisbane clubs. We’d caught up a few times briefly, but you can understand that we found other things to talk about than those days.

If there is a message I would offer to aspiring athletes, it is to always remember that ultimately, you are responsible for the situation you put yourself in. Set yourself a standard of conduct and stick to it. It might sound hypocritical coming from someone who learned the hard way but, knowing what I know now, you would rather not have the regret of wishing you could go back in time and make a different decision.

I made one other trip to Darwin after that, as coach with Australia A in a quad series during the winter of 2014. It was strange. I’d been apprehensive when we first arrived after getting my thoughts down about the original incident and reliving those days while writing this book.

I wasn’t nervous that anything bad was going to happen, just out of kilter. I recognised a lot of the places, and I found myself one day going past the watch house and trying to recall where we were taken. After a few days, that feeling of being ill at ease faded and I found Darwin a better spot than I remembered—maybe my older, wiser self, was more prepared to move on than I realised.

The term ‘wake-up call’ is a bit of a misnomer, because you don’t necessarily wake up to yourself straight away. But Darwin was one of those incidents that did change me, if only to remind me firmly that I still had an opportunity to make something of myself, as long as I could concentrate on cricket. After all, as a twenty-five-year-old with some strikes against me, the alarm bells would already have been ringing in cricket circles. Or even worse, I had already been considered and discarded without my knowledge. If that had happened my chance was gone already.

But as it turned out, my eyes might have been opened wider, but I still had more waking up to do.