What comes through loud and clear in the story of artist and alleged witch Rosaleen Norton is the ferocity of Australian censorship in the 1950s and 60s.
In the 1950s Australia was a backwater. Here in the mother country, we knew next to nothing about the second largest country in our Commonwealth. To us, Australia meant only kangaroos and Chips Rafferty. Chips was an actor who also worked in the UK and Hollywood. If you look him up on Wikipedia you’ll find that he was called ‘the living symbol of the typical Australian.’ He was so famous that the Australian government put him in British TV commercials that tried to encourage us to emigrate Down Under. There weren’t enough people living in Australia. The fare for us Poms, as you may be aware, was a mere £10.
There wasn’t much of a film and TV industry in Australia, and many Aussie actors had moved to London, especially to an area, Earls Court, that became known as Kangaroo Valley. The artistic community in Sydney must have been quite small. Probably everyone knew each other. Guess who turns up briefly in the astonishing story of Rosaleen Norton, the Witch of Kings Cross? (That’s Kings Cross, Sydney, surprisingly not named after the similarly sleazy King’s Cross, London). Chips Rafferty of course. But this is not about him.
Much of the appeal of the story of ‘Roie’ Norton is that it concerns people, a lifestyle and a culture that, until very recently, were pretty much unknown outside Australia. Roie’s sexual, heathen and “supernatural” exploits were so scandalous that they made headlines throughout the country. But the country was Australia. Nobody else was interested. Things are different today. Copies of a book, Pan’s Daughter, first published in Australia in 1988, currently change hands for more than £200. It was first published in the UK in 2013 and there was a second edition three years later. There has also been an opera, a documentary and, just last year, a BBC radio programme. The latter came about because somebody remembered that one of Roie’s lovers was the British classical conductor Sir Eugene Goossens. Surely a feature film can’t be far off? (The late Kenneth Anger once expressed an interest).
For my money, no previous exposé deals comprehensively with the crux of the Rosaleen Norton affair, which is that in a supposedly civilised democracy, the life of a bohemian artist was all but destroyed – and the career of a silly old fool was completely destroyed – by the kind of draconian censorship we now associate with militaristic regimes. Post-war censorship in Australia was Victorian in its inflexibility and I’m not referring to the Australian state.
Nevill Drury (1947-2013), author of Pan’s Daughter, makes Roie’s life seem terribly complicated. Somehow it involved yoga, Aleister Crowley, Satanism, Carl Jung, automatic drawing, quantum theory, Gnosticism, Buddhism, voodoo and the Kabbalah. It also requires us to take in quite a lot of information about cosmic ideation, astral planes and “the dark polarities of magical consciousness”, which may be too much for some readers.
It could be stated in complete contrast that actually Roie had an almost conventional career as an outsider artist and that includes her appearing to cultivate a relationship with tabloid journalists and being all too eager to play up to their confused but sensational notions of who she was. This could explain a great deal.
Rosaleen Norton was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1917. In 1925 she emigrated with her family to Sydney, Australia, but of course not to Kings Cross, a place of ill repute that only later drew her in. She showed a talent very early on for drawing and after leaving school studied art at the East Sydney Technical College. She also worked as a nude model. Because of buck teeth that in later life became quite misshapen, she wasn’t conventionally attractive. But she had a strikingly angular face with arched eyebrows that drew attention to sultry, dark eyes. Artists would have been fascinated by her.
She took odd jobs and had a brief marriage. She developed an interest in the Greek god Pan. She was far from alone in this. The Romans liked him too. There were revivals of interest in him in the 18th and 19th centuries. Then in the 20th century, Neopagans around the world took to him. From Pan, we get panic, pantheon, pipes of Pan, and Peter Pan.
The god Pan was either a goat or half-man/half-goat. He could generally be described as the god of nature. But he was also sex mad. Accordingly, he was anathema to early Christians, who used Pan’s horns, whiskers, tail and cloven hooves to characterise their Devil. Purely because Roie’s many depictions of Pan resembled Satan, journalists jumped to the conclusion that she was a Satanist and sometimes went much further. In 1955 the Sydney Sunday Telegraph made up a story depicting Roie and her friends as Satanists who celebrated Black Mass in the heart of Kings Cross. Very rarely are lies like these discussed.
At some point in the 1940s, Roie was working for the same arty magazine, Pertinent, as Gavin Greenlees (1930-1983). She was providing illustrations that today look much of a muchness – gods and monsters with slanted eyes and evil grins. He was a precocious but deeply troubled young poet, nerdy and probably gay, all of which appealed to Roie. They shared the same interests, notably Aleister Crowley and Carl Jung. Despite their almost 13-year age difference Roie and Gavin began a relationship. It wasn’t a match made in heaven. It was their combined ‘otherness’ that made them tabloid fodder.
Roie had shown her art in a bohemian bar, Pakie’s Club, in 1943, but it had created little interest. Her first major exhibition wasn’t until 1949. Roie and Gavin, together with their cat Geoffrey, hitch-hiked to Melbourne, where a fan had funded Roie’s exhibition at the gallery of the Rowden-White Library at the University of Melbourne. Her first show also resulted in her first attempted prosecution.
Two days after the opening, the gallery was raided by police acting on complaints that Roie’s drawings were lewd and disgusting, “as gross a shock to the average spectator as a witch’s orgy.” The shock appears to have been engendered by drawings of figures with genitals and, in Witches’ Sabbath, a woman being embraced by a panther. On this one and only occasion Roie escaped censure. Her counsel poured scorn on the fact that the prosecution was “based on a case heard during Queen Victoria’s reign in 1836.” The magistrate dismissed the charges and awarded Roie 4 guineas (£4.20) against the police.
The publicity encouraged a Melbourne University psychologist, L.J. Murphy, to conduct an extensive interview with Roie, one that has survived. In it, she claims that her work derives from her experiments with self-hypnosis. She seems prone to exaggeration, declaring that her trances could last for up to five days and that on at least one occasion her heart, pulse and breathing stopped. But in general, her belief that she could move to a different state of consciousness, where she met Pan and other gods, is not that dissimilar to the claims of the priests and shamans who went before her or those who subsequently said they had out-of-body experiences or enlightening trips on hallucinogenic drugs. Roie references everything from Buddhism to Jung but never mentions witchcraft.
Murphy’s diagnosis could have been anticipated. He concluded that Roie had superior intellectual abilities. But, as is all too apparent from her repetitive art, “The amount of variety and fantasy in the records is clearly not as great as the subject thinks it is [and] there is a certain stereotyping about them all.”
Back in Sydney, Roie and Gavin set the seal on their tempestuous partnership by moving into a crumbling property in Kings Cross, the rough equivalent at the time of New York’s Greenwich Village and London’s Soho. The district’s nightlife, some of it illegal, “attracted eccentrics, poets, vagrants and artists.” There were wild parties. This is where graphic artist Jim Russell re-introduces Chips Rafferty to the story:
“One night I was at a party at Chips Rafferty’s place. Block of flats up the Cross, third floor. During the party we heard screams from the flat below, and Chips said, ‘Aw, Christ. What’s this?’ And went down. Well, Rosie had this Gavin bloke by the balls. And he was screaming.
“Chips said, ‘Let ‘im go. Let ‘im go.’ But she wouldn’t. So Chips just went BIFF, and knocked her out. He pleaded with me to save him from her. She had him locked up in a room. She would be on to him night and day. And it was just sex, sex, sex…”
Russell’s take on Roie? “She was the weirdo of all times. Phoney as could be. Putting on this act of the witches and loving it. Because she was getting all the attention she wanted and was being written up.”
It seems inescapable that, because the newspapers decided she was a witch, Roie invented a history for herself, claiming that she had been born a witch, complete with witchy marks on her skin. On one occasion she agreed to be photographed wearing a black, pointed witch’s hat. She does not look at all uncomfortable.
Roie’s second brush with the censors – not, like the first, victorious – came about because she and Gavin were on remand on vagrancy charges. A writer and publisher named Walter Glover (1911-1983) offered them work, then a publishing deal. The book was The Art of Rosaleen Norton with Poems by Gavin Greenlees (1952). Early in 2024, a used copy was advertised online for £1216.67.
Not all of Roie’s artwork broke taboos. But several pictures went too far for Australia, which in the 1950s officially followed both the British moral values of a hundred years earlier and her own predominantly Christian conservatism. The Post Master General threatened prosecution because some of the book’s female figures were depicted with pubic hair (also considered illegal, it has to be said, in the UK). Subsequently, Glover was charged successfully with producing an obscene publication. He was fined £5 plus costs. The magistrate also recorded that two of Roie’s pictures must be blacked out in all copies. They were The Adversary (Lucifer with male genitalia) and Fohat (an entity, probably invented by Madame Blavatsky, which in Roie’s depiction is a demon with a serpentine phallus). Even this bowdlerisation was insufficient for U.S. Customs, which confiscated and burnt copies shipped to New York.
In response Roie wrote a furious and very good poem, which begins: “Behold, my friends the empty space/That doth this volume thus disgrace.” (It was included in a 1982 reprint).
Press stories linking Roie with obscenity and black magic also adversely affected other people. In 1955 David Goodman, owner of the Kashmir Café, was fined £5 plus costs for displaying Roie’s “lewd, lustful and erotic” paintings. Simultaneously Roie and Gavin were developing a fateful relationship with a celebrated English classical composer and conductor.
Eugene Goossens (1893-1962) had come to Australia in 1947 to become the first permanent conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. The city had no opera house. It’s now acknowledged that it was Goossens who looked out of the window of his home on Sydney Harbour, saw a disused tram depot on Bennelong Point, and later recommended that it should be cleared for what eventually was to become one of the world’s most iconic buildings. But when the Sydney Opera House was inaugurated in 1973, Sir Eugene’s name wasn’t even mentioned during the opening ceremony. This is why:
Goossens was an occultist. Among his musical coterie was the composer and critic Peter Warlock (1894-1930). As his pseudonym implies, Warlock was not only an occultist but one who had known Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Goossens learned ‘sex magick’ at only one remove from the man who spawned it. When Goossens discovered The Art of Rosaleen Norton in a Sydney bookshop, he made arrangements to meet her. Some may call it sex magick, others may dismiss it as group sex, but the orgies Goossens had with Roie, Gavin and others, enlivened by dressing up and a bit of fladge, sound like great fun and, to judge from the many extant letters and photos, they probably were.
While browsing shops in and around London’s Soho in 1956, the recently ennobled Sir Eugene Goossens found items that he wanted to share with Roie and Gavin. Little did he know that his movements were being monitored by journalists working in conjunction with Sydney police, who wanted more evidence of filthy sex at Roie’s flat. They were already in possession of photos developed from a roll of film that thieves Francis Honer and Raymond Ager had found down the back of Roie’s sofa and tried to sell to the Sydney Sun. The paper passed the snaps to the cops who arrested Roie and Gavin for “sex perversion.” They were fined £25 each.
On 9 March 1956, Sir Eugene was arrested at Sydney’s Mascot Airport by Vice Squad Detective Albert Trevenar. The conductor’s luggage was found to contain erotic photographs, books, a spool of film, ritual masks and incense sticks. He pleaded to the police, “Gentlemen, I beg of you not to let this be known; if I could make amends some other way.”
Sir Eugene was charged with possession of obscene materials and fined a maximum £100. He resigned from his posts in Australia, left the country never to return, and died of a ruptured ulcer six years later. On A Very Australian Scandal on BBC Radio 4 his most distinguished former pupil, Richard Bonynge, asserted, “I don’t believe it was anything more than a set-up. Somebody was out to get him.” Others have said the same thing.
Let’s discuss the exact nature of all those obscene materials. We know that Roie’s and Gavin’s “sex perversion” was mostly oral sex and probably some buggery. The flagellation was consensual sex play. It’s highly unlikely that the contents of Sir Eugene’s luggage, subsequently destroyed, would now qualify as pornography. There was “nothing really extreme”, says Drury in Sonia Bible’s interesting 2020 film The Witch of Kings Cross. The title of one of the ‘pornographic’ books was Flossie and Nancy’s Love Life.
By the time of the Goossens scandal, Gavin was already receiving treatment for schizophrenia that, according to contemporaries, was exacerbated by his use of amphetamines, notably Dexedrine. There were prolonged confinements to Callan Park, a psychiatric hospital in the Sydney suburbs. But Roie did not desert him. “She would remain his most valued contact with the outside world,” writes Drury. He was to outlive her. But he was not fully medically discharged until 1983, shortly before he died.
For the remainder of her life, Roie was famous for being famous. She entertained a succession of journalists and film-makers at her Kings Cross flat. One of them was Richard Neville (1941-2016), destined for Rosaleen Norton-style notoriety but on an international scale. In 1971 he was jailed in the UK along with two others for publishing the “School Kids Issue” of the counterculture magazine Oz. In 1962 Neville and co-writer Bob Walker had asked Roie how many were in her coven. She replied, “Roughly 300.” The number varied depending on who was asking the question.
Around 1982 Roie’s sister Cecily told Nevill Drury, “Roie didn’t have a coven as such. Roie had a group of occult friends.” This is borne out in The Witch of Kings Cross, when Roie’s painter friend John Martensen simply describes a party at the flat at which there was Cinzano Rosso and green ginger wine: “We stayed awake all night…and then at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, there was tramp-tramp-tramp on the stairs. The coppers are coming! And they made accusations.” We’ve all been to parties like that.
In 1967 Roie was on a TV programme called Seven Days “wearing a goat’s head mask and casting a spell.” Interviewer Phil Crookes reported, “We found Miss Norton to be a charming person.” Roie was then earning a living by making charms, performing hexes and accepting painting commissions. She charged £100 for a large canvas. Naturally, she was consulted on the findings of the Church Commission convened to discuss the effects of The Exorcist (1973). “Magic can send you round the bend,” she told the Sunday Mirror in 1975.
Surgery for cancer was unsuccessful and in 1979 Roie was taken to the Roman Catholic Sacred Heart Hospice for the Dying in Darlinghurst, which as a pagan she found amusing. She was cared for by Sister Jacinta de Capo who, after Roie’s death on 5 December 1979, told journalist Ned McCann, “If she was a witch, she was a very nice one.”
The legend of Rosaleen Norton, Witch of Kings Cross, took many decades to become established. Her art was not re-evalued. In the early 1980s, 37 of her paintings were bought for A$5000 by hotelier Jack Parker, who exhibited them at the Southern Cross Hotel in St Peters, South Sydney. In 1984 he told the Daily Telegraph that he’d removed them and sold them to a private buyer because they were not popular with his clientele, mostly truck drivers.
Her fame grew gradually for other reasons. Professor Marguerite Johnson of the University of Queensland is now regularly consulted about Roie. On A Very Australian Scandal she said, “I think Roie is far more popular now and people are far more interested in her, being an outcast of Australian cultural history.” Roie is in fact better-known than the all-but-forgotten Eugene Goossens.
By 1995, when I published my anti-censorship magazine, Scapegoat, things had changed radically in Australia. One of my Australasian correspondents – none other than David Blyth, director of splatter film Death Warmed Up (1984) – reported, “I regard censorship in this country as lenient, but I think this has been flavoured by having experienced the enormous censorship that existed in Australia in the Sixties. Late in [1969] Dracula Has Risen from the Grave was advertised as the first Dracula movie to have been passed by the censors in over twenty years.”
From the 1980s shame-faced Australian institutions began to make amends for the damage done to the reputation of Sir Eugene Goossens. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, who refused to give Sir Eugene a farewell party before he was forced out of the country in 1956, opened the Eugene Goossens Hall. And there is a bronze bust of Sir Eugene in the southern foyer of the Sydney Opera House. I should think so too.
DAVID McGILLIVRAY
Pan’s Daughter: The Magical World of Rosaleen Norton by Nevill Drury is published by Mandrake of Oxford
The Witch of Kings Cross:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKLDNpjxUps&t=2861sLike what we do? Support us and help us do more!
