Rosaleen Norton Australias Magical Visionary

By

Jack Sargeant

There can on occasion be something deeply unearthly about Sydney. During

recent forest fires the sky was vivid luminescent yellow grey, the wind hot, the air
smelling of ash from the flames devouring the trees dozens, even hundreds of
kilometres way, an atmosphere somehow more redolent of H.P Lovecraft than
Home and Away.

Walk through Sydneys Kings Cross neighbourhood and you will see large brass
plaques fixed in the pavement. Located near the naval docks and a short walk
from the city centre, Kings Cross has been known as Sydneys red light and
bohemian centre since at least the 1920s, these rectangular street markers are
equal parts celebration of the Crosss less than salubrious past and an attempt at
urban regeneration via acceptable tourism. Partway between the tourist mecca of
the El Alamain Fountain and the rows of strip clubs on Darlinghurst Road,
amongst the names of famous drag queens and local community campaigners1
is a plaque that reads: Rosaleen Norton, and a second plaque that reads: born
in a thunderstorm with pointed ears genius or crank? To the casual tourist
merely another life summarised in a single sentence. But Rosaleen Norton was
far more than this.

Born in New Zealand in October 1917, the seven-year-old Rosaleen Norton

immigrated to Australia with her family, settling in Lindfield in the north shore
suburbs of Sydney. Different from many of her contemporaries, the youthful

1
Including Juanita Nielsen who campaigned to save the Victorian streets from urban developers
in the seventies and went missing one morning in July, 1975, never to be seen again. Something
of a local conspiracy and rumours vary from her body being cut up in a bath tub to being buried
under the runway of the airport.
Norton chose to sleep in a tent in the garden where she enjoyed the company of
an orb spider. The spider scared her family away from her tent, guaranteeing a
degree of privacy, and helping cement her understanding of nature and love of
the night. As a child she was aware of a world wherein moved vast mysterious
powers, the sense of gay daemonic presences and hauntingly familiar
atmospheres, elusive yet powerful and compelling, when everything around me
seemed to change focus like patterns in a kaleidoscope2. She would also
describe various visions she experienced as a child, including a spectre of a
dragon. These made her acutely aware of other dimensions beyond the material
world, which she perceived as another aspect of reality, and which profoundly
informed both her artwork and her magical philosophy.

The first hints of the scandals which would come to plague her life began when
she was still at school, drawing a picture inspired by St Saens Danse Macabre
which horrified the teachers at Chatswood Girls Grammar school who simply saw
her as an immoral influence on her fellow pupils. She was duly expelled. Her
artistic talents won her a place at East Sydney Technical College, where two
teachers similarly tried to have her expelled before the college head gave her
work his support. Once at the college she moved across the harbour to a world
vastly different from her previous suburban home life.

Staying in a hotel known colloquially as Buggery Barn that was close to Circular
Quay she immediately fitted in to this transient community she described as
artists, writers, musicians and drunks3. Soon after she would move further east
to Darlinghurst, then a run down neighbourhood located next to Kings Cross.
Despite occasional accusations of vagrancy thanks to the poor standard of
housing available for the working classes, Rosaleen would spend most of her life
living in or near to Kings Cross, the zone of obscenity that remains the (unofficial)

2 th
Rosaleen Norton, Witches Want No Recruits, in Australasian Post, Jan 10 , 1957, p.35.
3 th
Rosaleen Norton, Hitch-hiking Witch, in Australasian Post, Feb 7 , 1957, p.10.
heart of the city. As an avowed night person, bisexual, artist and occultist Norton
enjoyed the bonhomie of the Crosss nocturnal inhabitants.

Supporting herself as a pavement artist in the Eastern Suburbs and as an artists

model she eked out a meagre living while studying. She modelled for Norman
Lindsay, whose paintings contained some of the eroticised mysticism that would
become a characteristic of her work. Norton (writing anonymously) understood a
crucial difference between their work however: his is a Daylight world and the
satirical element is used as a foil rather than admitted as another form of beauty.
The vision of Rosaleen Norton is one of Night; she dislikes any of the stereotypes
of beauty and finds the Daylight world in general does not make good subject
matter4.

For his part Lindsay would describe Norton, in patronising terms, as a grubby
little girl with great skill who will not discipline herself5. She would go on to do a
series of casual jobs, but she would primarily focus on her twin passions: art and
what would come to be seen by the moralistic tongue clicking wowsers of the
conservative Australian press as satanic and witchy beliefs.

Norton devoted time to pursuing her personal study of trance states and the
unconscious. Pushing herself to the limits of experience a fearless exploration of
possibilities, in her autobiographical articles produced for the Australasian Post
she described entering a deep trance lasting five days what some Buddhist
schools call the Trance of Annihilation6. Norton was also reported to take a
variety of drugs in order to facilitate her psychic journeys and visionary states.

Rosaleen also spent time to read key psychological and esoteric works; C.G.
Jung, Eastern philosophy, theosophy, and subsequently more directly magical

4
Rosaleen Norton, The Art of Rosaleen Norton, Walter Glover, 1982 (1952), p.12-13
5
Question mark Collective, Rosaleen Norton. Australias Favourite Witch,
http://www.takver.com/history/rosaleen.htm
6 th
Rosaleen Norton, Witches Want No Recruits, in Australasian Post, Jan 10 , 1957, p.5.
texts. Through her meticulous reading of occult topics and her numerous
personal observations she framed her experiences within a directly metaphysical
rather than psychological framework. The magical universes she experienced
informing her artwork, which frequently depicted beings witnessed during these
trances alongside images of the artist in a state of meditation and psychically
crossing over another plane of being.

Rosaleen - already an experienced hitchhiker, rail rider, and stowaway from

previous travels across eastern Australia - travelled to Melbourne in 1949 with
her lover the poet Gavin Greenlees in order to organise a show at the university.
Four of the works included in the exhibition were seized by the police and
prosecuted as obscene. Norton fought the absurd censorship laws, and won the
case, but this did not help her sell any work, and she returned to Sydney.

In 1952 Walter Glover published a book of her work entitled The Art of Rosaleen
Norton , complementing each of the images were poems by Greenlees. There
was talk of publishing the book in bat skin, although nothing came of this
wonderfully arcane idea. Produced in a numbered edition of 500 the book should
have been a success but again the work was seized by the authorities, who in
the Antipodean summer of 1953 judged two of the pictures to be obscene,
necessitating the book was sold with the offending pages disfigured with a thick
smear of censorious ink. Moreover, the book was banned by American customs,
and copies sent there were seized and destroyed. The negative publicity,
restrictive laws effecting distribution, and essentially state vandalised books did
not sell, and Glover lost his money. The book would eventually be republished in
1982 by Glover, but Norton would not live to see the book given the respect it
deserved.

In September 1955 an itinerant New Zealander Anna Hoffman was arrested for
vagrancy. On her arrest she claimed to have been a part of a black mass run by
Norton, or at least that is what the police claimed, Hoffman denied ever making
these accusations.

These accusations were nonsense, but yet again Norton and Greenlees were the
source of tabloid interest and legal harassment. The tabloid interest grew when
photos of Norton and Greenlees in flagrante delicto appeared thanks to two
thieves who tried to sell the stolen black and white sex pictures to the press.
News of these images profoundly shocked conservative Australia. Eventually
Norton and Greenlees would be found guilty of assisting in the production of
obscene photographs in April 1957 and would be fined.

On March 9th, 1956, Sir Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Sydney Symphony
Orchestra, was arriving in Australia from his native England. An intellectual and
artist Goossens was a friend of Norton and Greenlees and had reportedly
participated in magical ceremonies at their house, including sex magic rituals.
Customs official were interested in Goossens luggage - something that was
unusual at the time especially considering his VIP status - and searched it. The
officials found 1166 obscene items, including photographs and ritual masks.
Goossens was charged with importing prohibited goods.

The ensuing scandal destroyed the career of the conductor, who left Australia
two months later. It has never been fully explained why the authorities chose to
search the acclaimed conductor, but it is believed by many that the authorities
stole letters discussing sex magick from Goossens to Norton when they illegally
searched Nortons home7.

7
See: Keith Richmond, The Occult Visions of Rosaleen Norton, p.7. In her paper The Witch of
Kings Cross Rosaleen Norton and the Australian Media Marguerite Johnson suggests that the
letters had been appropriated by a senior crime reporter and handed to the Vice Squad. Note
that in Phillip Sametz's book Play On! the story of Goossens implies that some believe the
conductor was framed, while others believe that he was actually involved in a national security
scandal (p.174-182).
While Rosaleen Nortons witchcraft and scandal provided suitably salacious
fodder for the Australian press, her art was largely ignored by the galleries and
critics. However the more outr coffee shops and bars of Kings Cross would
often exhibit her work and she would occasionally sell works through these local
beatnik haunts. She was also employed on occasion to paint murals in cafes and
clubs.

With the authorities investigating Goossens, the lurid sex photos, and bleak
accusations of magical rituals, the police took it upon themselves to prosecute
Norton for exhibiting obscene pictures at the Kashmir caf. Norton was found
guilty in October 1957 and, after numerous appeals, a number of her paintings
were destroyed in 1960 by the authorities, making Norton unique amongst
Australian artists and indicative of the level of persecution she faced from the
repressive elements of conservative Australia for being outspoken in her religious
beliefs, aesthetic and social tastes, and sexuality. The series of legal battles and
salacious news stories finally took the toll on Norton and Greenlees. Norton
would retreat from the public eye in the 60s, while Greenlees was
institutionalised with mental health problems aggravated by the continual
harassment.

Norton remained defiant to the end, continuing to produce her esoteric artworks
and practice magic until her death from cancer on December 5th, 1979. Gavin
Greenlees would die four years later and, in a final note of synchronicity, passed
away on the same date as Rosaleen had.

As Keith Richmond notes in his writing on Norton what seems remarkable now is
the apparent lack of support she received during her trials, even when her
artwork was destroyed by the state, there was no outcry from museums or
artists, suggesting that the countrys artistic and intellectual communities were
either paralysed by cowardice or bloated with indifference. Such a lack of action
remains shocking to this day.
Sidebar 1:

While the media made much of the Witch of Kings Cross and her black masses
such accusations clearly failed to convey her beliefs, the media preferring instead
the images of lascivious devilishness and witchcraft rather than the truth. On one
occasion Norton was photographed in a cape, playing chess a contest between
black and white during which she manipulated the dark forces8 playing the
black pieces - mocking the popular clich of the occult and the gullibility of the
press.

Rosaleen Nortons beliefs were syncretic, they acknowledged a pantheon that

included gods such as Jupiter, Baphomet, Hecate, Neptune and Lucifer, and
notably in The Art of Rosaleen Norton there is a picture of the Voodoo Loa Baron
Samdi. However the central deity she worshipped was Pan.

In her belief system Pan represented the generative power and her first magical
ritual was in honor of the horned god, whose pipes are a symbol of magic and
mystery, and whose horns and hooves stand for natural energies and fleetfooted
freedom; And this rite was also my oath of allegiance and my confirmation as a
witch9. She understood gods as self-willed, beyond mere representation of
psychological forces to be acted upon, the gods would appear to the adept if they
chose to rather than at the whim of magician.

Her readings in the occult included the work of Aleister Crowley, Eliphas Levi,
and Dion Fortune, amongst others, suggesting that her worship of Pan was
mediated through a prism of other magical systems. In the Australasian Post
Norton is pictured before an alter above which is written Uriel, the Archangel of

8 th
Rosaleen Norton, Witches Want No Recruits, in Australasian Post, Jan 10 , 1957, p.4
9
Ibid, p.35.
the Earth more commonly associated with the Qabbalistic rituals of ceremonial
magic than traditional witchcraft.

In her autobiographical articles she observed that the onset of adolescence

often awakens the religious urge as well as the sexual urge, and this was so with
me10. The relationship between sexual practice and magical ritual find its most
explicit form in the ceremonial and ritual workings advocated by Crowley.
Whether or not Norton practiced Crowleys system is open to conjecture,
however the magical potentials of transgressive sexuality and sexual acts can
not be underestimated.

Most importantly Nortons belief system was fully integrated into her daily life, as
she wrote: As for Do I feel frightened of the things I see? No! Never! Most of
them are as familiar a part of my world as the teapot is. And as necessary to
me.11

Sidebar 2:

I do draw my own conception of beauty, which, like any other quality (including
obscenity, as I have remarked before), is in the eye of the beholder12.

A fan of science fiction magazines such as Amazing Fantasy the exotic fantasy
artwork had an early influence on Norton, alongside artists such as Henry Fuseli,
Odelin Redon, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dali and Norman Lindsay. Artists who all
embraced personal vision and many of whom were at some point viewed as
scandalous. Whether or not she was familiar with the work of Austin Osman
Spare and Felician Rops the visionary work of both of these artists also finds
some thematic echoes within Nortons art.

10
Ibid, p.35.
11
Ibid, p.35.
12
Ibid, p.5.
Rosaleen Norton commonly worked in watercolours, pastels, and pencils, but
later in her life she explored oils. Thematically her artwork combined numerous
elements, ranging from sexually charged images of entities, figures that combine
animal heads and human bodies, orgiastic celebrations of bacchanalian revelry,
and blackly humorous digs at authority figures. In many pictures male and female
bodies are combined creating hybrid, pandrogenous forms with both breasts and
penises, neither male nor female, but not defined by any form of lack, these
figures represent the union of opposites and the equal combination of forces at
play within the universe, the spirit forms often contrast with the figure of the
meditating magician, presumably Norton herself, who is occasionally depicted
laying naked in a yogic trance, thus pictures depict Norton in both material and
ethereal form.

In several works these images from liminal and hypnagogic states were
graphically depicted against ambiguous backgrounds of swirling aleatory forms
and landscapes, or alternatively breaking the flow of the image with broad lines
that criss-cross the visual plane, fragmenting the picture in a manner that
superficially recalls the work of early twentieth century radical artists such as the
Futurists or Cubists. However, while the Futurists and Cubists were examining
new radical representations of the modern world inspired by revolutionary
manifestos, Norton was examining other internal and metaphysical states of
being and the magical processes associated with the transition to these worlds
inspired by personal study.

Another visual reference would be the curves and fragmentation of art nouveau
and art deco, and certainly the architecture around Nortons beloved Kings Cross
embraced these styles, as did much of the stylish side of Sydney celebrated in
the local press anxious to present a cosmopolitan face to the world. However
Norton believed that her use of baroque curves and sharp angles comes from
her own unconscious urge to articulate the hidden realms and states, rather than
from modern design. Symbols and sigils also occur in her pictures, indicating
again her interest in the magical world, and emphasising the magical nature of
her work.

Sources:

Effectively dismissed as, at best, a kook and, more often for worse, as a morally
defective deviant in her lifetime, her paintings are now largely in the hands of
private collectors, and are not on permanent exhibition in any of the Sydneys
numerous galleries. The best examples of Nortons work pre-1952 can be found
in The Art of Rosaleen Norton, while this volume is currently out of print, second
hand copies can be found online, commonly costing approx US$150.

James Cockington, History Happened Here Strange But True Stories From
Australian Suburbia, ABC Books, 2003.

Nevill Drury, Pans Daughter, Collins Australia, 1988.

Marguerite Johnson, The Witch of Kings Cross Rosaleen Norton and the
Australian Media http://www.newcastle.edu.au/school/humanities/staff/
johnsonmarguerite/Roie%20Version%203.doc.

Richard Metzger, editor, Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magic and
the Occult, Disinformation, 2005.

Rosaleen Norton & Gavin Greenlees, The Art of Rosaleen Norton, Walter Glover,
1982.

Keith Richmond, The Occult Visions of Rosaleen Norton, Oceania Lodge of the
Ordo Templi Orientis and The Kings Cross Arts Guild, exhibition catalogue, 2000.

Phillip Sametz, Play On! 60 Years of Music-Making with the Sydney Symphony
Orchestra, ABC Books, 1992.

Question Mark Collective, Rosaleen Norton. Australias Favourite Witch,

http://www.takver.com/history/rosaleen.htm
My thanks to the staff at the State Reference Library of New South Wales and at
Kings Cross Library for their assistance in locating copies of the Australasian
Post and books on the history and culture of Kings Cross and its colourful
inhabitants. Many thanks also to Ian Drummond and Barry Hale.

Authors Bio.
Dividing his time between northern and southern hemispheres Jack Sargeant is
a regular contributor to Fortean Times and the author and editor of numerous
books and essays on forbidden, strange and underground culture. When not
writing he lectures and curates, check out www.jacktext.net and
www.myspace.com/jack_sargeant for updates.