Rosaleen Norton Australia’s 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 Sydney’s 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 Sydney’s red light and bohemian centre since at least the 1920s, these rectangular street markers are equal parts celebration of the Cross’s 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 kaleidoscope”2. 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 drunks”3. 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 3 Rosaleen Norton, Witches Want No Recruits, in Australasian Post, Jan 10 , 1957, p.35. Rosaleen Norton, Hitch-hiking Witch, in Australasian Post, Feb 7 , 1957, p.10. th th heart of the city. As an avowed night person, bisexual, artist and occultist Norton enjoyed the bonhomie of the Cross’s nocturnal inhabitants. Supporting herself as a pavement artist in the Eastern Suburbs and as an artist’s 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 matter”4. For his part Lindsay would describe Norton, in patronising terms, as a “grubby little girl with great skill who will not discipline herself”5. 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 school’s call the ‘Trance of Annihilation’”6. 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 5 Rosaleen Norton, The Art of Rosaleen Norton, Walter Glover, 1982 (1952), p.12-13 Question mark Collective, Rosaleen Norton. Australia’s 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 Goossen’s 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 Norton’s 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 Norton’s ‘witchcraft’ and ‘scandal’ provided suitably salacious fodder for the Australian press, her art was largely ignored by the galleries and critics. However the more outré 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 café. 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 country’s 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 forces”8 – playing the black pieces - mocking the popular cliché of the occult and the gullibility of the press. Rosaleen Norton’s 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 witch”9. 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 9 Rosaleen Norton, Witches Want No Recruits, in Australasian Post, Jan 10 , 1957, p.4 Ibid, p.35. th 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 me”10. 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 Crowley’s system is open to conjecture, however the magical potentials of transgressive sexuality and sexual acts can not be underestimated. Most importantly Norton’s 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 beholder”12. 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 Norton’s art. 10 11 Ibid, p.35. 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 Norton’s 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 Sydney’s numerous galleries. The best examples of Norton’s 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, Pan’s 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. Australia’s 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. Author’s 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.