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(ominous music)
(birds tweeting)
- [Girl] Once upon a time, there was a little girl
who wasn't afraid of the dark.
When she grew up, she became an artist,
and people called her a witch.
(bell tolling)
She made them afraid,
(dramatic beat)
and they were always watching to see what she would do.
(bell tolling)
(dramatic music)
So she put on a hat, and told them her story,
and gave them something to watch.
(dramatic music)
Her name was Rosaleen Norton.
She was the Witch of Kings Cross.
(dramatic music)
(fabric flaps)
(gentle music)
- For the first time in centuries,
a witch has written a full confession,
a revelation of her weird inhuman power.
Artist Rosaleen Norton charged by police
for exhibiting obscene paintings.
- They were arrested,
they were thrown in jail overnight.
- They all have a twist of the grotesque
or the bizarre.
- It was provocative stuff.
- I wouldn't call her a surrealist by any stretch.
Although some of her practises
could certainly be linked to that.
- She's drawing on the depths of her unconscious.
Accessed through trance.
- Artist and lover arrested after photographs
of bizarre sex acts.
- One of the most dramatic things
was the involvement of Eugene Goossens,
who was knighted by the Queen.
- World famous conductor
disgraced in pornography scandal.
(whip cracking)
- Roie lived expressing herself sexually,
however she wanted.
- Satanists at Cross in weird ritual.
The witches sing,
"Satan is the lord of the hunting horn,
and king of the Coven tree. "
- Well, she was an artist.
She was a performer.
And. . she created herself, she invented herself.
(ominous music)
- It's kind of a cliché to describe her as an eccentric,
but I mean there's the gold plaque in Kings Cross
where it says "genius or crank"
- She was a harmless sort of witch.
Especially as her spells didn't work.
- There's things real and imaginary,
but I know in her environment
I felt like I was in a sort of powerhouse.
(ominous music continues)
- Everybody wants to look and find out a little bit more.
It is such a romantic and threatening. .
image,
the image of the witch.
(ominous music continues)
- "And so begins my journal of E-Goetry.
(thunder)
In this journal I shall write my secret
and real thoughts about myself.
It will be an orgy of dwelling upon my own peculiarities,
which will be a mighty relief. "
- It's hard to know whether she was a witch,
or if that was the thing that she, as an artist, created.
(rolling thunder)
(insects buzzing)
- "When Gavin Greenlees and I
hitchhiked from Sydney to Melbourne,
it was with the purpose of finding a gallery
to exhibit my work. "
- They hitchhiked down there with a cat
called Geoffrey stuffed in a bag.
(cat yowls)
(soft piano music)
(sound of typewriter)
(car engine sputtering)
- Roie's artwork was exhibited
at the Rowden White Gallery in 1949 in Melbourne.
- It was actually part of the library
at Melbourne University,
and it was quite a prestigious little gallery.
- That was her first big exhibition.
They thought they'll just have a show of her drawings;
they're a bit pagan, they're a bit outrageous.
But they're not going to cause any great drama.
(piano music)
- This exhibition of her work,
which promised Roie all of the attention
a young artist would be seeking,
in fact, backfired very badly.
(speaking indistinctly)
(classical music)
- Some of the viewers came in
and said this was stark sensuality running riot
and things like that.
- And then the penny fell, the police came.
(people exclaim)
- She was charged with exhibiting indecent images.
And there was a court case that ensued.
- The Crown Prosecutor alleges
that work of this sort
could deprave and corrupt the morals of those who saw them.
- It also was extremely unusual;
it was the first prosecution
ever carried out against a female artist.
It was the first prosecution of that type in recent times.
- "Miss Norton said that she would leave it
to the public to judge her art. "
- There was a lot of sympathy,
but there was also a real danger
that she could be in quite serious trouble.
- And she took a public stand.
- "Obscenity, like beauty,
is in the eye of the beholder. "
(classical music continues)
- Roie never, ever apologised for herself.
She got up there and she defended that art.
- And she later explained to the magistrates
that the panther is a symbol of the dark night,
the unmanifest night,
the unmanifest potential that everybody has.
So she didn't see it as a rude or over sexual picture,
but it looked like a naked woman having sex with an animal,
a raging animal.
And then in the background there was a nun
on a crucifix giving a bit of a wink.
So it was provocative stuff.
(classical music flourishes)
- She also talked about the fact that, yes,
these artworks show people naked,
yes, these artworks show occult practises.
And to top it all off she opened her mouth and said,
"I participate in this sort of activity,
and these are the beings who visit me. "
(dramatic classical music)
Roie was just hitting every button
in terms of attracting negative media attention to herself.
And what happened in 1949 showed the Australian press
that Rosaleen Norton was really good fodder
to sell newspapers.
And it was the beginning of the Witch of Kings Cross.
(thunder rumbling)
- "Perhaps I'd better begin at the beginning.
(gentle classical music)
I was born at Dunedin, New Zealand at 4 a. m.
during a violent thunderstorm. "
(water rushing)
(lightning, thunder rumbling)
"I have loved night and storms all my life. "
"Storms arouse in me an elated, almost drunken sensation. "
(thunder rumbling)
"Night is for me the time when all my perceptions are alert,
when I feel most awake and function best. "
- She said she was born as a witch, I think.
That she was born on the night of a thunderstorm.
She had pointed ears, she said.
And she had a kind of blue birthmark somewhere.
So she took all this as a sign that she was different.
- "At seven years old,
two small blue marks appeared on my left knee
and they are still there.
I have since learned
that they are among the traditional witch marks.
I remember noticing them the year we arrived in Australia. "
(foghorn)
(gentle music)
- Roie was born into a very comfortable
middle class family.
- Fairly conventional upbringing.
Her two sisters were conventional as well.
- "My mother was a highly emotional woman.
Any attempt at a pleasant relationship
between us was doomed to fail. "
- Her dad was a really senior figure in merchant shipping.
- "I saw comparatively little of my father
who was away at sea for most of the time.
Incidentally, he was a cousin of Vaughan Williams,
the composer, to whom he bore a strong family resemblance.
(clasicall music)
In 1924, my family settled in Australia at Lindfield,
a Sydney suburb where I lived for the next ten years. "
- As a kid, for about three years or four years,
she refused to live in the house.
And she lived in a tent in the backyard.
(ominous music)
- "As a child my chief aim
was to be left to my own devices. "
- She liked being outside in the dark
and she liked to have an orb spider in the tent.
- And she kept all sorts of
little critters in the tent
that obviously were designed to keep people out,
because they were a bit scary.
(classical music)
- You can see the rebel in her,
rebelling against Christianity,
rebelling against the mores of society at such a young age.
- "The onset of adolescence
often awakens the religious
as well as the sexual urge,
and this was so with me.
For some time, I had been constantly aware
of a world of vast mysterious powers. "
(gentle music)
"If the kingdom of Pan had always been with me,
it had been mostly in the background overlaid by reality. "
"Now it had begun to emerge. "
"My awareness grew stronger and stronger,
that the tedious world of childhood didn't really matter.
Because this held the essence of all
that called to my inmost being. "
(classical music rises)
- Once Rosaleen Norton had adopted this pagan outlook
as a teenager of 13,
living at Lindfield in a very respectable house,
she made a commitment that she was going to follow
these pagan forces right through her life.
- And as soon as she could get out,
she wrote a note and left it in the house,
and she headed for the city.
(lively music)
- She studied at East Sydney Tech,
where she was encouraged by Rayner Hoff,
the famous sculptor.
- Rayner Hoff, by all accounts was, what's the term,
they called him a raging pagan.
And he was an odd influence obviously over his students,
but he was adored by them.
(gentle music)
- She was a naughty student.
She didn't listen,
and she wasn't interested in executing the perfect body.
What she was interested in was interpreting the body.
- "Hoff allowed me to depart from routine
and spend my time at figure drawing and composition. "
(shrill, tense music)
- Rayner Hoff had a grandness that he gave the figure.
At the forefront was the way of depicting the figure
almost god-like, and idealised, and the spirit within.
- "Hoff had been in trouble with the church
over two sculptures he designed for the Anzac War Memorial.
They were beautiful pieces,
and it was sad that they were never made.
Apparently, the image of a naked woman
on a public building was far too controversial!"
- The Catholic archbishop
has condemned the sculpture,
saying it is insulting to God.
- It's a wonderful example of how the smallest things
at that point in time could anger the authorities,
but particularly the use of any religious
or spiritual element within art.
(whistle blowing)
(soft music)
- "Assorted painters, poets,
writers of various sexes,
broke, talented, ambiguously wedded to the arts and plonk,
came and went.
All our time seemed to be spent working and drinking,
as well as begging, borrowing, stealing,
and occasionally buying food. "
- I never saw Roie cook anything.
I don't know what they ate.
I think they lived on cups of tea out of tin mugs.
She would always say "Have a cuppa?"
She would say, "Oh Christ Eileen, I am something. "
So that's how she spoke.
(gentle music)
- "Various rooms and studies had elastic limits.
Strange drawings, luggage, bottles or bodies
scattered about the floor.
Vignettes stand out in memory. "
- She did a bit of modelling.
- "I posed for Norman Lindsay
as the figure on the bull. "
- She was influenced by Norman Lindsay,
but not her subject matter.
- Some people have compared Rosaleen Norton
with Norman Lindsay.
But she always said that Norman Lindsay
was an artist of the daytime.
They're fairly mainstream figures of light.
And she said, "I'm not like that.
I'm definitely an artist from the dark side. "
(gentle music)
She was a creature of the night,
and she referred to herself as a dark spirit.
(gentle music)
- Shall I tell you the scandalous part?
- [Interviewer] Yes.
- Roie told me that she lost her virginity in Pakie's,
but she did it because she was curious.
She was tired of being a virgin.
- "I had a boyfriend, Beresford.
World War Two had started so we got married
before Beresford enlisted and was sent to New Guinea. "
- He was away for perhaps two years,
and it would have been an extraordinary experience.
(plane rumbling)
(gentle music)
- "Only one thing ever makes me afraid. "
(gun fires)
"The vibrations of human beings. "
(bombs exploding)
(guns firing)
(crowd cheering)
- [Announcer] Peace is wonderful.
- He came back from New Guinea
and they seem to have parted company almost immediately.
(gentle music)
- "Eventually I decided
to experiment with self-induced trance.
The idea being to induce an abnormal state of consciousness.
I decided to apply psychic stimulus to the sub-conscious.
I collected together a variety of things, aromatic leaves,
wine, a lighted fire, a mummified hoof.
I darkened the room and tried to clear my mind
of all conscious thought.
(ominous music)
My eyes would shut, and I was merely aware
that I was drawing on a blank sheet of paper in front of me.
I knew that somewhere in the depths of the unconscious,
the individual would contain in essence,
the accumulated knowledge of mankind. "
(ominous ambient music)
- She believed that the gods lived there,
in an inner world.
If she went into the inner plains in trance state,
she could meet them halfway.
They would come down from their heights
and she would rise up in trance,
and they would have dialogue.
And she could also base some of her pictures
on those gods and goddesses.
So that's where she got some of her imagery from.
(bell tolls)
(ominous music)
- "All through my trances,
as a recurrent motif is the being that I know as the other.
It is familiar and as near to me, as myself.
In fact, it seems to be a complementary part of my self,
separate yet united with me. "
- She comes from a very unique space
in the context of Australian art.
She's most easily placed into the genre
which is now being called esoteric art,
which is artwork which is concerned
with spiritual journey.
(ominous music)
- There have been relatively few visionary artists
in Australia, and Roie Norton would definitely be
the most prominent figure of that style of art.
(bell tolls)
(ominous music)
Some of the earliest works of Roie Norton
are published in a little magazine called Pertinent.
(ominous music)
- "Pertinent feels that in Miss Rosaleen Norton,
there is an artist worthy of comparison
with some of the best Continental,
American and English contemporaries. "
(ominous music)
- Roie met Gavin Greenlees
at some point quite early on when she moved to the Cross.
And he was a young up and coming poet
who was publishing in magazines.
- They both finished up writing
and creating for Pertinent.
(soft jazz)
- He was a young man
who was regarded as a brilliant child.
- He was very talented too,
and interested in surrealism and the inner world.
So they were a natural combination.
Originally, she was just a protector,
but later on they became lovers,
but there was a big age difference between them.
(jazz continues)
- He was a very slim person.
I would call him a spare man - S-P-A-R, S-P-E-R,
not a spare man but a thin man, spare in, mm.
- Loose-limbed, flexible, floating with the breeze,
he was like a dream coming through.
(jazz)
- Gavin was also homosexual,
and homosexuality was illegal in Australia,
as was practising magic.
So they were, in a lot of ways,
social and legal refugees who came together.
(jazz continues)
- "My work was slowly
starting to get recognition.
I'd been showing in nightclubs and cafes in Sydney.
I was part of a group show in Adelaide
where art critics praised my paintings.
(light jazz music)
It was time for a solo exhibition
and Gavin had a connection at Melbourne University. "
(classical music)
(tram bell ringing)
(policeman blowing whistle)
- Read all about it.
- Up to that stage, they'd been getting
some quite wonderful publicity.
She'd told the newspapers that she did some of the paintings
while she was in a trance.
For whatever reason, the media just loved it.
They absolutely lapped it up.
- So what you have in 1949 in Melbourne
is a media scandal.
Woman producing obscene art, woman upsetting people.
Art taken out of galleries.
(classical music)
- She won her case but she didn't have much money
to go back to Sydney.
They got back eventually,
but she and Gavin had great trouble getting back.
- "Here I am with a thousand pounds
worth of publicity,
and I can't sell a painting. "
- And it was at that phase they
then moved into their Kings Cross life.
(jazz music)
- It was filled with coffee shops that had different themes.
They were all a little bit teeny tiny.
(jazz music)
Poets doing poetry and it would always be against society.
(horn honking)
(jazz continues)
- And it had a history, Dobell and Drysdale,
all these great Australian artists had lived there.
- There was lots of characters around the place.
Well, I suppose you'd call them bohemian.
(jazz music)
- The mavericks, the outcasts of society.
- Artists, dancers, homosexuals,
transvestites, transsexuals.
(jazz music)
- Where jazz was happening,
where there was nightclubs,
where there was strippers and sex stuff happening.
Obviously, there was crime there as well.
(jazz music)
- The cafes were open all night,
and you could discuss,
you could play chess, you could smoke, you could engage.
And that was the intellectual environment that she craved.
(ominous music)
- It was an entire neighbourhood of night people.
The night is a world of possibilities,
and the night is a world of opportunities.
And if you think of how harsh the Australian sunlight is,
and how it kind of bleaches everything out.
The darkness of night is actually a time
when difference and depth and perception
suddenly becomes more important.
- On misty nights. . in Woolloomooloo,
it had this sort of strange atmosphere.
(ominous music)
Roie wrote a poem about it.
- "Lights black majesty, midnight sun,
lord of the wild and living stars.
Soul of magic and master of death,
panther of night, enfold me.
Take me dark shining one,
mingle my being with you.
Prowl in my spirit with deep purring joy,
live in me, giver of terror and ecstasy.
Touch me with tongues of black fire.
Night, freakish night,
sets me free. "
(ominous music)
- She's not scared of things,
she's not scared of the dark.
The dark is somewhere where you can be safe.
(ominous music)
Maybe when you think about it, that's why people were,
the dominant culture was so shocked by her work,
because she was quite happy in a darkness.
(gentle guitar music)
- Rosaleen and Gavin moved
into this decrepit three storey terrace house,
cream and brown, in Brougham Street.
It was an old house, and in the front
were two beautiful big palm trees leaping up.
(gentle music continues)
There was always a cup of tea and something that she had
and she was often without food herself,
but she would share what she had.
There was a cellar underneath, a sort of an annex
at the back where Roie and Gavin used to live.
(gentle music continues)
And it was altogether a rather nice place.
We loved it.
- And it was definitely a house of ill repute
as far as the police were concerned.
There was an SP bookmaker there,
sly grog was sold by the landlord.
- "Overnight party, Gavin was mad,
seeing the second coming of Jesus Christ.
Hall covered in blood one morning,
razor slashing from upstairs ménage.
Tough bodgie type pulled gun, shot hallstand to pieces. "
(gun fires) "I never did like that hallstand anyway. "
- It was actually the habit of the police
to raid it on occasion,
and the preferred charge of choice was vagrancy,
which was basically the crime
of not having enough money to support yourself.
(gentle music)
So they were arrested for vagrancy.
(prison door slams)
- "Wally read the newspaper account
about our arrest, and to get out of jail
we needed employment within a fortnight. "
- Walter Glover had quite good connections
with the printing industry.
He knew people that could typeset,
he knew people who could bind.
- He was a lovely man, but a little bit of a spiv.
He always had an idea, something new, something fresh,
something that was going to make a quid here or there.
- Walter Glover put to them a proposition
that they should produce a book together,
which he would publish.
It would showcase Rosaleen's beautiful artwork
and Gavin's transcendental poetry.
- "For the first time we had money.
(classical music swells)
We obtained enough booze and drugs
to freely escape into the world of the book. "
(classical music)
- Rosaleen had a figure called Janicot,
who was her magical ally and familiar.
And there's a wonderful picture showing Janicot
peering over her shoulder,
where they're considering how to go up and reach Pan.
(classical music)
(ominous music)
- "The Goat-God laughs:
Immortal joy is golden lightning from his eyes.
Primal, ageless, wild and wise. "
(ominous music)
- There's a figure here called the Master,
which people could easily construe
as a demonic or satanic picture.
If we look closer at this image,
it's really a figure of Pan.
(explosion)
(esoteric music)
- He was her guardian spirit.
- She's really implying that he is the foundation
of the whole universe, the foundation of all knowledge.
- Pan is the god of life.
He is the god of reproduction.
(esoteric music continues)
(ominous choral music)
(ominous music)
- Lilith comes from a different tradition to Pan.
Lilith comes from a Hebrew tradition.
- It's a fantastic drawing
and it's absolutely rich with symbolism.
We see Lilith has a little horn along the top of her head,
so she's the horned goddess.
There's also the moon there in the centre of the horn.
And of course, her hair's writhing with snakes.
The Snake Goddess was crucial to the Great Goddess.
The snake sloughed its skin,
and the snake is a symbol of the circle of rebirth.
- "Where Lilith is,
there is night and the regions of darkness.
Eternity lives there,
and fathomless voids are their secrets. "
(dramatic music)
- Lilith is also highly sexualized.
Lilith loves flying in at night, getting on top of men,
riding them, taking their energy
and their essence and then flying off again.
(dramatic music)
So for Roie, Lilith represented the sex drive
and the pleasures of female freedom.
(dramatic music continues)
I think that was very important for Roie,
because she was a very sexualized woman.
(tense music)
(ominous music)
- The representations of sexuality
and of the male figure with an incredibly long penis.
Now, in earlier Neolithic religions the penis
is a symbol of fertility.
Quite often the public would have seen her drawings
of these figures as pornographic,
not understanding anything of the history of the body
and the way in which sexual areas of the body
were once seen to signify fertility,
and the continuation of the group.
(ominous music)
- When we look at Rosaleen's influences
I think we can say that the main ones were the Kabbalah,
which the Jewish mystical tradition.
And that has the Tree of Life symbol,
and you ascend through the spheres on the Tree of Life,
and that's your path of progress as a spiritual initiate.
(ominous music)
- "Geburah, meaning strength.
Binah is understanding. "
(ominous music)
- "Individuation" is a really interesting picture,
because it refers specifically to Carl Jung,
who coined the term.
- What we see is the ouroboros which is the snake
which is actually devouring its own tail.
(rising classical music)
We have to devour one's self to birth one's self
as a whole being.
- The figure has breasts as well as a penis,
so it's a composite figure.
- And it was very obviously heavily based then
on being female and male.
But when we actually work in that archetypal space,
we talk about the feminine and the masculine.
And both male and female have
all of these characteristics within themselves.
(classical music)
- Norton's work, you could almost argue,
is a visual manifestation of a lot of Jung's ideas.
(ominous music)
- "What do I mean there by Archetypal self?
Do I mean my archetypal self or the abstraction?"
- She has the ability to move
from the literal to the symbolic.
And like Jung would always say,
in the tension of the two opposites is that numinous
or that mysterious third.
And I really feel all her archetypes of self
are drawing the viewer
into what is this other third self that is there.
(ominous music)
(dramatic music)
- There's one work in particular which I love,
called "Lucifer and the Goat of Mendes"
She said she would come across Lucifer every now and again
but he would only appear when he was good and ready,
she couldn't conjure him or invoke him.
This particular experience she had was quite visceral
and quite present,
and she embodied it in that painting,
and she just got all of the heat and the love and the danger
and everything just right in that painting.
She just really caught it all.
And that's coming from an experiential knowledge.
(ominous music)
- "Where Lucifer is,
the light that is being in its essence.
And light that is different, yet equal in clarity.
Light that is absolute knowledge,
and light beyond name. "
(dramatic electornic music)
(dramatic music)
- The book caused a controversy,
and of course, the book was seized
and it led to a court case.
(dramatic music)
- On August 27th, 1952
Walter Glover was officially charged
with producing an obscene publication.
(ominous music)
- The final ruling from the obscenity case
was that the book could be released
if two of the artworks in the book were blacked out.
(dramatic, ominous music)
- It was a tough time to be an artist.
It was an even tougher time to be a female artist.
It was an even tougher time
to be a female artist painting spiritual themes.
- "A life in my view,
makes an abstract pattern in the round,
rather like a musical symphony,
wherein are themes and variations,
counterpoint and harmony.
And sometimes deliberate dissonance. "
(gentle classical music playing)
- The book also attracted the attention
of one Sir Eugene Goossens
who had come to Australia
to be the first permanent conductor
of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
(classical music playing)
- She loved classical music,
especially Beethoven, and Hector Berlioz.
Her favourite thing
was Hector Berlioz' "Symphonie Fantastique"
(classical music swells)
- Now, Sir Eugene Goossens
was the crème de la crème.
He was a giant of the art world.
He was a giant of the music world.
(classical music)
And Sir Eugene Goossens was courted by everyone
who was anyone in Australian society.
- Welcome, Sir Eugene!
Officially, he is the conductor
of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra,
run by the Australian Broadcasting Commission.
- What people didn't know about Sir Eugene Goossens
was that he was very much interested in the occult.
(gentle classical music)
- [Man] Goossens was really a pagan at heart.
(gentle music)
He'd been really interested in black magic
and mediaeval Goetia when he was still in England.
He was English by birth,
although he was of Belgian extraction.
(classical music continues)
Goossens finds the book, probably at the end of 1952,
in a gallery bookshop or an art bookshop,
we're not quite sure,
and he determines to get in touch with her.
(gentle music)
- "I received a letter from Goossens
praising the book. Correspondence. "
- He wants a bit more colour in his life.
Roie lives just down the road in Brougham Street,
she loves drinking cups of tea.
(classical music)
- "Eugene Goossens' tentative suggestion
of an opera libretto by Gavin and backdrops by me. "
(classical music rises)
"Meeting. Second meeting. "
- And before you know it,
he's getting involved in her sex magic rituals.
(gentle classical music)
(sound of bulb switching on)
(dramatic classical music)
(ominous classical music)
- These were practises
that were not unique to Rosaleen Norton.
Practitioners and magicians like Aleister Crowley,
particularly, experienced various forms of trance magic
where he would transcend
different states of consciousness.
- Crowley was a very influential figure,
and sex magic was central to his thinking.
(tense music)
- The most important contribution
that he made was as a philosopher,
and as an occultist.
His maxim was "Do what thou wilt
shall be the whole of the law. "
(tense music continues)
- Which effectively doesn't mean go off
and do whatever you want to do.
It's actually discovering what your will is in the world.
And that one purpose that you're here to achieve.
- And then focus all one's energy on doing that will.
(tense music)
- "I do not wish to propagate any cult,
even the witch cult,
change society, establish a better world for others.
These things leave me entirely indifferent.
I have what I prefer to describe as a function.
The function is that of focus and catalyst.
(classical music)
And this function is best served
by my performing my own personal will.
And not caring a damn about effects good or bad
on other people. "
(classical music)
- The idea of sex magic
is that one can harness one's will
to effect change in the universe
through sacred sexuality, essentially.
(dramatic, classical music)
- Roie and Gavin and Goossens were all bisexual.
- "I love the erotic sense,
especially when it forms a kind of undertone to life.
It is a continuous voluptuous response
of all the senses to stimulate,
a kind of sexual awareness. "
(burning sound)
(dramatic classical music)
(music flourishes, ends)
- This is a strong woman advocating
a form of women's liberation.
In the early 1950s in a conservative country,
you can imagine how much that must have horrified people,
especially as the population
was like 80% Christian, or whatever.
So Christian conservative culture
versus a strong sexually active artistic woman
who identifies as a witch.
(rock music) ♪ I don't wanna, I don't wanna be a good girl ♪
♪ I'm just a misunderstood girl, in a world made mad ♪
♪ I'm a girl! gone! bad! ♪
♪ I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't wanna be a good girl ♪
♪ I'm just a misunderstood girl, in a world mad mad ♪
♪ I'm a girl! gone! bad! ♪
- Roie lived expressing herself sexually
however she wanted.
(rock music continues)
- "The fallacy that men are naturally polygamous
and women monogamous,
is belied by physiological facts and ecology.
Nature intended women to be polyandrous,
as evinced by the ability of any normally sexed woman
to have several orgasms,
(whip whooshes)
to any normally sexed man's one.
(whip whooshes)
(rock music) ♪ I don't care what they say ♪
♪ 'Cause they're gonna say it anyway ♪
- Satanists at Cross in weird ritual.
- A blonde girl exposed a rotten core
of perversion in Kings Cross.
She spoke of black masses,
witches, sex orgies, drugs and weird people.
- The Witch of Kings Cross, revealed.
(sound of fire)
(crickets chirping)
(upbeat music)
(flames crackling)
- It was the eve of the 2nd of October
at Rosaleen Norton's birthday party, and I was there.
And we had Cinzano Rossi,
and we had her favourite, green ginger wine.
And mine, too.
I loved them both.
And we also stayed awake all night.
(crowd chattering)
The party began about 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
It continued on and on and on until midnight, past midnight,
into the small hours of the morning.
And then right down into 2 o'clock in the afternoon,
when there's a tramp, tramp, tramp on stairs.
The coppers are coming.
So the coppers come in and they make accusations
of a criminal offence.
(gentle jazz music)
They were charged with the abominable crime of buggery.
And do you know, that's the only crime in the whole book,
the law book, that has an adjective describing it.
(jazz continues)
(whip whooshing)
(whip sound)
- "A roll of film had been stolen
from my house by two foolish lads. "
(sound of flash bulb)
- They started hawking them around the newspapers.
- "The Sun newspaper called the vice squad
and Detective Trevenar was on our case. "
(jazz continues)
- Detective Sergeant Trevenar, oh, one word about him,
this was a man of bad will, very bad will.
He was an agent for the Roman church.
He wanted to burn her.
- Now, Roie and Gavin were hated by journalists
and they were hated by the police.
- Once the party had broken up,
Norton and Greenlees has gone away.
The Sun reporter, Joe Morrison, actually went in
and searched Norton's apartment,
which was obviously completely illegal
and quite an extraordinary action,
but took place nonetheless.
And in the course of doing that,
he found a small cache of letters.
- "My personal letters from Goossens
were stolen from their secret hiding place. "
- Unfortunately for Goossens and Norton,
the letters were very explicit in their content.
There was a lot of sexual references
and a lot of occult references.
And it was immediately clear that they were involved
in the practise of what's known as sex magic.
(ominous music)
- The letters that haven't been released
in any great detail, talk about the magical relationship
between Goossens, Norton and Gavin.
And the essence of it is that they were very interested
in the idea of meeting
on what you could call the astral plane.
Roie Norton could be in touch with Goossens
when he was over in Europe.
They could all be together performing
what you might call an astral ritual.
(ominous music)
- "Consciousness changed
and I passed the barriers of plane.
There I was in a different part of the realm
performing functions impossible to describe in human terms. "
(ominous music)
"I flitted and swooped among great shapes.
They appeared to be engrossed in something,
and I saw other shapes and designs emanate from the realm,
into the dark void below,
where they blended into new patterns
with those already there.
One of them shouted in a great ringing golden voice. "
(ominous music)
"And the sound was visual. "
(ominous music)
- So Goossens was always going over to Europe.
So he would go to occult bookshops in London,
he would go to rather seedy places in Soho,
he would go to dodgy art galleries.
And he'd come back with all this stuff.
He came back with things
that were deemed to be pornographic.
- Goossens comes back in to the country
and immediately his bags are searched.
(dramatic brass music)
What Customs discover. .
is, allegedly, pornographic material.
- There were things that you'd call,
well, lightweight pornography perhaps,
but I mean they were not that dramatic.
There are ritual masks in there
and there are a few dodgy photographs,
but nothing really, really extreme.
(brass music continues)
- And Goossens was arrested at Sydney airport
by Customs for bringing in prohibited goods.
The media had a field day,
because the media could allude to whatever they wanted.
The mind of the Australian reader can run riot.
(camera shutters)
- "Trevenar was obsessed with Gavin and I.
Unfortunately, Eugene was caught in the crossfire. "
(fire crackling) (dramatic music continues)
- Don't forget that Goossens was knighted
by the Queen in 1955 for services to music.
He was a major figure in the Sydney art and music world.
He was really a major icon.
(ominous music)
- His career was ended immediately.
(melancholy music)
- He very quickly resigned from the ABC
and got on a plane under a pseudonym
and went back to England.
(melancholy music)
He didn't live very long after that.
(melancholy music)
- She was very, very upset.
Very upset indeed.
(melancholy music swells)
- [Interviewer] And did she talk about it?
- Only to say to me that:
"Goossens does not blame me for it.
Regardless of the rumours,
Goossens does not blame me for it. "
(gentle music) (fire crackling)
- Roie, in a way, was left by herself.
And it also further alienated Norton from polite society.
She was well and truly personae non grata now.
She was dangerous.
(melancholy classical music)
- "I remember, but time turned back upon itself
and curved another way. "
"And I was lost, a phantom from the future in the past.
The past, or was it the future?
I was wandering astray, amid the maze of time
where there was neither first nor last. "
(melancholy music)
- Witch hunt on artists.
Opening his address to the jury, Norton's counsel said,
"In the olden days they used to burn witches.
But there are still witch hunts
by the authorities and by newspapers. "
(dramatic sound)
- "Trevenar didn't give up.
He persisted with the buggery charges
from the stolen photographs from more than a year ago. "
(prison door slams)
"Gavin and I were taken to jail. "
(jazz music)
(burning sound)
"I packed my bag for an overnight stay in Long Bay Jail,
containing three prohibited drugs and a banned book,
mercifully intercepted later by my sister Cecily.
During a previous aborted hearing,
I had been told to remove all costume jewellery.
So I decided to overcome this by wearing a dress
patterned with tigers, one of my totems. "
(jazz music continues)
- I got onto the stand, and the lawyer says
"What did you see?
Would you have seen an offence had it occurred?"
Of course I would have, yes, I was all over the place.
It was a party, man.
And we were all drunk and dexo-ed and so on.
That's how I was able to stay awake all that time.
You know what dexos are?
Amphetamines.
(jazz continues)
Previous to that, Detective Sergeant Trevenar
had made a fool of himself in the witness box.
- "When Detective Trevenar was asked
to describe the contents of the room,
he couldn't describe anything else
but the altars at each end of the room
and a painting of the God Pan.
He had to be asked, 'Was there a bed? If so, where?'"
- And the judge had said,
"Detective Trevenar, I'll not have you carrying on
like a cheeky bikie in my court. "
(jazz music)
- "I smuggled in enough smokes,
eighteen, but forgot matches.
The second night I made sure of matches,
but only three smokes. "
- Gavin, well he was really unfit to plead.
He was halfway round the bend,
he was crazy on Dexedrine most of the time.
(camera shuttering)
- A barrister told a Quarter Sessions jury today
that a young man charged with an unnatural offence
had been a youth of promise, even of brilliance.
He stands in this dock today
as a man who carries the taint of declared insanity.
- Gavin Greenlees had earlier been committed
to a psychiatric institution.
He was schizophrenic, he had epileptic attacks as well.
- If the jury released Greenlees,
he would go back to Callan Park as an insane person.
- And the jury retired, they came back and said
"Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty. "
All 12 of them.
And the judge said,
"Mr Greenlees and Miss Norton,
you are discharged without stain on character. "
(jazz music)
- Girl artist, lover beat charge.
She smiled broadly
when the not guilty verdict was announced.
(ominous music)
Told she could leave, she turned on her heel,
but turned back to touch Greenlees affectionately
on the arm.
(choral music)
(fire crackling)
- Gavin Greenlees is one of the true victims
of Australian conservatism.
(choral music continues)
And what we find with Gavin is that Roie
was the one force of stability in his life,
and without her he didn't seem
to be able to function very effectively in society.
(slow piano music)
- Art works to be destroyed.
After an exhibition at the Kashmir café
was raided by vice squad detectives,
a court has ordered that two paintings
by Rosaleen Norton be burnt by police.
(fire whooshing)
(slow music continues)
- This was a truly extraordinary occurrence.
I couldn't find any reference
to the judicially sanctioned destruction
of art in Australia prior to this.
- Her exhibitions were shut down,
her artwork was taken
and effectively destroyed by the government.
The worst thing about it was the art industry
did nothing about it.
- No one seems to have stood up for her.
- She was really left alone at that point in time,
which I think was pretty bad.
(slow music)
- "I had noticed about people's reactions
to my drawings.
They are inclined to see themselves in them,
in the sense of their own inner ideas
and preoccupations upon them. "
(slow music)
- We often scapegoat and marginalise
those that bring our shadow to the light to be integrated.
So something that is denied or repressed within us,
that when we see it in an artwork,
it's easier to demonise that artist
and say that is not reflective of us.
That is something that is only to the individual.
But what we can see
is that we both have a collective shadow as well,
and in those images what we're seeing is images
that are of the other.
Of the us.
She is actually painting something
that is within the collective that the individual
has not yet had the strength to look at
and to integrate within themselves.
(slow music)
- She was a totally unique individual;
an artist, a radical, an outsider.
And she was uncompromising.
She wasn't going to give up her art
and what she believed in,
simply because the police raided her shows
and tried to censor her works and thoughts and so on.
So in that sense she would have been a kind of,
what I call, a monstrous feminine.
(animal growls)
(ominous music)
A larger than life mythical female character
who struck fear, to some extent,
in the hearts of the average.
But people also clamour for this,
because she crosses boundaries,
she's so interesting.
(ominous music)
She had her own career and she was an artist
and she lived according to her own philosophy,
and she had relationships with different men.
She threatened everything
that the sanctity of the home stood for,
and I imagine there was a strong element of that
in her demonization.
There was no doubt she was made a scapegoat.
(ominous music)
- I think she was so badly treated
and sensationalised that by the late 1950's
she waged her own war with the Australian media.
(lively music)
And she took the media on, on her own terms.
And she fought back to all the misrepresentations,
and she did it in the most ironic way.
She embraced the stereotypical image of the witch,
right down to the fact that she posed for photographers
wearing a pointy hat.
(lively music)
(camera shuttering)
Once she took them on,
the media didn't have any more control over her,
she controlled the media.
- What would be the state of the world
if evil ruled?
- Exactly what it is.
- [Announcer] What is your answer to the old Bible saying
that the devil is a great deceiver?
- That man created the devil in his own image.
I am a witch.
I was born a witch.
(lively music)
(jazz music)
- The witchcraft aspects that she gave to the media
were almost caricature.
- She was a player, you know.
She was out to get attention and she got it.
- A big aspect of what Rosaleen did was create herself.
And that's very, very contemporary art.
(lively music)
Her real art was her.
(lively music)
- In the name of the horned god,
above and below,
within and without, around and about, here and there.
(ominous music)
- She brought a world of magic
and the occult with her,
and it was in her presence.
(bell ringing)
- The spirits of the gods, that they be with me,
and with that, which we are,
(ominous music)
there and here,
and I drink, and you drink, as you drink.
(ominous music)
- It takes a lot of courage just to be Rosaleen Norton
and open the door and walk out onto the street.
(ominous music)
So when she was going through the Cross,
she's used to people attacking her.
And that would have hurt.
(ominous music)
So she would have built up all these defences
from a lifetime of hurt and misunderstanding.
And that's why in some ways she was probably scary.
(ominous music)
- This is Pied Percy.
Come on then, don't be nervous.
Hello.
Hello, sweetie.
(classical music)
He's a fine young up and coming familiar because
some animals are,
I love nearly all animals, actually,
some of them are natural familiars
and others aren't.
This bloke is.
(melancholy classical music)
(car revs)
(slow classical music)
- In these images that were taken
at her sister's house,
without actually the witch's personae there,
what I see is a woman that is self-possessed.
(slow classical music continues)
There's no need for the eyebrows,
there's no need for the fringe,
there's no need for the dress.
This is the example of someone
being a sovereign unto one's self.
I rule myself.
(classical music swells)
- Her work is best described
as a magical diary of her experiences.
(classical music continues)
She is painting and drawing with her own aesthetics
and her own language.
I mean the way that she arranged figures
and the way that she composed her colours
and everything was something that
none of the artists of her age even attempted.
- Her art was her journey, it was her religion,
it was how she got to where she was going,
and how she reflected her visions.
(classical music continues)
- From my point of view,
the most interesting art is the art
that makes people stop and think,
that perhaps threatens us to some extent in our views,
but certainly makes us think differently.
And I'm sure that's what her works did.
(classical music continues)
- It is jarring art and it's meant to be jarring art.
It's meant to be challenging.
That's the whole idea of it.
That's what the surrealists were trying to do.
They were trying to rattle you;
they were trying to challenge the viewer.
They, from the outset,
Breton said, "This is not an artistic movement,
this is a revolution.
I want to actually start a cultural revolution
through art. "
And esoteric artists like Norton
were doing a similar revolution.
(classical music)
(crowd chanting)
- There's huge cultural shifts in the mid-20th century.
There was an opening up of culture.
Her work has been seized and destroyed,
and within ten years you've got all of this stuff happening.
(classical music)
- That was a time when everyone was looking at the occult.
(ominous music)
- "The true Fallen Angel
is the spirit of mankind. "
(ominous music)
As mankind becomes more civilised
it increasingly assails nature,
who has no choice but to set herself up as its adversary. "
(ominous music)
"Worship nature, not the dollar. "
(dramatic music)
- She didn't ever get the respect in her life
that she really deserved.
(dramatic music)
She started something really important,
artistically, culturally.
She was a part of the counterculture itself.
She was a key part of that in a way
that maybe we haven't really considered.
(dramatic music)
And the fact that people don't really know who she was,
that's really sad, because her work is so important.
(dramatic music)
- Rosaleen Norton would probably be
one of the most exciting artists in Australia
that came from that period.
I think she was really doing something exceptional
and something that could have stood on a world stage
if it was really just given the right kind of support
and education and context.
Not just in her age, but in today's age.
(dramatic music)
- Why I think we should be taking
the importance of this now,
it's the rise of the divine feminine.
I think it's not just about saying well,
patriarchy has had its time it's now back to matriarchy,
but definitely a matrifocal society.
And I think her work is really the uprising of the feminine
at an archetypal level,
and also the feminine as the anima mundi, the world soul.
(dramatic music)
(crackling noise)
- [Child] Can you hear me?
(slow music)
- In the deep scent of midnight.
In the secret colour,
above and beneath the spectrum, is life.
- [Child] Can you see me?
(uplifting music)
- In the wild laughter of chaos.
In the moonlit houses and night lit streets
(uplifting music)
In the seed of secrets, the still core of silence, is life.
(uplifting music)
- Roie was a recluse right through the '70s,
but in November 1978, she became sick
and she went for various medical tests.
(gentle music)
- Roie was diagnosed with colon cancer
when she was in her very early 60s.
(gentle music)
- And she had to be admitted to St. Vincent's Hospital
in the hospice there,
where she was treated by Roman Catholic nuns,
which was a great irony.
(uplifting music)
Here she was, the great witch of Kings Cross
with crucifixes on the wall,
but I think she thought it was a great hoot.
(gentle music)
- I came back to Sydney once
and I heard that Roie was dying in the hospital.
And I wanted to go and see her,
but I didn't know where that hospital was,
and I just didn't go.
And I regret it,
because I can imagine her lying in a hospital bed and saying
"Oh Christ, Eileen, lovely to see you. "
Well, she was a colourful character
and I'm glad I knew her.
(gentle classical music)
- Rosaleen Norton's last words were,
"I came into this world bravely,
and I will leave this world bravely"
(choral music)
- [Child] Can you hear me?
I live in the green blooded forest.
(choral music continues)
I live in the white fire of powers.
(music continues)
I live in the scarlet blossom of magic.
I live in infinity.
(music continues)
I live.
(music slows, quietens)
- I live.
(music fades out)
(rock music)
♪ I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't wanna be a good girl ♪
♪ I'm just a misunderstood girl ♪
♪ In a world that's mad ♪
♪ I'm a girl! ♪
♪ Gone bad! ♪
♪ I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't wanna be a good girl ♪
♪ I'm just a misunderstood girl ♪
♪ In a world that's mad ♪
♪ I'm a girl! ♪
♪ Gone bad! ♪
♪ I don't care what they say ♪
♪ 'Cause they're gonna say it anyway ♪
♪ Dreams don't come true, they leave you beaten ♪
♪ Black and blue ♪
♪ It's a small town and I've got big dreams ♪
♪ Like my face on the silver screen ♪
♪ Late night kiss and tell ♪
♪ I'm tearing down this poster girl ♪
♪ I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't wanna be a good girl ♪
♪ I'm just a misunderstood girl ♪
♪ In a world that's mad ♪
♪ I'm a girl! ♪
♪ Gone bad! ♪