Rosaleen Norton

Biography

In 1949, two days after an exhibition opened at the Rowden White Library of the University of Melbourne, the police came to the gallery and removed four paintings: “Witches’ Sabbath”, “Lucifer”, “Triumph” and “Individuation”. Forty-six works had been put on show in all. Norton was charged under the Police Offences Act of 1928.

She won the case.

She was born on 2 October 1917 in Dunedin, New Zealand, into an Anglican family of English origin, comfortably middle class. She was the youngest of three sisters, and Cecily and Phyllis were more than ten years older than she was. Her father, a sailor, was often away. In June 1925 the family emigrated to Sydney and settled in Lindfield, a wealthy suburb on the north side. Her relations with her mother were strained. For three years she slept not in the house but in a tent in the garden, and at the entrance she kept a pet spider named Horatius. Later she claimed to have been born a witch and listed the marks: pointed ears, blue markings on her left knee, a strand of flesh hanging from her body. She was expelled from a Church of England girls’ school for drawing demons and vampires, which the teachers said corrupted the other pupils. She then studied at East Sydney Technical College under the sculptor Rayner Hoff, whom she greatly admired and who encouraged her talent.

In 1934, when she was sixteen, the newspaper Smith’s Weekly published several of her horror stories, hired her as a cadet journalist and then as an illustrator. Her drawings were judged too controversial, and she lost the job. After her mother’s death Norton left home, worked as an artists’ model for painters including Norman Lindsay, and took jobs as a hospital kitchen maid and a waitress and designed toys. She rented a room at the Ship and Mermaid Inn overlooking Circular Quay and read about the Western esoteric tradition: demonology, the Qabalah, comparative religion. In December 1940 she married Beresford Lionel Conroy; after the wedding they hitch-hiked from Sydney to Melbourne, Brisbane and Cairns. Conroy enlisted as a commando and served in New Guinea, while she lived in a stable. The divorce was settled only in 1951. Later she moved into a boarding house called the Merangaroo in the Rocks area and began working for the magazine Pertinent, where the poet Leon Batt compared her with the best Continental, American and English artists of her day. In 1943 she exhibited in Sydney with Selina Muller and described her paintings as “psychic experiments”.

At Pertinent she met a younger poet, Gavin Greenlees (1930–1983). In 1949 the two hitch-hiked to Melbourne to look for a venue for an exhibition. In court, her defence counsel, a lawyer named Abrahams, argued that the illustrations in “The History of Sexual Magic”, a book the censors had allowed, were far more explicit than her paintings. The court awarded her compensation of £4 4s.

Back in Sydney, they moved into a house at 179 Brougham Street in Kings Cross, then a red-light district where artists, writers and poets lived. She decorated the house with her own occult murals and hung a sign on the door welcoming visitors to a house of ghosts, werewolves, vampires and witches. Her works were displayed in the Arabian, Apollyon and Kashmir cafés. One of her pictures also appeared in Dulcie Deamer’s book of poetry “The Silver Branch”. In September 1951 the police arrested Norton and Greenlees for vagrancy. The publisher Walter Glover took them on as assistants and decided to bring out a book of her drawings with Greenlees’s poems. “The Art of Rosaleen Norton” appeared in 1952: thirty-one black-and-white reproductions, bound in red leather with gold blocking. The print run was small, and copies numbered up to 505 are known. The book was banned in New South Wales, and its import into the United States was forbidden as well. A court ruled that two illustrations, “The Adversary” and “Fohat”, were obscene; Glover blacked them out in only a few copies. American customs destroyed copies that were imported. Glover went bankrupt, and the binder, Alan Cross, who had not been paid, was allowed to choose a work from Norton; he took “Fohat”.

In 1955 a homeless adolescent girl, Anna Karina Hoffman, claimed in court that her life had fallen apart after she took part in a “Black Mass” run by Norton, and the tabloids picked up the story. Norton considered herself a pagan, not a Satanist, and denied the charges; Hoffman later admitted that she had made it all up. The press nonetheless wrote of devil worship and animal sacrifice, which Norton abhorred. That same year the owner of the Kashmir restaurant was taken to court for displaying her works, and the police raided the home of Norton and Greenlees and accused them of “an unnatural sexual act”. The evidence was a photograph taken at Norton’s birthday party. It had been stolen by two members of their coven, Francis Honer and Raymond Ager, who hoped to sell it to The Sun newspaper for £200.

Meanwhile the conductor and composer Sir Eugene Goossens, who was interested in the occult, read her book and wrote to her. They became friends, and he became her lover. In March 1956 he was stopped while bringing into Australia 800 erotic photographs, some film and ritual masks. He pleaded guilty, paid a fine of £100, resigned his posts at the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music, and returned to England. Greenlees was admitted to Callan Park Hospital in 1955 and in 1957 was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Norton continued to visit him afterwards.

In the late 1950s tourists began to come to see her. Although witchcraft remained illegal in New South Wales until 1971, she openly called herself a witch, explained pantheism to journalists and earned extra money by making charms and casting hexes. In 1967 she returned to Kings Cross and settled in a derelict house in Bourke Street, Darlinghurst, later moving to a flat in Elizabeth Bay, where she lived a secluded life.

Norton died on 5 December 1979 at the Sacred Heart Hospice for the Dying in Darlinghurst; shortly before her death she said: “I came into the world bravely; I’ll go out bravely.” A plaque in her memory has been installed in Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross. After her death her paintings were sold at auction to a single collector. In 1982 Glover republished her book, and in 2017 an exhibition at the City Gallery in Wellington was the first major showing of her work in New Zealand.