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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.

She made them afraid,

and they were always watching to see what she would do.

So she put on a hat, and told them her story,

and gave them something to watch.

Her name was Rosaleen Norton.

She was the Witch of Kings Cross.

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.

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.

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.

Everybody wants to look and find out a little bit more.

It is such a romantic and threatening...

image,

the image of the witch.

"And so begins my journal of E-Goetry.

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.

"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.

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.

This exhibition of her work,

which promised Roie all of the attention

a young artist would be seeking,

in fact, backfired very badly.

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.

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."

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.

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."

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.

"Perhaps I'd better begin at the beginning.

I was born at Dunedin, New Zealand at 4 a.m.

during a violent thunderstorm."

"I have loved night and storms all my life."

"Storms arouse in me an elated, almost drunken sensation."

"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."

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.

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.

"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.

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."

"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."

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.

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.

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."

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.

"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.

"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."

She was a creature of the night,

and she referred to herself as a dark spirit.

Shall I tell you the scandalous part?

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.

"Only one thing ever makes me afraid."

"The vibrations of human beings."

Peace is wonderful.

He came back from New Guinea

and they seem to have parted company almost immediately.

"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.

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."

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.

"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.

There have been relatively few visionary artists

in Australia, and Roie Norton would definitely be

the most prominent figure of that style of art.

Some of the earliest works of Roie Norton

are published in a little magazine called Pertinent.

"Pertinent feels that in Miss Rosaleen Norton,

there is an artist worthy of comparison

with some of the best Continental,

American and English contemporaries."

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

It was time for a solo exhibition

and Gavin had a connection at Melbourne University."

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.

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.

It was filled with coffee shops that had different themes.

They were all a little bit teeny tiny.

Poets doing poetry and it would always be against society.

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.

The mavericks, the outcasts of society.

Artists, dancers, homosexuals,

transvestites, transsexuals.

Where jazz was happening,

where there was nightclubs,

where there was strippers and sex stuff happening.

Obviously, there was crime there as well.

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.

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.

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."

She's not scared of things,

she's not scared of the dark.

The dark is somewhere where you can be safe.

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.

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.

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.

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."

"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.

So they were arrested for vagrancy.

"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.

We obtained enough booze and drugs

to freely escape into the world of the book."

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.

"The Goat-God laughs:

Immortal joy is golden lightning from his eyes.

Primal, ageless, wild and wise."

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.

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.

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."

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.

So for Roie, Lilith represented the sex drive

and the pleasures of female freedom.

I think that was very important for Roie,

because she was a very sexualized woman.

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.

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.

"Geburah, meaning strength.

Binah is understanding."

"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.

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.

Norton's work, you could almost argue,

is a visual manifestation of a lot of Jung's ideas.

"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.

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.

"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."

The book caused a controversy,

and of course, the book was seized

and it led to a court case.

On August 27th, 1952

Walter Glover was officially charged

with producing an obscene publication.

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.

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."

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.

She loved classical music,

especially Beethoven, and Hector Berlioz.

Her favourite thing

was Hector Berlioz' "Symphonie Fantastique".

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.

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.

Goossens was really a pagan at heart.

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.

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.

"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.

"Eugene Goossens' tentative suggestion

of an opera libretto by Gavin and backdrops by me."

"Meeting. Second meeting."

And before you know it,

he's getting involved in her sex magic rituals.

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.

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."

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.

"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.

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."

The idea of sex magic

is that one can harness one's will

to effect change in the universe

through sacred sexuality, essentially.

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."

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.

Roie lived expressing herself sexually

however she wanted.

"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,

to any normally sexed man's one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"A roll of film had been stolen

from my house by two foolish lads."

They started hawking them around the newspapers.

"The Sun newspaper called the vice squad

and Detective Trevenar was on our case."

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.

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.

"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."

"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."

"And the sound was visual."

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.

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.

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.

"Trevenar was obsessed with Gavin and I.

Unfortunately, Eugene was caught in the crossfire."

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.

His career was ended immediately.

He very quickly resigned from the ABC

and got on a plane under a pseudonym

and went back to England.

He didn't live very long after that.

She was very, very upset.

Very upset indeed.

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."

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.

"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."

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."

"Trevenar didn't give up.

He persisted with the buggery charges

from the stolen photographs from more than a year ago."

"Gavin and I were taken to jail."

"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."

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.

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."

"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.

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."

Girl artist, lover beat charge.

She smiled broadly

when the not guilty verdict was announced.

Told she could leave, she turned on her heel,

but turned back to touch Greenlees affectionately

on the arm.

Gavin Greenlees is one of the true victims

of Australian conservatism.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think she was so badly treated

and sensationalised that by the late 1950's

she waged her own war with the Australian media.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Her real art was her.

In the name of the horned god,

above and below,

within and without, around and about, here and there.

She brought a world of magic

and the occult with her,

and it was in her presence.

The spirits of the gods, that they be with me,

and with that, which we are,

there and here,

and I drink, and you drink, as you drink.

It takes a lot of courage just to be Rosaleen Norton

and open the door and walk out onto the street.

So when she was going through the Cross,

she's used to people attacking her.

And that would have hurt.

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.

This is Pied Percy.

Come on then, don't be nervous.

Hello.

Hello, sweetie.

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.

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.

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.

Her work is best described

as a magical diary of her experiences.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That was a time when everyone was looking at the occult.

"The true Fallen Angel

is the spirit of mankind."

As mankind becomes more civilised

it increasingly assails nature,

who has no choice but to set herself up as its adversary."

"Worship nature, not the dollar."

She didn't ever get the respect in her life

that she really deserved.

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.

And the fact that people don't really know who she was,

that's really sad, because her work is so important.

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.

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.

Can you hear me?

In the deep scent of midnight.

In the secret colour,

above and beneath the spectrum, is life.

Can you see me?

In the wild laughter of chaos.

In the moonlit houses and night lit streets

In the seed of secrets, the still core of silence, is life.

Roie was a recluse right through the '70s,

but in November 1978, she became sick

and she went for various medical tests.

Roie was diagnosed with colon cancer

when she was in her very early 60s.

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.

Here she was, the great witch of Kings Cross

with crucifixes on the wall,

but I think she thought it was a great hoot.

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.

Rosaleen Norton's last words were,

"I came into this world bravely,

and I will leave this world bravely".

Can you hear me?

I live in the green blooded forest.

I live in the white fire of powers.

I live in the scarlet blossom of magic.

I live in infinity.

I live.

I live.

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