Rosaleen Norton - Legacy

Legacy

Following her death, Norton’s many paintings, which were owned by Don Deaton, a local printer and pub owner, sold them at auction, all of which went to a single collector, Jack Parker, who purchased the lot for £5000, and displayed them at his Southern Cross Hotel in St Peters, Sydney. Meanwhile, Walter Glover gained the rights to republish The Art of Rosaleen Norton, re-releasing it in a facsimile edition. Following this, in 1984, he published A Supplement to the Art of Rosaleen Norton, which contained colour prints of nineteen of the works which had been featured in her 1949 Melbourne exhibition.

In December 1982, a play opened at the Tom Mann Theatre in Sydney entitled Rosaleen - Wicked Witch of the Cross. It starred Jane Parker as Norton, Peter Laurence as Glover, Christopher Lyons as Greenlees and Alan Archer as Pan, and was attended by both Willy Glover and Gavin Greenlees themselves. However, according to Nevill Drury, who was invited to the show by Glover, "the play itself had most the weaknesses of an amateur production - it was unconvincingly acted and was not acclaimed a critical success."

In 1988, the anthropologist Nevill Drury, who had published a number of books on the subject of witchcraft and magic, released a biography of Norton which was entitled Pan's Daughter: The Strange World of Rosaleen Norton. He later "substantially expanded and reworked" this into a new book titled Homage to Pan: The Life, Art and Sex-Magic of Rosaleen Norton, which was published in 2009. Drury had himself met her only on one occasion, at her apartment in 1977, at a time when she had become somewhat of a recluse.

In 2000, an exhibition of Norton's paintings was held in Kings Cross, Sydney, organised by various enthusiasts including Keith Richmond, and Barry Hale of the Australian Ordo Templi Orientis. A full-colour catalogue was published to accompany this exhibition. In 2009, Teitan Press published Thorn in the Flesh: A Grim-memoir by Norton, with an introduction by Australian Norton scholar Keith Richmond. Thorn in the Flesh. The volume comprises poetry (often humorous), reminiscences, and various occult jottings by Rosaleen Norton, with reproductions of two stunning photographs of Norton, as well as some half-a-dozen examples of her art (mainly in color).