Australian Notes

Wednesday, 10th June 2009

President Obama’s speech in Cairo combining ‘a new beginning’ for Muslims of the world with reassurance to old allies like Israel was a fine balancing act.

One of the great sad stories of Australian culture is the tragedy of Sir Eugene Goossens, the anniversary of whose death in London in 1962 falls this month. A brilliant conductor, composer and teacher, his downfall in 1956 followed his importing, in breach of the Customs Act, hundreds of obscene photographs, films and masks for use in group sex in a Kings Cross coven conducted by the witch, painter and sometime pavement artist Roie Norton. He pleaded guilty. Savaged by a vicious press and a scandalised public, he fled the country. The disgrace killed him. (It was an intolerant era. Only three years earlier, the great English actor John Gielgud was prosecuted and fined for cottaging in a London public lavatory.) Barry Humphries was one of the first to fight for the Goossens cause. He wrote a sketch satirising the Sydney newspapers, which bayed for Goossens’s blood and demanded that the members of Norton’s coven be named and shamed. But the comic theatre for which Humphries was treading the boards would not touch the story. Since then there have been books, documentaries, an opera, a play, paintings and sculptures, not to mention halls, fellowships and lectures named in his honour. The theme of the dramas is sometimes Samson and Delilah — the hero (Goossens) brought down by the seductress (Norton). Sometimes it is Tristan and Isolde — the doomed love of two passionate artists. Both these ideas seem to me to misjudge and romanticise Norton. Her role is not clear. The Vice Squad had already begun a case against her, and then dropped it. Had she had made a deal with the police? We will probably never know the full story. But the title of Timothy Daly’s play, Complicity, is suggestive. Perhaps the true theme of this tragedy is the damnation of Dr Faustus. But it still awaits its Christopher Marlowe.

The sacked editor of the Monthly, Sally Warhaft, said that the reason Robert Manne and Morry Schwartz gave her the heave-ho was that she had wanted to publish Peter Costello’s reply to Kevin Rudd’s polemic against those economic conservatives who wear their badge with pride (to coin a phrase). But despair not. Costello and I have now included the prohibited arguments in a new chapter for the paperback edition of The Costello Memoirs, to be published shortly.