`Pagan'
by Inez Baranez
Elizabeth Kelly
Pagan is the story of Eveleen Warden ...
In truth Pagan is a story of Rosaleen Norton, the young Kings Cross habitue who shook the conservative Sydney establishment of the 1950s into noticing her.
All in all the author portrays Eveleen with a mixture of sympathy and distaste - as a determined but fairly ordinary young woman of modest artistic talent who was increasingly driven to more and more exhibitionistic acts by the prejudice that surrounded her and by the media which delighted in her strangeness. She is also portrayed as someone who lived by scrounging and in a considerable degree of filth and disarray. "You'd hear Evvi and Terry were into devil worship. Sheer nonsense, of course. Evvi had a picture of a demon painted over her fireplace. A lot of people had seen it: everyone got down to Evvi's place some time or other. What was all the fuss about? It was just a filthy place with strange mess everywhere. But a lot of people would go there and think: this is the life, bohemians and witches!"
` The book also includes a thinly veiled account of the relationship between Rosaleen Norton and Eugene Goosens the musician and conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra - a relationship that gave society their final excuse to ostracize a someone who made them feel more than a little uncomfortable in any case.
"He was a great conductor. He came here after the war. He was a tremendous force in Sydney's - and Australia's - musical and cultural life. He introduced modern music, he brought world standards, he made the orchestra great. People forget that. All they know is the scandal."
"He was a victim of a parochial, puritanical society."
Pagan is about many other diverse things as well - the struggle of the artist to break free, migration from Europe to Australia, migration from the bush to the city, fear of the unknown, a treatise on witchcraft, growing up, falling in love, getting sex, corrupt cops, liquor licensing laws - to name but a few.
At times the sub-plots that arise from these themes are almost powerful enough to take over the story and often they distract from it. So Eveleen is left languishing in her dingy room with Terry, the pale and ineffectual waif that she cares for, while Patrick and Nora, the "normal" couple in the book, fumble their way towards multiple orgasm after an exhilarating day on Bondi Beach.
"When they came back to the flat they were alone there, they were alone there for hours. They did not stop, three times one after another it was everything, once she was rigid and apprehensive, the second time she relaxed and responded, and the third time she took hold of him, drew him into her, flowed like a river in flood ..."
In the end Evvi is arrested in her sister's tidy fibro house on the north shore and Eduard von Kronen (Goosens) is forced to reveal some "interesting" objects "that weren't meant for a kiddies birthday party" in his bags at Sydney airport.
"And there was the medal among it all." - his knighthood "stuck in among a bunch of dirty filthy pictures."
So finally it's Australian society that is exposed. Rosaleen Norton is still a legend in Kings Cross. And it's not easy to tell the story of a legend.