the porn queen and the goose

If you’re interested, you can read an obituary of Melvin Harris here. It details his life as an oboe enthusiast, radio and television personality, author and researcher of Jack the Ripper. But it’s the story he told about world famous oboist Leon Goossens that interests me the most.

In 1952 Goosens lost his diary while walking across a field. The field was searched but the diary remained hidden in the grass. Over a year later he was walking across the same field when he spotted the lost diary. By then it was a battered relic, the elements had warped and split its bindings open, revealing that the covers had been stiffened with squares of newspaper in the manner used at that time. 

By strange coincidence, the piece of newsprint he uncovered was a 19 year old gossip column referring to his own marriage in 1933…..

Leon had an older brother named Eugene Aynsley Goossens who was very well known in Australia as the conductor of the Sydney Symphony.  

In the early 1950s, Goossens met Rosaleen Norton, the so-called Witch of Kings Cross. Norton was known as an artist of the grotesque and for her interest in the occult and erotica, which Goossens secretly shared. They conducted an intense affair, exchanging a number of passionate letters; although Goossens asked Norton to destroy all of them, she kept a bundle hidden behind a sofa.

In early 1956, Goossens visited Europe, unaware that Sydney police were already in possession of his letters to Norton and photographs of her occult activities. When Goossens returned to Australia on 9 March 1956, he was detained at Sydney Airport, following a tip-off by informants in London; his bags were searched by customs officials, who found a large amount of what was then considered pornographic material, which included photographs, prints, books, a spool of film, some rubber masks, and sticks of incense.

Coincidentally, Rosaleen Norton’s house is within walking distance of Gimcrack Hospital……..