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Roma Winsome Blair (1923–2013)

by Nadia Rhook and Timothy Jones

Roma Blair (1923–2013), yoga teacher, model, dancer, author, and journalist, was born on 28 July 1923 near the regional inland town of Coonamble, New South Wales, on Wailwan land. Her father, William Alexander Blair, was a wool and sheepskin classer, and her mother, Ivy Victoria Bateman, cared for her and her four siblings. At birth, Roma’s face was covered in caul (a part of the amniotic sac that protects a fetus), prompting the matron to tell her mother: ‘You’ll never need to worry about this baby. She will be a most unusual child.’ She would later reflect that ‘the matron’s prophecy was misguided because my mother had much occasion to worry about me; it was my life that was unusual, not me.’[1]

Blair lived a largely happy childhood. She enjoyed dancing and parts of her schooling, but she struggled with undiagnosed dyslexia and related literacy challenges.[2] After winning a beauty contest at age twelve, she embarked upon a lucrative career as a photographic model.[3] At seventeen she married Dutch businessman, boxer, and dancer, Leo Ossendryver, and they moved to Indonesia so his family could expand their Persian carpet business.[4] They lived a luxurious colonial Dutch lifestyle; waited on by domestic servants, Blair ‘barely had to lift a finger.’[5] In 1942 the Japanese occupied Java and she became a prisoner of war, interned separately from her husband. A few months later while still interned, she gave birth to her first child, Arnold, without the aid of doctors. She raised him on food scraps while working long hours in the paddy fields, experiences she described as ‘tormenting’.[6]

After the war ended, Blair was freed and reunited with Ossendryver. They moved to South Africa to further pursue the family business. In Pretoria Blair resumed her career as a model. Malnourishment and trauma, however, had left her weak and suffering with excruciating stomach pains, ‘memories and nightmares.’[7] Finding Western doctors unable to cure her, she turned to yoga as recommended by a Chinese doctor.[8] She studied yoga and the Bhagavad Gita with a mystic teacher and monk of the Advaita Vedanta order of India known as Manie Finger or Swami Yogeswarananda.[9]

In 1957, having separated from her war-affected husband and aware that her modelling work may soon be impacted by ageism, Blair left her family and returned to Sydney, on Gadigal lands. Here she found a nascent urban yoga scene, established by a number of charismatic, impassioned European migrants and refugees who claimed to have studied yoga in China and India. She studied with leading Russian-born teacher Michael Volin who, with Nancy Phelan, had introduced yoga to Sydney in 1950.[10] The impact of racist immigration restriction policies meant that white yoga teachers became most mobile and prominent.[11] Blair quickly grew in influence and opened ‘Roma Blair’s Yoga Club’ in Pitt Street in 1962.[12] By this time her son and Ossendryver had joined her in Australia. After re-marrying and attempting to reconcile their independent lives, Blair and Ossendryver divorced. In 1964 she married Czech-Australian Leo Kogos.[13]

In the following decades Blair, accompanied by her corgi, Yogi, became a popular sensation. Her 1960s television segment ‘Relaxing with Roma’ proved so popular that it was extended to seven days a week in the early morning slot as ‘Wake Up and Live.’ The show ran for fourteen years. [14]

In 1963 Blair was invited to the first World Yoga Convention in Monghyr, India, where she became Australia's first yoga swami and was given the title Swami Nirmalanda, meaning ‘pure’ and ‘bliss’.[15]. In 1967 she established the International Yoga Teachers Association to provide professional training and accreditation for yoga in Australia. The following year she organised the first Australian Yoga Convention, held near Richmond, New South Wales, and attended by around 300 people.[16] Blair told the media the camp was an opportunity to unify yoga schools that had fallen into a ‘my-school-is-better-than-yours sort of thing,’ proclaiming that ‘yoga is on the move in Australia.’[17] Blair also wrote regular yoga columns for the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mirror and by the late 1960s was a veritable celebrity, known as ‘The “Glamorous Grand-mum” of yoga in Australia.’[18] In the late 1970s the Australian Women’s Weekly described her as a ‘lithe’ grandmother figure.[19] 

Blair was a knowledge-maker and holistic health leader. Her five published books as well as her journalistic publications offered alternative health practices to those of contemporary biomedicine.[20] She created targeted, practice-based knowledge about the health benefits of yoga.[21] She was also influential in promoting yoga—and an appropriated form of tantric yoga—as publicly accessible practices with sexual health benefits. Her 1977 published book, Yoga the Natural Way, included many full-page nude asana spreads that implicitly promoted yoga as sexual.[22] In 1976 the Australian Jewish Timesreported that Blair and her assistant, Bertha Kay, included tantric teachings in their class. Differing from contemporary teachers, they disavowed that tantric teaching was about ‘love making’ and promoted the sensual pleasures of unifying body and mind.[23]

Over the course of her yogic life, Blair engaged closely with Hinduism but she expressly did not see yoga as a religion. A trip to an ashram in India clarified for her that ‘yoga’s purpose was really uniting the concept of religion by encouraging people to do good acts as their own divinity on Earth.’[24] She remained passionate and vivacious into her mature years. After divorcing Kogos, who she felt was resentful of her busy life of yoga and related travel, she fell in love with businessman Joe Lubrano. The two were together for over sixteen years and married for a short time before he died of brain cancer.[25] During her decades post-teaching she was ‘a doyenne of Sydney's social scene,’ a philanthropic fundraiser, and for three decades a columnist for the conservative Gold Coast Bulletin.[26] At her eightieth birthday party, she joyously performed the splits. Friend and fellow columnist Regina King remembers that ‘Ms Blair had her wits about her right until the end.’[27] Blair died on 5 November 2013. She had, so she reflected in her memoir, transformed periods of suffering into a love of life, reflecting: ‘Th[e] grim years had taught me to love life, and I still do’.[28]  

 

[1] Roma Winsome Blair, Karin Cox and Rachel Syers, Roma: From Prison to Paradise; as told to Rachel Syers and Karin Cox (Sydney: New Holland, 2004), 21.

[2] ‘Roma Blair’, The Australian Women’s Weekly, 12 October 1966, 2.

[3] Katie Brown, ‘Honouring Roma Blair’, International Yoga Teaching Association, accessed at https://iyta.com.au/honouring-roma-blair/.

[4] ‘Roma Blair: The Mother of Yoga’, Life London, https://mlifelondon.com/blogs/journal/roma-blair-the-mother-of-yoga. See also Blair, From Prison to Paradise, 43-44.

[5] Blair et al., From Prison to Paradise, 48

[6] ‘Roma Blair: The Mother of Yoga’.

[7] ‘Brown, ‘Honouring Roma Blair’.

[8] Blair et al., From Prison to Paradise, 175.  ‘Roma’s story is one of love, suffering and spirituality. She was married three times and had one child, Arnold’. ‘Honouring Roma Blair’.

[9] ‘Yoga helped me to surrender my problems to the universe’. Blair et al., From Prison to Paradise, 105-106.

[10] ‘Interview with Dr Fay Woodhouse’, University of Melbourne Research Blog, 25 March 2021, accessed at https://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/shaps-research/2021/03/25/gita-yoga-interview-with-dr-fay-woodhouse/.

[11] Shameem Black, ‘State Spectacles of Yoga: Invisible India and India Everywhere’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 46, no.  1 (2023): 5. See also Shameem Black, ‘From India, with love: cultural appropriation and 50 years of Light on Yoga’, Australian National University, 30 September 2015, https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/from-india-with-love-cultural-appropriation-and-50-years-of-light-on-yoga, accessed 23 May 2024.

[12] Roma Blair, Yoga for the Family (Sydney: Unimex Marketing Company, 1966), 3.

[13] ‘Engagement: Blair Kogos’, Australian Jewish Times (Sydney) 27 November 1964, 7. See also Blair, From Prison to Paradise, 202-203. 

[14] Glynis Jones and Wendy Circosta, 'Photographs and biography of Roma Blair', Powerhouse, Sydney, 2019, https://collection. powerhouse.com.au/object/549481.

[15] Woodhouse, Gita Yoga School, p. 16.

[16] ‘Unworldly Stirrings’, The Bulletin, 9 November 1968, 4.

[17] Ibid.

[18] ‘Honouring Roma Blair’.

[19] ‘Relaxing with Roma’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 1979, 17.

[20] Blair’s first book was published in association with Leo Kogos, Yoga in Pictures (Sydney: Unimex Marketing Company, 1964).

[21] Blair, Yoga for the Family; Roma Blair and Joy McIntosh, Beauty Through Yoga (West Melbourne: Thomson Nelson, 1975).

[22] Roma Blair, Yoga the Natural Way, Rushcutters Bay: Text, 1977. 

[23] ‘Hakoah Sports Scene: Glamorous Grand-mum shows health and harmony through yoga’, Australian Jewish Times (Sydney) 1 July 1976, 16.

[24] Blair et al., From Prison to Paradise, 141

[25] See ‘Honouring Roma Blair’.

[26] Glynis Jones and Wendy Circosta, 'Photographs and biography of Roma Blair', Powerhouse, Sydney, 2019, https://collection. powerhouse.com.au/object/549481.

[27] 'Australian yoga guru Roma Blair dies aged 90', News.com.au, 7 November 2013, https://www.news.com.au/national/australian-yoga-guru-roma-blair-dies-aged-90/news-story/d789e8607342cc80ff7a9cbe55b611dc.

[28] Blair et al., From Prison to Paradise, 221

Citation details

Nadia Rhook and Timothy Jones, 'Blair, Roma Winsome (1923–2013)', People Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://peopleaustralia.anu.edu.au/biography/blair-roma-winsome-34802/text43820, accessed 6 November 2024.

© Copyright People Australia, 2012

Life Summary [details]

Alternative Names
  • Swami Nirmalanda
Birth

28 July, 1923
Coonamble, New South Wales, Australia

Death

5 November, 2013 (aged 90)

Cause of Death

general debility

Religious Influence

Includes the religion in which subjects were raised, have chosen themselves, attendance at religious schools and/or religious funeral rites; Atheism and Agnosticism have been included.

Occupation
Key Events
Key Organisations