He won three successive poetry competitions sponsored by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and his poems later were widely published, notably in the 'Australian Weekend Book'.
He experimented with Surrealism and studied Freud, Lautreamont, Rimbaud and James Joyce for several years.
In 1949 he began studying Jung, Dostoyevsky and Ouspensky[1] and the works of Aleister Crowley and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
[2] The sexually explicit nature of some of the artwork, led to the publisher being charged with producing an obscene publication, and continued distribution within Australia was only permitted if some of the offending images were obliterated with black ink.
From 1955 onwards, Greenlees had many prolonged admissions to psychiatric hospitals in Sydney suffering from hallucinations and paranoia,[3] possibly made worse by his regular use of drugs including amphetamines and LSD.