Australia’s ‘Witch of Kings Cross’ Practised Sex Magic, Painted Erotic Gods and Scandalised Puritanical 1950s Society

The theme for the month of April is THE OCCULT. We are observing how it has manifested in various ways in this country over the past 200 or so years of settler colonialism.“The occult” is a nebulous term, generally used to describe anything pertaining to the esoteric, supernatural, or preternatural. The month of April conjures images of cute Easter bunnies, pastels and Catholicism. So, naturally, we will be exploring its antithesis: witches, black magic, and Satanism.

The gist of mid-century Australia wasn’t a far cry from the sanitised suburban paradise rendered in American media of the time: post-war nuclear families, tinned food, the joy of television, the wonder of cars. It was a largely Christian, puritanical, and repressive society, where the status quo was locked in a desperate loop of reasserting itself against anything that lurked beneath.

Kings Cross had been a bohemian haunt since the 1940s. With its reputation as the seedy, inner-city red light district, it was home to an undercurrent of eclectics and vagrants that fluttered out of apartments and lodging houses in the dark hours to mingle at cafes, restaurants, saloons and entertainment venues. Underworld figures mixed with the artistic middle and lower classes; poets, artists and writers flocked.

Amid all this, Rosaleen Norton came to be known as the Witch of Kings Cross.

In 1949, the University of Melbourne's Rowden White Library exhibited 46 paintings by Rosaleen Norton. The surreal, vivid portraits, with titles like Witches’ Sabbath, Merlin, Lucifer, and The Initiate, depicted pagan gods, oozing untoward, magical eroticism, and did not go down well with the public. The exhibition was raided by the police, and 4 artworks were seized and deemed obscene. Rosaleen Norton was charged under the Police Offences Act of 1928.

Rosaleen’s story has been covered in biography, film, and book. In 2021, Australian documentary filmmaker Sonia Bible released The Witch of King’s Cross, an imaginatively illustrated portrait of the artist’s life. Bible spent 7 years producing the film, which contains a breadth of unreleased material, as well as letters and notes from Rosaleen’s private collection. 

“She's sort of become more known for scandal rather than her art, which is a shame,” Bible told VICE.

“She was in the newspapers a lot after being accused of obscenity, because her paintings depicted gods and goddesses who were nude figures. At the time, in Australia, that was seen as obscene.”

In 1949, Norton had met a young poet by the name of Gavin Greenlees while working at a monthly, free-thinking magazine, Pertinent. They became lovers, and it was he who accompanied her across Australia to find a location for the Melbourne University exhibition that would see her charged for obscenity. 

“It was very easy to harass anyone who was an artist or a bohemian at that time because of the vagrancy laws,” Bible said. “It gave them free rein to really persecute people who were a bit different.”

“But they were specifically targeting Rosaleen for obscenity. It was just too much for 1950s society.”

Ultimately, Norton won the case at court by arguing a published volume of her earlier work, The History of Sexual Magic, which was permitted by Australian censors, was far more obscene than the images exhibited at the Rowden White Library. She was awarded £4 compensation, but it was just the beginning of her life of provocation.

She was expelled at age 14 from the Church of England Girls’ School in Chatswood for her “depraved” drawings of ghouls, vampires, witches and other blasphemous scenes which posed the blatant threat of “corrupting” the other girls. 

Rosaleen later went to art school at the East Sydney Technical College, where she was mentored by Australian sculptor, Raynor Hoff, who encouraged her in exploring her pagan beliefs through her art.

After college, Norton was fired from a cadet journalist role at Smith Weekly, as her graphic illustrations were deemed “too controversial”. She left home and took up a job as an artist’s model, working for painters including Norman Lindsay, and also worked as a hospital kitchen’s maid, toy designer and waitress. In this time she began reading books on western esoteric tradition, and developing her spiritual ideology. 

After moving to Kings Cross with Greenlees in 1951, Rosaleen Norton’s notoriety began to develop. She was openly bisexual, often dressed in men’s clothes, and decorated her house with occult insignia. Her artworks were displayed at the local cafes. The tabloid newspapers called her a witch, which she eventually embraced, but falsely accused her of holding black masses. It was in these tabloids that Sonia Bible came across her story.

“When I was making a film, A Recipe for Murder, about women who had poisoned their husbands with rat poison in 1950s Sydney, I did a lot of research in the tabloid newspapers. I kept coming across the Rosaleen story, she was quite present in the material that I was going through. And so I just started a little folder. I knew it would be hard. And then, I don't know, I just started following it.”

“I realised that some of the people who knew her and who had met her who were the experts were quite elderly, and were maybe going to die.”

This included Nevill Drury, author of the 1988 biography, Pan's Daughter: The Magical World of Rosaleen Norton, who was ill with cancer.

“I just started doing interviews with people who I thought, like, might die,” Bible told VICE. “And they did, while I was making the film.” 

“I just thought it was a really important part of Australian history that needed to be preserved.”

Rosaleen’s story has developed a cult following, not just for people interested in the occult, paganism and the esoteric, but also for those fascinated by a woman who so steadfastly chose to devote her life to her belief and art, even when it flew completely in the face of the Christian status quo of the time, and perhaps actively in spite of it. Her art and beliefs would see her persecuted, continually, and mocked by the press. While fantastic, being dubbed the Witch of Kings Cross put a target on her back for the remainder of her life.

“They were very naive times,” Bible said. “People go, oh, she knew what she was doing, and she played up to the media. It's like, no, it was unprecedented. There was no Facebook or internet, then. When the media were interested in her as an artist, of course, you'd go oh, they're interested in me, not knowing that they would turn so badly.” 

“The media were the first ones to label her as a witch, she was always a pagan. And she was very strong in her beliefs, but she didn't say oh, I'm a witch and wear pointy hats and things. So, there was this growth of her image that you could see through the tableau: it's first oh she's an interesting occult artist and then it's like, she might be a witch and then it's I am a witch. And these stories just kept growing and growing.”

In 1951, Greenlees and Norton were arrested for vagrancy. The charge could be levelled at anyone without a job at the time. A publisher named Walter Glover offered them jobs as assistants, and after seeing Greenlees’ poetry, and Norton’s art, decided to publish their works in a combined volume. 

The Art of Rosaleen Norton was published in 1952, including Fohat, a now notorious painting by Norton depicting the eponymous demon with a snake penis. Glover was charged with the publication of an obscene text, and two images in the book, Fohat and The Adversary, were deemed obscene under Australian law, and ordered to be removed from the book. In the United States, copies of the book were destroyed at customs.

“It’s cool, we'll never really know what's true,” Sonia said. “I don't think we'll ever really know if she was really born in a thunderstorm. Was that true, or was that part of the narrative?”

Rosaleen’s terse relationship with the press caused problems for Bible down the line, though. Not only were the people that knew her on the verge of death, they were intently sceptical of intruding filmmakers.

“It took a long time to gain people's trust,” Bible told VICE. “Anyone who was close to Rosaleen, they knew how much she'd been betrayed by the media. And so people were saying to me, you're the media, you're the media. And it's like, no, I'm not, I’m a documentary filmmaker, it's different. But it did take a long time. 

A couple of years into the project, Bible uncovered “major” private collections holding artworks of Rosaleen’s, as well as scrapbooks and writings. 

“They took a long time to get access to, and it took a long time for people to trust me,” Bible told VICE. “Once I was able to document those collections, it was kind of a point of no return. I felt responsible to finish the film, and bring all the material out in a way, because I couldn't find any interest from art galleries and museums to look at the work. I just thought, well, the only way that this work can be seen by people is in the documentary. It's like a moving artwork. It's like a moving exhibition. That's the most that I could do, really.”

Despite her works being intrinsically thought-provoking, revelatory, informed by spirituality and belief, fantastical and moving, and her story being of cultural importance to the fabric of 20th century Sydney, Norton never received critical recognition for her work.

“It’s because of this idea that, if it's classified as occult art, then it is lowbrow,” Bible told VICE. 

“And the main museums are not interested in that, they say we don't do that, we don't go there. Yet they'll go there with the surrealists, all the male surrealists. The Art Gallery of New South Wales has all that on their walls, but they won't go there with Rosaleen. I guess they're afraid of being shunned as having lowbrow art on their walls.”

“I'm really surprised… She's our Frida Kahlo. Look at the queues that were lining up outside the art gallery in New South Wales to see the Frida Kahlo exhibition. I looked at the exhibition and the story, and I just thought it was so similar.”

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