The Witch of Kings Cross

Once upon a time, there was a little girl

who wasn't afraid of the dark.

When she grew up, she became an artist,

and people called her a witch.

She made them afraid,

and they were always watching to see what she would do.

So she put on a hat, and told them her story,

and gave them something to watch.

Her name was Rosaleen Norton.

She was the Witch of Kings Cross.

For the first time in centuries,

a witch has written a full confession,

a revelation of her weird inhuman power.

Artist Rosaleen Norton charged by police

for exhibiting obscene paintings.

They were arrested,

they were thrown in jail overnight.

They all have a twist of the grotesque

or the bizarre.

It was provocative stuff.

I wouldn't call her a surrealist by any stretch.

Although some of her practises

could certainly be linked to that.

She's drawing on the depths of her unconscious.

Accessed through trance.

Artist and lover arrested after photographs

of bizarre sex acts.

One of the most dramatic things

was the involvement of Eugene Goossens,

who was knighted by the Queen.

World famous conductor

disgraced in pornography scandal.

Roie lived expressing herself sexually,

however she wanted.

Satanists at Cross in weird ritual.

The witches sing,

"Satan is the lord of the hunting horn,

and king of the Coven tree."

Well, she was an artist.

She was a performer.

And... she created herself, she invented herself.

It's kind of a cliché to describe her as an eccentric,

but I mean there's the gold plaque in Kings Cross

where it says "genius or crank".

She was a harmless sort of witch.

Especially as her spells didn't work.

There's things real and imaginary,

but I know in her environment

I felt like I was in a sort of powerhouse.

Everybody wants to look and find out a little bit more.

It is such a romantic and threatening...

image,

the image of the witch.

"And so begins my journal of E-Goetry.

In this journal I shall write my secret

and real thoughts about myself.

It will be an orgy of dwelling upon my own peculiarities,

which will be a mighty relief."

It's hard to know whether she was a witch,

or if that was the thing that she, as an artist, created.

"When Gavin Greenlees and I

hitchhiked from Sydney to Melbourne,

it was with the purpose of finding a gallery

to exhibit my work."

They hitchhiked down there with a cat

called Geoffrey stuffed in a bag.

Roie's artwork was exhibited

at the Rowden White Gallery in 1949 in Melbourne.

It was actually part of the library

at Melbourne University,

and it was quite a prestigious little gallery.

That was her first big exhibition.

They thought they'll just have a show of her drawings;

they're a bit pagan, they're a bit outrageous.

But they're not going to cause any great drama.

This exhibition of her work,

which promised Roie all of the attention

a young artist would be seeking,

in fact, backfired very badly.

Some of the viewers came in

and said this was stark sensuality running riot

and things like that.

And then the penny fell, the police came.

She was charged with exhibiting indecent images.

And there was a court case that ensued.

The Crown Prosecutor alleges

that work of this sort

could deprave and corrupt the morals of those who saw them.

It also was extremely unusual;

it was the first prosecution

ever carried out against a female artist.

It was the first prosecution of that type in recent times.

"Miss Norton said that she would leave it

to the public to judge her art."

There was a lot of sympathy,

but there was also a real danger

that she could be in quite serious trouble.

And she took a public stand.

"Obscenity, like beauty,

is in the eye of the beholder."

Roie never, ever apologised for herself.

She got up there and she defended that art.

And she later explained to the magistrates

that the panther is a symbol of the dark night,

the unmanifest night,

the unmanifest potential that everybody has.

So she didn't see it as a rude or over sexual picture,

but it looked like a naked woman having sex with an animal,

a raging animal.

And then in the background there was a nun

on a crucifix giving a bit of a wink.

So it was provocative stuff.

She also talked about the fact that, yes,

these artworks show people naked,

yes, these artworks show occult practises.

And to top it all off she opened her mouth and said,

"I participate in this sort of activity,

and these are the beings who visit me."

Roie was just hitting every button

in terms of attracting negative media attention to herself.

And what happened in 1949 showed the Australian press

that Rosaleen Norton was really good fodder

to sell newspapers.

And it was the beginning of the Witch of Kings Cross.

"Perhaps I'd better begin at the beginning.

I was born at Dunedin, New Zealand at 4 a.m.

during a violent thunderstorm."

"I have loved night and storms all my life."

"Storms arouse in me an elated, almost drunken sensation."

"Night is for me the time when all my perceptions are alert,

when I feel most awake and function best."

She said she was born as a witch, I think.

That she was born on the night of a thunderstorm.

She had pointed ears, she said.

And she had a kind of blue birthmark somewhere.

So she took all this as a sign that she was different.

"At seven years old,

two small blue marks appeared on my left knee

and they are still there.

I have since learned

that they are among the traditional witch marks.

I remember noticing them the year we arrived in Australia."

Roie was born into a very comfortable

middle class family.

Fairly conventional upbringing.

Her two sisters were conventional as well.

"My mother was a highly emotional woman.

Any attempt at a pleasant relationship

between us was doomed to fail."

Her dad was a really senior figure in merchant shipping.

"I saw comparatively little of my father

who was away at sea for most of the time.

Incidentally, he was a cousin of Vaughan Williams,

the composer, to whom he bore a strong family resemblance.

In 1924, my family settled in Australia at Lindfield,

a Sydney suburb where I lived for the next ten years."

As a kid, for about three years or four years,

she refused to live in the house.

And she lived in a tent in the backyard.

"As a child my chief aim

was to be left to my own devices."

She liked being outside in the dark

and she liked to have an orb spider in the tent.

And she kept all sorts of

little critters in the tent

that obviously were designed to keep people out,

because they were a bit scary.

You can see the rebel in her,

rebelling against Christianity,

rebelling against the mores of society at such a young age.

"The onset of adolescence

often awakens the religious

as well as the sexual urge,

and this was so with me.

For some time, I had been constantly aware

of a world of vast mysterious powers."