The Witch of Kings Cross and Her Macabre Stories

The new documentary, The Witch of Kings Cross (2021), is a short film (75 minutes) tracing the life of the talented occult artist and bohemian Rosaleen Norton (1917-1979), a New Zealand-born Australian resident. Norton suffered under the toxic censorship in the 50s and by the idiotic sensationalism of the press, who dubbed her "The Witch of King's Cross" (Kings Cross being the area in which she resided in Sydney). Norton responded by playing up the role for the tabloids, though her brazenness certainly came at a cost. The documentary is fascinating.

One lesser-considered aspect of her art is the weird fiction she wrote in her youth. Such stories were only nebulously known until tracked down and republished in 1996 by Typographeum Press in a small limited edition (150 copies) as Three Macabre Stories. An attractive reprint (expanded with some ancillary materials) came out from Teitan Press in 2010, in an edition of 666 copies. Both are expertly curated by Keith Richmond, whose introduction and commentaries are meticulous and highly interesting. Richmond sees Norton's influence on two 1944 stories by one of her lovers, Beresford Conroy, published in Pertinent magazine, and these stories are helpfully included in an appendix. 

Richmond also notes that Norton was an early fan of H.P. Lovecraft, and of Weird Tales magazine, unusual for someone in Australia at that time. This is apparent in her three stories, all published when she was sixteen, and in the same magazine (Smith's Weekly).  The first, "The Story of the Waxworks" (6 January 1934), recalls A. Merritt's Burn Witch Burn (Argosy, 1932), while the second, "The Painted Horror" (27 January 1934), is clearly a take on Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model" which had appeared in Weird Tales in October 1927.  The third story,"Moon Madness" (21 July 1934), has again some of the feel of A. Merritt's stories of the reemergence of forgotten rituals. None of Norton's tales are lost masterpieces, but she had some stylistic flair which makes the stories interesting and readable, and her imagery is as exotic as that found in her paintings. It's a pity that she abandoned the writing of weird fiction so early.