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Category Archives: Australian popular culture
Ghostly Messages: Australia’s Lost Horror Anthology, ‘The Evil Touch’

In a June 2017 article in Fortean Times, the British magazine concerned with strange and paranormal phenomena, writer and broadcaster Bob Fischer discussed how the sensation of not being exactly sure what you were watching on television, or not being able to recall the details with any precision, was a common experience in relation to consuming visual culture in the 1960s and 1970s, before the advent of streaming, DVD, and VHS. This sense of “lostness”—of incomplete and unverifiable experience—is also what makes these memories such powerful nostalgia prompts.
The television viewing experience that most encapsulates this sense of lostness for me is a little-known, American-backed, Australian-made horror anthology series, The Evil Touch, that debuted on Sydney screens in June 1973 and in Melbourne a month later. Largely forgotten now, American critic John Kenneth Muir referred to the show in his 2001 book, Terror Television: American Series 1970-1999, as the “horror anthology that slipped through the cracks of time.” The Evil Touch has never had an official DVD release, although poor quality versions of some episodes can be found online, or as bootleg editions originally copied from television on VHS. It is not even known who now owns the rights. But the program was significant in many ways.
You can read the rest of the piece in full here at the We Are the Mutants site.… Read more
Posted in Australian popular culture, Australian television history, Dystopian cinema, Horror, Science fiction and fantasy
Tagged 1970s Australian television, Australian horror television, Fortean Times, horror pulp fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, John Kenneth Muir, Lost horror television, Lost television, Mende Brown, Television anthology horror, The Evil Touch
Rosaleen Norton ‘The Witch of Kings Cross’

I was familiar with the name Rosaleen Norton long before I watched Sonia Bible’s excellent documentary about her, which takes as its title Norton’s long running nickname, The Witch of Kings Cross.
In an attempt to cash in on the upsurge of public interest in the occult that occurred throughout the west in the 1960s, the long defunct Sydney pulp publisher Horwitz Publications put together a number of salacious tabloid style non-fiction books on the so-called rise of witchcraft and Satanism in Australia. My favourite of these, which I wrote about on this site some years ago, the 1965 book Kings Cross Black Magic, was a direct attempt to piggyback on Norton’s fame.
Norton was also a semi-regular presence in the bachelor and barbershop magazines that proliferated on the shelves of Australia’s newsagents in the 1960s, titles like Adam, Man, Pix and Australasian Post. These magazines, incredibly tame by today’s standards, were once seen as very risqué. The activities of Norton slotted in well with their steady diet of stories about UFO sightings, white slavery, heroic Anzacs, shark hunting and out of control teens.
So great was interest in the occult in mid-1960s Australia that the subject even featured in a 1965 episode of the high rating locally produced Crawford TV crime show, Homicide.… Read more
Posted in Australian popular culture, Australian television history, Crawford Productions, Horror, Horwitz Publications, Non-crime reviews, Pulp fiction, Rosaleen Norton, Scripts Publications
Tagged Australian occult, Crawford Productions, Gavin Greenless, Horwitz Publications, John Martensen, Kings Cross Black Magic, Rosaleen Norton, Sir Eugene Goossens, Sonia Bible, Sonia Borg, The Witch of Kings Cross, The Witch of Kings Cross (2020)
Carter Brown and the Australian craze for faux American crime fiction

In 1950s Australia, one author – writing pulp novels about detectives and cities he’d never visited – gave birth to a phenomenon. I’m over at the CrimeReads writing about Australia’s most successful, least critically recognised, 20th century author, Alan Yates aka Carter Brown, and the popularity of faux American crime fiction in post-war Australia. You can read the entire article at their site here. … Read more
Posted in Australian crime fiction, Australian noir, Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Carter Brown, Horwitz Publications, Pulp fiction, Pulp paperback cover art
Tagged Al Wheeler, Alan Yates, Audrey Armitage, Australian pulp fiction, Bill Williams, Carter Brown, faux American crime fiction, Horwitz Publications, K. T. McCall, Marc Brody, Mickey Spillane, Muriel Watkins
Lockdown recollections of the outside world and the wonder of Space Age Books

I was saddened over the Eastern weekend to hear of the death of Mervyn ‘Merv’ Binns on April 7, at the age of 85. Binns was a major participant in Melbourne science fiction fandom going back to its earliest days in the 1950s, and established Space Age Books, Australia’s first specialist science fiction bookshop, and a frequent bolt hole for myself and no doubt so many other teenagers, desperate to escape the boredom of long suburban weekends in the 1970s and 1980s.
I only met Binns once, but his passing feels particular poignant given the circumstances we currently find ourselves in, unable to leave our houses and take part in Melbourne’s physical public culture, a field in which Binns once played a small but important role, to go to the pub with friends, browse in a bookshop or go to the cinema or film club screening.
But more than this, memories of Space Age Books briefly made concrete my fears about one of the unintended consequences of the (very necessary) restrictions evoked to combat the Covid-19 virus – its potential impact on the few remaining cultural holdouts that make living in Melbourne feel special compared to a lot of other places: bookshops, including the second-hand and antiquarian bookshops, independent cinemas and cinema clubs, record stores, and other speciality businesses that deal in material cultural items and experiences and, just as importantly, provide a space to engage in face to face discussion about them.… Read more
Posted in Australian popular culture, Australian pulp fiction, Dystopian cinema, Horror, Horwitz Publications, Pulp fiction, Science fiction and fantasy
Tagged Horwitz Publications, Lee Harding, McGill's Newsagency, Melbourne bookshops, Melbourne science fiction, Mervyn Binns, Open Leaves Bookshop, Robert Bloch, Ron Smith, science fiction, Space Age Books