Witching hours

Deploying demonology in contemporary politics

My oh my there is simply too too much going on. Iran ends up the winner in Trump’s war (didn’t we always know though?); my beloved France is sweltering in an unprecedented heatwave; and Pauline Hanson is being, well, Pauline Hanson—but more savvy these days and with better speechwriters. We would do ill to underestimate her. (More on that another time.)

And I still want to talk to you about Ghislaine and the man she served. She will be an upcoming instalment in my little series on misogyny, handmaidening and green skin, which I promised you last time.

Today’s first instalment, however, is about the vocabulary used to demonise women in politics (or in Hanson’s case, to accuse others of such demonisation), and more particularly about the epithet “witch”. Which is where the green skin comes in. Although it really shouldn’t.

Green on screen (and stage)

You may or may not have wondered why witches are often portrayed with green skin. Well, I have wondered this, following the notorious truck-mounted series of electronic billboards featuring AI-altered images of current Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan in a witch’s hat (the form of which is also something to wonder about) with a dollar sign on it, warts on her face and in some, the extremely pointy nose and chin often featured in caricatures of witches (or Jews). The first of these billboards contained the slogan “Ditch the Witch”, recalling that used against Julia Gillard and infamously supported tacitly by then opposition leader Tony Abbott when he appeared beside placards bearing the slogan. As we subsequently learned, the anti-Allan advertisement was primarily funded by owner of Melbourne’s Gotham City brothel, Franco Puleo, along with other local “business” owners. The brothel name in itself is, well, enough said (reference: Batman, which I have never read nor watched, but I am aware of the cultural reference).

The original billboards did not paint Allan green but the imagery has been reproduced and extended across social media by those—including, sadly, many women—who support the campaign, where the warts, pointy nose and chin and green skin feature prominently. The campaign was even taken to a new low when some bloke (one assumes) spraypainted “Rape Jacinta Allan” over a Melbourne tram stop timetable.

So where did the greening of witches come from? Yes, got it in one: The Wizard of Oz (TWOO), the 1939 MGM musical adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). The film was not, as is often thought, the first to use three-strip Technicolor, in which the camera simultaneously exposed three strips of black-and-white film, each recording a different colour of the spectrum, thus enabling a full range of colour to be used in film. The first to use it was the 1935 film Becky Sharp, a film version of a stage adaptation of William Thackeray’s 1848 novel Vanity Fair. What TWOO did was to contrast the Technicolor world of Oz with the sepia tones of Dorothy’s home in Kansas; it also used various special effects. It is reputedly the most watched film of all time and figures in various lists of the top-ten best or top-ten most influential. The reworking of the Land of Oz in the Wicked musical and screen adaptations has also given the 1939 adaptation a new lease of life.

It was TWOO that imprinted—indelibly, it seems—the colour green on the face of the Wicked Witch (of the West in the movie), whereas the original novel had not painted her green. The colour was chosen because it “popped”: it provided a dramatic effect against the black of her clothing, which the flesh tones of a white woman did not. The copper-based body paint used was also toxic, and caught fire in one scene, leaving actress Margaret Hamilton with severe burns. Makeup used for other characters was also toxic, causing injuries and other after-effects, not to mention the notorious strict diet and pill-popping regime imposed on child star Judy Garland, or the winged monkey accident when their wires broke, causing injuries to a number of stunt performers. The performers in TWOO most definitely suffered for their art.

Margaret Hamilton (1902–1985), photographed in 1929, 10 years before her TWOO role. She already had a stage career by that time (her Broadway debut was in 1932) and when filming TWOO she befriended and mentored Judy Garland. Her career continued for many decades and she was an ardent defender of public education but she is, sadly, only remembered for being green.

The colour green has a decidedly marked history in performance. In film, it “pops” as a costume or makeup colour, and when used in lighting it can create an air of mystery. On stage, green lighting tends to wash out skin tones and add a ghoulish air. In the days of limelight (the original “spotlights”), the lights had a greenish tinge, such that any performer wearing green tended to disappear. In France, wearing green on stage is considered unlucky, due to the fact that Molière was wearing green in his last performance (of The Imaginary Invalid) before Louis XIV. He was taken ill during the performance and died shortly thereafter.

Hammering the Witches

Once upon a time, in the early Middle Ages, witches were healers and scientists, possessing (quasi-supernatural powers). These were the so-called Dark Ages, as Renaissance and Enlightenment revisionists liked to frame them. In the early Arthurian legends, as Nicole Campbell reminds us in The Conversation, Morgan Llee Fay was one such healer and scientist, and various rehabilitations of the Arthurian women such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s novels (beginning in 1983 with The Mists of Avalon) or the celebrated Cyndi Lauper song “Sisters of Avalon” (1997) characterised popular feminist culture in the decades following the so-called “second wave”.

Thing is, as we well know, men have always feared and resented women’s power, and it did not take long, starting with the mid to late Middle Ages, for Morgan and other legendary women of the time to become Baddies: evil temptresses who seduced, enchanted and otherwise messed with the heads and bodies of men. Campbell lays the blame, or the beginnings thereof, at the hands of writers of French chivalric romances, as does my research for a stint teaching a senior undergraduate module on the Grail legends in Comparative Literature or European Studies or somesuch. I was very far from expert in Things Arthurian to start with, so following the adage: “a good way to learn about something is to do a course in it but a better way is to teach one”, I boned up, reading many works of literature from the delightful to the pure tosh and watching as many films in the same range of quality. To rehabilitate the French, I did show my students a few snippets from the sendup TV sketch show Kaamelott, which I find (mostly) pretty funny. Not sure my students followed along quite as well; Audrey Fleurot’s Lady of the Lake is really something to see though.

(Of course, I’m still very far from expert in Things Arthurian: a little research to keep a page or three ahead of highly talented undergrads does not an expert make—but the experience was tremendous fun albeit tremendous work and I probably learned a great deal more from it than the students on whom I imposed chivalric poetry … and Kaamelott.)

But I digress. The (highly sexualised) evilling of Morgan corresponds to the (re)assertion of male power in a world that was moving from the somewhat anarchic to the authoritarianly theocentric, complete with Crusades and suchlike.

In her book Lewd women and wicked witches (1992),¹ Marianne Hester recalls the revolutionary feminist analysis of the system of male supremacy as depending on the eroticisation of male dominance and female submission, or in other words: “male sexuality … is about power … [M]ale sexuality often appears to be perverse because it is perverse” (p. 16, emphasis added). Indeed. Witches are lewd scary creatures in the European imaginary from the late Middle Ages onwards.

It only gets lewder with the advent of the Inquisition and then the Renaissance. In circa 1486 or 1487 Dominican monks and inquisitors for the Holy Roman Empire Henri Institoris (Latinised name of Heinrich Kramer) and Jacques Sprenger published their treatise of demonology Malleus Maleficarum (literally, “the hammer of witches”, that is, “the hammer against the witches”). The title declines “witch” in the feminine (I speak of grammar not cultural attributions) and the first part of the work explains at length that women, being weaker and intellectually inferior to men, are particularly prey to the temptations of Satan. The work was pretty influential at the time, as was that published a century later by French jurist and philosopher Jean Bodin (De la démomanie des sorciers, 1580). In a work that historian of the Reformation, witchcraft and visual culture of the 16^th–18^th centuries Lyndal Roper has described as often “crudely salacious” and “even pornographic”,² Bodin stresses that the “sorciers” were in fact overwhelmingly “sorcières” due to their bestial appetite, their vengeful and lustful personalities and so on. He recommends in great detail the direst of punishments for these nasty lustful women.

Hester, for her part, argued that the European witch-hunts of the 16^th and 17^th centuries were a means of reinforcing male domination during a period of great social upheaval as Europe shifted from a theocentric and feudal to a humanist and mercantilist economic and social older. The witch hunts overwhelmingly targeted poorer and single or widowed women (women who escaped male control or who were considered a social or economic threat), and those few men who were targeted were often related to the women, especially by marriage.

Let us not assume, however, that the witching of women disappeared with the Enlightenment—far from it. Among other things, the Arthurian legends, complete with the evil Morgan Le Fay, made a spectacular comeback through their appeal to Victorian romantics, and this painting by Pre-Raphaelite painter Frederick Sandys (1864) is a well-known example of our Morgan as seen at that time.

The painting is held today at the Birmingham Museums and Gallery and you can purchase a poster of it for just £27.80. The museum describes the painting as follows:

Here she stands in front of a loom on which she has woven an enchanted robe, designed to consume the body of King Arthur by fire. A flaming lamp is passed back and forth while she chants her spell.

Apparently Sandys’ “mistress” posed for the painting, adding, no doubt, to the eroticisation of women as evil temptresses.

In short, the portrayal of Jacinta Allan as lustful for power and money, nasty, vengeful, shrivelled up I’m-Coming-To-Take-Your-Children monster and whatever else runs through the imaginations of Franco Puleo and his sidekicks has a long history in Europe (and a somewhat shorter one in Hollywood).

From demonology to demonisation

Politicians of all stripes are generally fair game for satire and criticism of all sorts, including caricatures (such as First Dog on the Moon’s portrayal of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as a balloon) and name-calling. There are, however, limits. Federal Labor minister Tanya Plibersek was rapped over the knuckles, for example, for referring to then opposition leader Peter Dutton as Voldemort (an epithet in common circulation at the time, along with Potato Head). Much as he lent himself to being mocked, his alopecia is not, after all, his fault and the choice of those particular names was unfortunate to say the least (even if Dutton arguably had some vindictive and power-seeking character traits in common with the fictional villain of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series). Morevoer, who speaks, and from what position, does matter. Satirists and caricaturists in the media and on stage mocking our political class is one thing, but a Federal minister doing so is quite another.

As for calling women witches, it is a particularly sexualised and vindictive attack. As Blair Williams put it a couple of weeks ago in relation to the attack on Allan:

Calling a woman a “witch” reinforces the idea that women who seek or have political power are not to be trusted. They are cast as inherently deceitful, dangerous, and diabolical.

It’s also a sledge that targets women’s appearance. Witches are portrayed as ugly, poor, disabled, barren spinsters who fail to live up to feminine beauty standards (in The Conversation, 12 June 2026).

It is not a political insult like any other, it calls up centuries-old demonisation of women, “asserting women should not seek power and that those who do so are dangerous; they are to be feared and destroyed” (Blair Williams again). In the Australian context, the deployment of this slogan is all the more appalling in that it recalls the same slogan directed against then Prime Minister Julia Gillard (and to date Australia’s only female PM) some fifteen years ago.

When some of us moved to denounce this witch-portrayal of Jacinta Allan, others immediately assumed that we agreed completely with Allan’s political stances and thought she was an excellent Premier, the tacit message behind such an assumption being that it is impossible to denounce violent misogyny without endorsing the politics of the women targeted by it. Not so.

Following Pauline Hanson’s first election in 1996 and her much-mocked political statements (including the notorious “please explain” response to the journalist’s question “Are you xenophobic”), I recall a number of my radical feminist friends fretting over the supposed dilemma of denouncing the considerable misogyny directed against Hanson at that time without appearing to support her politics. Yet I saw no dilemma: denounce the misogyny but also denounce the politics. Calling out the often horribly misogynist treatment of women in the public sphere does not mean we immediately angelise the women, just as, to use the analogy of another much-vexed political debate, calling out antisemitism does not equate to support for the actions of the Israeli state.

I disagree with both Gillard and Allan on various things, notably their stance on gender identitarianism. This does not mean I think open misogynist slather is justified. There are many ways in which women still do not benefit from substantive equality in our societies; that some women deny this substantive equality in one domain does not mean those same women should be denied it in another. When one calls a woman a witch, soon thereafter come the calls to ditch her, burn her—and indeed, in the case of the anti-Allan graffiti, rape her. I do not believe anyone has ever suggested Tony Abbott or Peter Dutton or indeed Anthony Albanese should be burned and certainly not raped. Evilling women through the “witch” epithet calls up centuries-old hateful and pornographic misogyny of the kind to which men in the public eye are never subjected. It is simply wrong.

Epilogue: “suck it up” (or not…)

Pauline Hanson’s response to the demonisation of Allan is, er, interesting. Her initial response was, in relation to issues in Victoria, to “suck it up, sweetheart” (cited by News.com, 8 June 2026), and subsequently “no wonder they call her witch”, telling Allan “Jacinta, you know, if the shoe fits then wear it” (cited by News.com, 9 June 2026).

Hanson claimed that she had been “called so many things over [her] career, it’s water off a duck’s back now”, citing her oft-made allegation that the late former deputy PM and Nationals leader Tim Fischer had called her a witch and said she should be burnt at the stake. Yet during questions following her address to the National Press Club on 17 June last,³ veteran political journalist Michelle Grattan pointed out that there was absolutely no evidence of such a statement ever having been made, even following careful research by Fischer’s biographers, and that Fischer’s widow was upset by the continued allegation. Grattan asked Hanson if she either could provide evidence for the allegation or “admit that [she] could be mistaken”. Hanson stuck to her guns, saying she had “read it in the newspaper” and “when you read something like that about yourself, it’s like … wow … ooh” (Hanson held up her hands in a “taken aback” gesture). So apparently it’s unacceptable to (allegedly) call Hanson a witch (even if it is apparently only in Hanson’s deceptively fertile imagination) but Allan should just “suck it up” (sweetheart).

Just goes to show you, readers: there is one set of rules for the goose and another for the other goose.

I have to admit that AI has its uses. But its increased use is nonetheless worrying (not the least in producing pretty awful writing). Another post for another time.

1. Marianne Hester, 1992. Lewd women and wicked witches: a study of the dynamics of male domination. London & New York: Routledge.

2. Lyndal Roper, 2012. The witch in the Western imagination. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, pp. 38–39.

3. The full address and question time can be viewed here.