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At the Cross
‘But you’ll love Sydney, and Sydney will be mad about you’.Thus opens the first Australian novel to deal with homosexual life, Jon Rose’s At the Cross, published in 1961. It tells the story of Jon, a sixteen year old (who looks fourteen), who defies the wartime ban on interstate travel and sets off for the bright lights of 1940s Sydney.His adventures there – as he is rapidly absorbed into the thriving camp community centred on King’s Cross – make for a rollicking good yarn. There’s a sly-grog joint accessed through a wardrobe door; male gypsies wearing tangerine satin, Jon naively delivering ‘Chinese herbs’ to desperate users. The novel’s highpoint, though, is the Gala Drag and Drain Party – a costume ball attended by Peter Pans, Greek soldiers, half a dozen Carmen Mirandas, with dancing, a cabaret … and a riotous police raid and subsequent magistrates hearing.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1961
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July 16, 2026
From the flyleaf of the 1961 hardback edition from Andre Deutsch:
"The Cross, which is really called King's Cross, is to Sydney what Soho-plus-Chelsea is to London. Writers, painters, actors gravitate towards it, and so do eccentrics and rebels. When Jon Rose arrived there he was only sixteen years old, so he was not sure what kind of Cross-inhabitant he would be: he only knew that the Cross was the place for him.
"An older person might have had reservations about the life led by Australia's bohemians at that time, which was during the last war when the wild were wilder and the gay were gayer than is normal. But to a boy of sixteen it was glamour and life, and this book shows why. It would be hard to find another writer able to recapture a youthful experience so well as Mr. Ross has done. His words bubble off the page as though in speech; his spontaneity whirls the reader into pleasures and pains, friendships and feuds, and especially into sharing his immense relish for the comic and bizarre.
"Whether Mr. Rose's sense of humour or his sense of colour contributes most towards the glowing life of this book it is impossible to decide. They blend together with affection, honesty and shrewdness to create a portrait of a place and its people which everyone will enjoy and remember."
The American author Peter Cameron wrote this review at his site (https://extremelegibility.typepad.com... - no longer in existence)
"A memoir by this fine writer about two years he spent in Sydney's bohemian ghetto when he was 16 and 17. Jon Rose leaves his unloving and thwarting family in Melbourne at the tender age of 16 and travels with a couple -- a man and a woman who both are (sexually) interested in him -- to the "Cross," an enclave in Sydney that is home to artists, homosexuals, and other outliers. Jon quickly moves in with Bella, a middle-aged prostitute, who guides him with kindness and wisdom through the complicated and sometimes dangerous world of the Cross. Jon meets and befriends a wonderful gallery of eccentric and vividly drawn characters, and learns a lot about life and love before being drafted into the army at the age of 18, in the midst of WWII.
"Rose's writing isn't as luminous as in Peppercorn Days, but it is wonderfully engaging and vivid. Like Denton Welch, Jon Rose was a vulnerable young man with an amazing sense of empathy for both objects and animals. He's less adept at understanding people than Welch, but his experiences related in this book move him towards a more mature understanding of human nature.
"This is a funny, wise, heartbreaking book -- a brilliant depiction of a rare young individual growing into himself in a long-lost but memorable time and place."
An absolutely charming and first rate successor to Rose's earlier memoir 'Peppercorn Days' which is rightly renowned for its depiction of gay life in Sydney's Kings Cross area during WWII (circa 1941/42). Although more recent critics and reviewers tend to question how 'gay' it is and others ignored it - I am thinking in particular of Robert Dessaix's 1993 anthology 'Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing' were it doesn't get mention but that may be due to the difficulty of excerpting a sufficiently 'gay' segment - I would question if the doubters had actually read the book. It is far more openly gay/queer/homosexual in its very blase way then many other books published later (it came out in 1961). What discretion is exercised is that Rose doesn't admit, never mind describe, any affairs with men - and considering its publication date and that he was living in the UK were such acts were illegal and could have led to his deportation - this is not surprising. But from the early pages of the book we are made aware that Rose was the object of interest for many men, that many of his female friends were Lesbian and the entire milieu he lived in was mainly homosexual. There are numerous terms like 'trade' and 'NTBH' (not to be had) which are not explained and would in 1961 have been meaningless, I would think, to most 'straight' readers of the novel.
What is missing from 'At the Cross' and was only hinted at in his earlier 'Peppercorn Days' was Jon Rose's alienation from his family - at 16 he was living by himself and his main 'friend' was an older married man screams 'gay' son thrown out - and it is a great pity the reasons for the estrangement are never made plain. That neither 'Peppercorn Days' nor 'At the Cross' contain any information about Jon Rose is annoying and interesting. Perhaps in the archives of Andre Deutsch there is information - but on the books jackets there is nothing - and I can't help thinking even in those more prosperous publishing days it was unusual for a publisher silent about an author in its lists.
[Even Drewey Wayne Gunn in his problematic but comprehensive 'Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth 1881-1981' although, just, mentioning this novel provides no information about the author noting only that his 'dates' of birth and death are unknown. If an academic researcher can find nothing I am not surprised my efforts have been fruitless].
The lack of information about Jon Rose on his books is frustrating and all my attempts to track him online have failed because there is a famous Australian violinist named Jon Rose who dominates all search engines and is even credited as the author of this book (which is absurd as he was born 1951 so could hardly write a memoir of life in Sydney during WWII). Although it is guesswork I believe Jon Rose was born circa 1927. The only information I have tracked down about Jon Rose can be found below:
'Jon Rose’s At the Cross (1961), narrated by seventeen-year-old Jon, is set in Sydney during World War II and documents Jon’s heterosexual dalliances, yet there are other lovers, identifiably or presumably males, where the story stops with an ellipsis. Two examples:
'"Watching them [Cliff and Dennis, an identifiably gay couple who offer him accommodation] I became more and more sad at leaving this flat. I liked it and it liked me, but I had to go and stretch my own wings. I went back into the bedroom. Dennis was sitting in a little heap on the pillow, Cliff stood looking at an invisible spot in his underpants. I gave them a half-hearted smile, looked at the light switch, and said ‘Can I sleep on the outside?" (Rose 30)
'"I suddenly felt drunk and very sad in a strange way. At that second I saw a low fence and sat down on it. As I was sitting, a half familiar voice said ‘You all right?’ I looked up, saying yes, but I couldn’t really see properly. The voice said ‘I live just here. Would you like some coffee?" (43)
'Jon, who looks even younger than his years, has hitch-hiked to Sydney from Victoria. He is a young innocent abroad. The supposedly heterosexual couple who pick him up both try to seduce him and when he rejects their overtures he finds himself with no place to stay. Then he rooms with Cliff and Dennis, later finds other accommodation at the Cross, and eventually settles in with a middle-aged woman of dubious reputation. His various experiences are recounted with a dash of self-deprecation. He mixes in a very camp milieu, but Jon is never fully “out.” Yet even though Jon’s sexuality in At the Cross is equivocal, at the same time it is coy, perhaps too much so, a camp “in-joke.” The codification of secrecy is in place.
'The novel reaches its dramatic zenith with the Gala Drag and Drain Party which is attended by a vast range of camp people dressed as characters such as Carmen Miranda, Peter Pan and Greek soldiers. It is a riot, in more ways than one, with a police raid and later court appearances.
'The book uses camp slang which is sometimes explained and sometimes not; suggesting two audiences, one “in the know” and one not. Perhaps the editor, if in fact the book had one given the comments that follow, was “in the know”, and missed some opportunities for clarity for the general audience for whom the book is presumably intended; there was no pink market in 1961. As Graham Willett (ALGA 2014) notes: “Who knows what your uninitiated reader would make of ‘TBH’, ‘TBHID’, camp slang which is used but never explained (‘to be had’; ‘to be had in drink’).”
'At the Cross was published by Andre Deutsch, an entrepreneurial and idiosyncratic London publisher (Calder 2000), where its author was living at the time. Jon Rose had moved from Australia to London, working there in theatrical circles throughout the 1950s. He lived for a period with Sandy Wilson, writer of the musical The Boy Friend, in 1953. Wilson describes him in his autobiography as “a singer, one of a growing colony of Australian immigrants in London who had come to Europe seeking the culture and fulfilment which their own country seemed to deny them. He was volatile and articulate – at times excessively so – and possessed of a personality with [sic] either charmed people into the ground or sent them screaming out of the room. We had a close and stormy friendship which lasted for several years, and no account of the following events would be complete or honest if Jon’s part in them were omitted” (Wilson 181). In the course of their friendship, Rose went on a holiday to France with Wilson and accompanied him by ship in a shared cabin to New York for the American premiere of The Boy Friend. It is tempting to consider how these events might have been portrayed by “volatile and articulate” Jon in a “novel” about his life with Sandy, the boyfriend. However, we have only the memoir/novel about his life in Kings Cross in the forties with the sexuality of the narrator excised.
'With regard to contemporary reception of the book, which was quite comprehensive for a first novel from an unknown author, the poor quality of the editing was noted in The Canberra Times (R.R. 1961), where the book was reviewed as a memoir rather than a novel:
'"Jon Rose rarely puts a sentence together in the conventional way, some of his mis-spellings are appalling (‘emptyness,’ for example), and his punctuation is so bad it is disgraceful. This book has been so carelessly and clumsily put together that I suspect that in years to come it will become a source book for literary howlers. Example (p 110): ‘His Honour says “... I am going to bind you over to be of good behaviour for a year and you will be find (sic) three guineas each (11).”
'The book may indeed be more memoir than novel, and therefore what is omitted is quite crucial for what these days might be expected to be revealed in a life story. However, in 1961 even what is not omitted was found morally repugnant:
'"In this book Jon Rose bares his soul in a way that makes the reader almost ashamed to go on turning the pages. It becomes patently obvious that Rose and his associates were only fooling themselves that they were really living. Their contempt for decency and self-respect becomes pathetic. This is not a ruthless self-examination; it is petty exhibitionism. If, however, one is prepared to do a little literary slumming, the book is good entertainment." (R.R. 1961, 11)
Reviewer R.R. had another go at Jon Rose in March, 1962, though to be fair it looks as though one long review of two books was cut and used as space permitted. In this second piece R.R. compares Rose’s work to the American Peter Cohen’s heteronormative memoir Diary of a Simple Man (1961):
'"This is where Jon Rose failed. He had his drunks and his sex but his attitude was: ‘Oh, I am a naughty little boy, so I must be enjoying myself. This is living.’ Peter Cohen, on the other hand, although far from being overtly a moralist, nevertheless casts doubt on the joy of the moment, finds a lesson in his weariness and boredom, and values decent things when he finds them." (R.R. 1962, 17)
Joyce Halstead (1962) was as unkind in the Women’s Weekly:
'"A sordid mixture of ' squalor, vulgar emotions, sin, and vice is used for this picture of Kings Cross – a lopsided picture without much of the color and charm which characterised the Cross even in wartime, when this autobiography is set. A boy of 16 comes to Sydney from Melbourne hungry for life and the reputed excitement of the Cross. His growing-up process is speeded by experience in such dead-end jobs as washing dishes in a hash house, contact with people of doubtful sex, failure as a nightclub singer, and friendship with Bella, a big-hearted madam, in whose house he has a room. His life seems concentratedly seamy, with a gaol sentence thrown in for good measure. All the descriptive detail of Sydney and the Cross is there, but the story is flat. One has the feeling that maybe he lived in the Cross, but that these things never happened to him. Moreover, a few errors in place names do not convince. These may have been deliberate, but the wrong spelling of a well-known coffee shop chain must certainly jar on Sydneysiders." (14)
'These reviews suggest that Jon Rose had stepped too far out of his reviewers’ comfort zone. Cautious as he was in his depiction of Jon’s sexuality, his story still managed to offend. Hopefully, this was the author’s intention. More than fifty years later, it is easy to question why At the Cross ever saw the light of day. It has so many weaknesses in its writing and editing. The last suggests the publisher gave the book the tiniest budget. However, At the Cross does offer some insight into camp culture in Sydney around the time of World War II. Because of that it has survived as a Sydney story and had some influence on Sydney’s gay scene having inspired Alex Harding’s musical comedy Only Heaven Knows, which was first performed by the Griffin Theatre Company at the Stables Theatre in Kings Cross in 1988 (Hurley 195).'
From: sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/... - there are quite a few errors in the account of narrative of 'At the Cross' in the above piece but I think it worthwhile quoting in full because it is the only source I have found for information on Jon Rose or the reception of this book - though it is only Australian reviews which are quoted and I have no access to UK reviews.
"The Cross, which is really called King's Cross, is to Sydney what Soho-plus-Chelsea is to London. Writers, painters, actors gravitate towards it, and so do eccentrics and rebels. When Jon Rose arrived there he was only sixteen years old, so he was not sure what kind of Cross-inhabitant he would be: he only knew that the Cross was the place for him.
"An older person might have had reservations about the life led by Australia's bohemians at that time, which was during the last war when the wild were wilder and the gay were gayer than is normal. But to a boy of sixteen it was glamour and life, and this book shows why. It would be hard to find another writer able to recapture a youthful experience so well as Mr. Ross has done. His words bubble off the page as though in speech; his spontaneity whirls the reader into pleasures and pains, friendships and feuds, and especially into sharing his immense relish for the comic and bizarre.
"Whether Mr. Rose's sense of humour or his sense of colour contributes most towards the glowing life of this book it is impossible to decide. They blend together with affection, honesty and shrewdness to create a portrait of a place and its people which everyone will enjoy and remember."
The American author Peter Cameron wrote this review at his site (https://extremelegibility.typepad.com... - no longer in existence)
"A memoir by this fine writer about two years he spent in Sydney's bohemian ghetto when he was 16 and 17. Jon Rose leaves his unloving and thwarting family in Melbourne at the tender age of 16 and travels with a couple -- a man and a woman who both are (sexually) interested in him -- to the "Cross," an enclave in Sydney that is home to artists, homosexuals, and other outliers. Jon quickly moves in with Bella, a middle-aged prostitute, who guides him with kindness and wisdom through the complicated and sometimes dangerous world of the Cross. Jon meets and befriends a wonderful gallery of eccentric and vividly drawn characters, and learns a lot about life and love before being drafted into the army at the age of 18, in the midst of WWII.
"Rose's writing isn't as luminous as in Peppercorn Days, but it is wonderfully engaging and vivid. Like Denton Welch, Jon Rose was a vulnerable young man with an amazing sense of empathy for both objects and animals. He's less adept at understanding people than Welch, but his experiences related in this book move him towards a more mature understanding of human nature.
"This is a funny, wise, heartbreaking book -- a brilliant depiction of a rare young individual growing into himself in a long-lost but memorable time and place."
An absolutely charming and first rate successor to Rose's earlier memoir 'Peppercorn Days' which is rightly renowned for its depiction of gay life in Sydney's Kings Cross area during WWII (circa 1941/42). Although more recent critics and reviewers tend to question how 'gay' it is and others ignored it - I am thinking in particular of Robert Dessaix's 1993 anthology 'Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing' were it doesn't get mention but that may be due to the difficulty of excerpting a sufficiently 'gay' segment - I would question if the doubters had actually read the book. It is far more openly gay/queer/homosexual in its very blase way then many other books published later (it came out in 1961). What discretion is exercised is that Rose doesn't admit, never mind describe, any affairs with men - and considering its publication date and that he was living in the UK were such acts were illegal and could have led to his deportation - this is not surprising. But from the early pages of the book we are made aware that Rose was the object of interest for many men, that many of his female friends were Lesbian and the entire milieu he lived in was mainly homosexual. There are numerous terms like 'trade' and 'NTBH' (not to be had) which are not explained and would in 1961 have been meaningless, I would think, to most 'straight' readers of the novel.
What is missing from 'At the Cross' and was only hinted at in his earlier 'Peppercorn Days' was Jon Rose's alienation from his family - at 16 he was living by himself and his main 'friend' was an older married man screams 'gay' son thrown out - and it is a great pity the reasons for the estrangement are never made plain. That neither 'Peppercorn Days' nor 'At the Cross' contain any information about Jon Rose is annoying and interesting. Perhaps in the archives of Andre Deutsch there is information - but on the books jackets there is nothing - and I can't help thinking even in those more prosperous publishing days it was unusual for a publisher silent about an author in its lists.
[Even Drewey Wayne Gunn in his problematic but comprehensive 'Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth 1881-1981' although, just, mentioning this novel provides no information about the author noting only that his 'dates' of birth and death are unknown. If an academic researcher can find nothing I am not surprised my efforts have been fruitless].
The lack of information about Jon Rose on his books is frustrating and all my attempts to track him online have failed because there is a famous Australian violinist named Jon Rose who dominates all search engines and is even credited as the author of this book (which is absurd as he was born 1951 so could hardly write a memoir of life in Sydney during WWII). Although it is guesswork I believe Jon Rose was born circa 1927. The only information I have tracked down about Jon Rose can be found below:
'Jon Rose’s At the Cross (1961), narrated by seventeen-year-old Jon, is set in Sydney during World War II and documents Jon’s heterosexual dalliances, yet there are other lovers, identifiably or presumably males, where the story stops with an ellipsis. Two examples:
'"Watching them [Cliff and Dennis, an identifiably gay couple who offer him accommodation] I became more and more sad at leaving this flat. I liked it and it liked me, but I had to go and stretch my own wings. I went back into the bedroom. Dennis was sitting in a little heap on the pillow, Cliff stood looking at an invisible spot in his underpants. I gave them a half-hearted smile, looked at the light switch, and said ‘Can I sleep on the outside?" (Rose 30)
'"I suddenly felt drunk and very sad in a strange way. At that second I saw a low fence and sat down on it. As I was sitting, a half familiar voice said ‘You all right?’ I looked up, saying yes, but I couldn’t really see properly. The voice said ‘I live just here. Would you like some coffee?" (43)
'Jon, who looks even younger than his years, has hitch-hiked to Sydney from Victoria. He is a young innocent abroad. The supposedly heterosexual couple who pick him up both try to seduce him and when he rejects their overtures he finds himself with no place to stay. Then he rooms with Cliff and Dennis, later finds other accommodation at the Cross, and eventually settles in with a middle-aged woman of dubious reputation. His various experiences are recounted with a dash of self-deprecation. He mixes in a very camp milieu, but Jon is never fully “out.” Yet even though Jon’s sexuality in At the Cross is equivocal, at the same time it is coy, perhaps too much so, a camp “in-joke.” The codification of secrecy is in place.
'The novel reaches its dramatic zenith with the Gala Drag and Drain Party which is attended by a vast range of camp people dressed as characters such as Carmen Miranda, Peter Pan and Greek soldiers. It is a riot, in more ways than one, with a police raid and later court appearances.
'The book uses camp slang which is sometimes explained and sometimes not; suggesting two audiences, one “in the know” and one not. Perhaps the editor, if in fact the book had one given the comments that follow, was “in the know”, and missed some opportunities for clarity for the general audience for whom the book is presumably intended; there was no pink market in 1961. As Graham Willett (ALGA 2014) notes: “Who knows what your uninitiated reader would make of ‘TBH’, ‘TBHID’, camp slang which is used but never explained (‘to be had’; ‘to be had in drink’).”
'At the Cross was published by Andre Deutsch, an entrepreneurial and idiosyncratic London publisher (Calder 2000), where its author was living at the time. Jon Rose had moved from Australia to London, working there in theatrical circles throughout the 1950s. He lived for a period with Sandy Wilson, writer of the musical The Boy Friend, in 1953. Wilson describes him in his autobiography as “a singer, one of a growing colony of Australian immigrants in London who had come to Europe seeking the culture and fulfilment which their own country seemed to deny them. He was volatile and articulate – at times excessively so – and possessed of a personality with [sic] either charmed people into the ground or sent them screaming out of the room. We had a close and stormy friendship which lasted for several years, and no account of the following events would be complete or honest if Jon’s part in them were omitted” (Wilson 181). In the course of their friendship, Rose went on a holiday to France with Wilson and accompanied him by ship in a shared cabin to New York for the American premiere of The Boy Friend. It is tempting to consider how these events might have been portrayed by “volatile and articulate” Jon in a “novel” about his life with Sandy, the boyfriend. However, we have only the memoir/novel about his life in Kings Cross in the forties with the sexuality of the narrator excised.
'With regard to contemporary reception of the book, which was quite comprehensive for a first novel from an unknown author, the poor quality of the editing was noted in The Canberra Times (R.R. 1961), where the book was reviewed as a memoir rather than a novel:
'"Jon Rose rarely puts a sentence together in the conventional way, some of his mis-spellings are appalling (‘emptyness,’ for example), and his punctuation is so bad it is disgraceful. This book has been so carelessly and clumsily put together that I suspect that in years to come it will become a source book for literary howlers. Example (p 110): ‘His Honour says “... I am going to bind you over to be of good behaviour for a year and you will be find (sic) three guineas each (11).”
'The book may indeed be more memoir than novel, and therefore what is omitted is quite crucial for what these days might be expected to be revealed in a life story. However, in 1961 even what is not omitted was found morally repugnant:
'"In this book Jon Rose bares his soul in a way that makes the reader almost ashamed to go on turning the pages. It becomes patently obvious that Rose and his associates were only fooling themselves that they were really living. Their contempt for decency and self-respect becomes pathetic. This is not a ruthless self-examination; it is petty exhibitionism. If, however, one is prepared to do a little literary slumming, the book is good entertainment." (R.R. 1961, 11)
Reviewer R.R. had another go at Jon Rose in March, 1962, though to be fair it looks as though one long review of two books was cut and used as space permitted. In this second piece R.R. compares Rose’s work to the American Peter Cohen’s heteronormative memoir Diary of a Simple Man (1961):
'"This is where Jon Rose failed. He had his drunks and his sex but his attitude was: ‘Oh, I am a naughty little boy, so I must be enjoying myself. This is living.’ Peter Cohen, on the other hand, although far from being overtly a moralist, nevertheless casts doubt on the joy of the moment, finds a lesson in his weariness and boredom, and values decent things when he finds them." (R.R. 1962, 17)
Joyce Halstead (1962) was as unkind in the Women’s Weekly:
'"A sordid mixture of ' squalor, vulgar emotions, sin, and vice is used for this picture of Kings Cross – a lopsided picture without much of the color and charm which characterised the Cross even in wartime, when this autobiography is set. A boy of 16 comes to Sydney from Melbourne hungry for life and the reputed excitement of the Cross. His growing-up process is speeded by experience in such dead-end jobs as washing dishes in a hash house, contact with people of doubtful sex, failure as a nightclub singer, and friendship with Bella, a big-hearted madam, in whose house he has a room. His life seems concentratedly seamy, with a gaol sentence thrown in for good measure. All the descriptive detail of Sydney and the Cross is there, but the story is flat. One has the feeling that maybe he lived in the Cross, but that these things never happened to him. Moreover, a few errors in place names do not convince. These may have been deliberate, but the wrong spelling of a well-known coffee shop chain must certainly jar on Sydneysiders." (14)
'These reviews suggest that Jon Rose had stepped too far out of his reviewers’ comfort zone. Cautious as he was in his depiction of Jon’s sexuality, his story still managed to offend. Hopefully, this was the author’s intention. More than fifty years later, it is easy to question why At the Cross ever saw the light of day. It has so many weaknesses in its writing and editing. The last suggests the publisher gave the book the tiniest budget. However, At the Cross does offer some insight into camp culture in Sydney around the time of World War II. Because of that it has survived as a Sydney story and had some influence on Sydney’s gay scene having inspired Alex Harding’s musical comedy Only Heaven Knows, which was first performed by the Griffin Theatre Company at the Stables Theatre in Kings Cross in 1988 (Hurley 195).'
From: sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/... - there are quite a few errors in the account of narrative of 'At the Cross' in the above piece but I think it worthwhile quoting in full because it is the only source I have found for information on Jon Rose or the reception of this book - though it is only Australian reviews which are quoted and I have no access to UK reviews.
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