Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

It’s a little known fact that the two most powerful – and most maligned – women in Australia’s recent history share their origins with witches.

Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s hometown in Wales is Cwmgwrach, which means ‘The Valley of the Witch’. At the entrance to the village is a black silhouette of a witch riding a broomstick over the sign Croeso i Cwmgwrach, which is Welsh for ‘Welcome to the Valley of the Witch’.

Meanwhile, Peta Credlin, the imperious chief of staff of former PM Tony Abbott, hails from the small Victorian country town of Wycheproof. There are no witches on broomsticks to welcome you into this town.

But it is an uncanny coincidence that the two women dubbed the First and Second female prime ministers of Australia share a witchy birthplace. And, after all, the treatment of both has all the hallmarks of the Salem witch trials.

Move over, Dolores Umbridge and Bellatrix Lestrange.

The minute she snatched the top job from Kevin Rudd, Gillard was despised as the usurper. It would not have surprised her detractors if she had been caught dropping eye of newt in frothing cauldrons while singing, ‘Double, Double Toil and Trouble’ and laying curses on her inconsolable predecessor.

Kevin Rudd did end up in hospital with a strange gall bladder ailment about a month after he lost his job.

But it didn’t keep him down, suggesting there’s a bit more Draco Malfoy about him than Billy Bunter, despite appearances.

So loathed was Gillard, as time wore on, that ‘witch’ became a common slur, immortalised by ‘Ditch the Witch’ signs, complete with a black silhouette of a witch riding a broomstrick, strikingly similar to the one gracing the entrance to Cwmgwrach.

Gillard did not see the charm, however, and never forgave Tony Abbott for inadvertently standing in front of the sign during a carbon tax protest on the lawns of Parliament House.

‘I really don’t know why this wasn’t a career-ending moment for Tony Abbott,’ she said later. ‘Sexism is no better than racism’.

And, thus, Abbott’s fate was sealed.

For the next time Gillard came for him it was with her fabled misogyny speech, which had its genesis in the witch signs.

‘I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not,’ she said. ‘I was offended when the leader of the opposition went outside in the front of Parliament and stood next to a sign that said “ditch the witch”.’

Most Australians at the time dismissed the speech as a cynical ploy designed to get Gillard out of a tight spot to do with a man named Slipper and his penchant for mussels. But the world was spellbound. Feminist luminaries such as Jezebel and Hillary Clinton feted the flame-haired firebrand from down-under as a latter day Boadicea.

When Abbott became Prime Minister, the misogyny speech was his curse. Gillard had cast a spell that would eventually determine his fate.

Everything he did was judged against the backdrop of his supposed disdain for women. He couldn’t look at his watch. He couldn’t even wink without being accused of misogyny. And, even if he wanted to, he couldn’t, ever, sack Credlin, because she was a woman. In the end that was what brought him undone.

It was said by the gossips of the press gallery that Abbott grew so reliant on Credlin that he referred to her as ‘the Boss’ and would sometimes become ‘visibly agitated’ when she was out of sight for too long.

Whether or not that is true, Gillard’s spell remained, even after she had slipped off the stage and disappeared overseas. The visceral loathing she engendered soon attached itself to Credlin, albeit in smaller doses.

There’s just something about powerful women that stirs up colourful hatreds.

Like Gillard before her, Credlin became the butt of cartoonists’ malice. Sometimes they dressed her like Morticia Addams, but always they gave her linebacker shoulders in lieu of Gillard’s enlarged bottom.

The two women couldn’t be more different, yet there were parallels. Both enjoy process and get by on very little sleep. In person they are charming and faintly girlish.

But while one was dedicated to the destruction of Tony Abbott, the other’s dedication to Tony Abbott contributed to his destruction.

Both women made errors of judgement, but neither was malicious. Neither deserved the witch-hunt.

Any woman in bygone times who rose above her station and disturbed the social fabric was portrayed as a devil worshipping deviant. They were the Malleficarum, female evildoers of the 1500s, hunted down, burned at the stake or thrown in a lake to see if they float.

Perhaps the witchy origins of their hometowns were clues to the fate that would befall Gillard and Credlin.

Now unnamed score-settlers are trying to drag Julie Bishop into the cauldron to join them. So far she is getting off scot free. Interestingly, Bishop hails from the Adelaide Hills’ town of Lobethal, just 18km from another German pioneer village, Hahndorf, which is famous for its witches. Cue Twilight Zone music.

In the 1840s, Hahndorf boasted a black witch and a white witch, who have been immortalised in a giant mural in the front bar of the German Arms Hotel. They are said to have frightened their neighbours into wearing their clothes inside-out, and tying red ribbon around their necks to ward off the witches’ spells.

Odd coincidence.

Then again, I was born in New York, which even today is a hotbed of witchcraft. Just a few blocks from where my family last lived is a Hogwarts style school for witches, the Wiccan Family Temple Academy of Pagan Studies.

Eat your heart out, Hermione Grainger.