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  If that Easter show was the beginning of my magic performing career it was also the beginning of my calling as a magic archivist. I’m not a pack-rat in general. I don’t have every essay I ever wrote, or every theme-park souvenir I ever got. But I have kept every possible piece of paraphernalia associated with magic. And I mean every piece: I still have the banner from that Easter show. I can’t really tell you why, other than that I always felt like those things were special and should be preserved. For the same reason I didn’t throw out the shoes I wore in the Michael Jackson dance number when I outgrew them; I still have them. They’re part of my own personal museum of magic.

  My confidence was growing, day by day, week by week. The shift that had happened in the way I felt about myself and about school gathered speed. Teachers now looked at me like I had something to offer and suddenly I was popular with the other boys and with girls, who liked the idea of a guy being able to dance like that. Whenever I had free time I’d push my bed out of the way, put a large unfolded cardboard box down on the floor of my room and experiment with all kinds of dance moves, or I’d pore over the pages of my magic book. I learned more and more tricks, picking them up quickly and practising at every opportunity. Conjuring was still fascinating but increasingly it was the stage illusions that really gripped me.

  Wilson Du

  Things started to snowball. I discovered magic shops, amazing places full of treasure. The first one I went into was Australia’s oldest, Bernard’s Magic Shop in town in Melbourne, and it made my head spin – I loved it. I left after my first visit with a magic catalogue, page after page of tricks and equipment that you could order by phone or mail. The descriptions were so enticing: ‘Make a 20 cent coin vanish in your bare hand’, ‘Levitate a silver sphere with no attachment whatsoever’. They were magic-focused versions of the kind of ads you used to find at the back of comic books for ‘X-Ray Specs’ and ‘Sea Monkeys — so eager to please they can even be trained’.

  It all sounded too good to be true and it was, of course, but I didn’t wise up to that until I’d had a few experiences of excitedly phoning through the order, with Mum next to me to authorise her credit card, only to receive something very different to what I was expecting. Nowadays you wouldn’t sell a trick without having a product webpage for it and a YouTube video showing exactly what you get for the money and how it works, but I found out the hard way that when you sent off for the levitating ball trick you got a perfectly ordinary ball and a print-out of the method telling you how you could make it appear to levitate with enough practice. It didn’t dent my enthusiasm for magic shops but it did make me a more sceptical purchaser.

  After a couple of visits to Bernard’s and to Abracadabra, another shop we found, in North Balwyn, I got up the courage to have a conversation with whoever was behind the counter. What I didn’t realise in my overawed state was that any teenager who came in represented much-needed fresh blood for junior magic clubs intended to keep the craft alive — because while magic is cool now it wasn’t then. There were no funky street magicians getting attention, no steampunk stage magicians selling out theatres. When most people thought of magic they thought of top hats, canes and hokey shows at suburban RSLs and kids’ birthday parties. The sole exception was David Copperfield.

  Copperfield was similar to other magicians the way the sun is similar to a streetlight. He was a superstar who happened to have chosen magic as his medium. There were other people performing magic who were breaking the mould in one way or another, particularly Siegfried & Roy, although they were spectacle entertainers famed more for their lions and tigers than the magic they performed; Penn and Teller, then well regarded in the US but little known outside it; and Ricky Jay, maybe the greatest ever sleight of hand magician but known more to the cognoscenti than the general public. At the time I’d never heard of any of them, but I had heard of David Copperfield.

  He was internationally famous for amazing illusions including walking through the Great Wall of China and making the Statue of Liberty disappear. I would never have imagined how similar his early experience of magic was to mine (despite me being twenty-six years younger). He, too, had been fascinated with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. He’d discovered magic (and ventriloquism) aged just a year or two younger than me and had started performing in his neighbourhood as ‘Davino, the Boy Magician’. He said that being able to do magic helped him fit in as a teenager, that it was his way of ‘being okay’.

  By 1996 he didn’t need to worry about fitting in anymore. He was instantly recognisable for his all-black stage outfit of designer jeans, cowboy boots and leather jackets. He’d had eighteen TV specials, a record-setting Broadway show run, he was playing five hundred shows a year throughout the US, Europe and Asia, and he was engaged to the gorgeous German supermodel Claudia Schiffer. I knew he was famous but I hadn’t seen him in action until, flicking through the channels, I caught the end of one of his specials. I was desperate to see more and fortunately my cousins had taped that show. I replayed the VHS they gave me over and over, absolutely blown away by the scale of the illusions, by his artistry, by the set decoration, the beautiful assistants — the whole package.

  It got me really fired up about the possibilities of magic. I wanted to get bigger and better to really amaze people. I was especially keen to do more illusions myself. To create those illusions you needed special apparatus. Because of the cutaway diagrams in my encyclopedia I could get the idea of how most of the equipment worked, but I couldn’t afford to buy it. So I had to get creative and try to make some pieces of my own. That’s where Dad came in. He had the skills, of course, and a good workshop set-up in the garage but, even better, it interested him. Going out to a park and kicking a soccer ball around with us wasn’t really his thing but he loved nutting out a problem, coming up with possible solutions then using his hands to test them out. I really enjoyed the fact that we worked on things together. It was real bonding time for us amid the wood blocks and buzz-saw, nails, glue and paint.

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  The first things we made were pretty simple — we looked at the diagrams I had and figured out how we could adapt them. We made a piece which we called a ‘Crystal Appearance’ that used three Perspex boxes totalling two metres high, stacked on top of one another on a table we had made. A cloth went over the whole thing and when it was pulled off I had magically appeared. There was also our re-engineered take on the classic ‘Zig-Zag’ illusion. The full-size Zig-Zag has the magician cutting his assistant into three pieces then sliding the middle section out of alignment. I’d bought a small version at the magic shop. It looked like an ordinary can of Coke which I could seemingly cut up and reassemble before opening it with a flourish and pouring its contents out. Dad and I made one from scratch to suit an old-fashioned Coke bottle, which we thought was more aesthetically pleasing. (Even back in those early days I gravitated to an original vintage aesthetic and I love it just as much today.)

  I got a few more chances to do little performances at school fetes and children’s birthday parties. As I’d learned at school, doing presentations, if I could pretend to myself I was putting on a show, then it wasn’t shy me up there, it was a performer. I did the same thing with these appearances, getting myself into a kind of mindset where it wasn’t me so I didn’t have to feel self-conscious.

  My next opportunity to put on a real showcase was at my Nonna Pina’s eightieth birthday celebrations. The audience was going to be bigger this time, with both family and friends, and I decided to increase the showmanship by adding music and incorporating dance moves — moonwalking across the stage or using my arms in a certain way. It amplified the theatricality and was also a useful misdirection tool. Adam was interested in DJing and had a little cassette tape-deck mixer, so I went to him for advice about the music and we put together a backing tape for the performance. It was a laborious process but the work paid off — once again, biased as they may have been, the audience really enjoyed the show. It was time to branch out.<
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  Follow your own path. Commit to doing what you love.

  Believe in yourself. Then magic will happen.

  Jilda had a family friend who ran a nursing home. At some point she mentioned me to the friend, who asked if I might be willing to come and entertain the residents. I said yes straight away. These days if I took on something like that I’d probably do some great close-up magic, card tricks and maybe a few other cool effects using apparatus attached to my body or clothes, but at the time ‘magic’ meant stage magic in costume in front of a table covered in a black cloth, so that’s what I did.

  The costumes were incredibly time-consuming to get right. The amount of reworking alone would have made it out-of-reach expensive if I’d had to pay someone to do it. Magicians need things that look standard but aren’t — sleeves that are a bit wider than normal or pockets that are bigger or deeper than you’d expect — and it took a lot of trial and error to get it just right. Three times to correctly position a pocket for a disappearing ball trick was nothing out of the ordinary, for example, and that would be repeated for almost every costume I wore for many years. Nonna was incredibly patient with the endless sewing, waiting for me to practise, unstitching, repositioning, resewing and unstitching all over again, not to mention creating things I asked her to whip up based on a sketch I’d done.

  For the retirement-home gig, I changed the name of the show to ‘The Magic of Cosentino’ and worked up what I thought was a full show, although really it was just bits and pieces put together with dance. It didn’t occur to me to change the music I used. My costume was inspired by Michael Jackson, including the plastic fedora I’d worn in the school performance, and the music consisted of dance tracks. It must have been a bit startling for the couple of dozen people who made their way to the rec room to be entertained. I’m also not sure what they would have made of my mask. I’d decided that a blank white mime-style mask I found at Spotlight would look mysterious and cool against my black outfit and it would have the big added advantage of letting me adopt a character. I decided I’d wear it through the whole act, taking it off only at the end when I took a bow. I wouldn’t speak at all.

  ‘Magic is the only honest profession. A magician promises to deceive you and he does.’ — Karl Germain

  Adam came with me and it probably took us two or three times as long to set up as it did to perform. I did a heap of tricks including disappearing silks (as magicians’ handkerchiefs are known) and dancing lights, a trick I’d bought at the magic shop that enabled me to make a coloured ball of light appear which I then threw back and forth between my hands, multiplying it. My big finish was the Coke bottle Zig-Zag, which I seemingly cut up and reassembled before opening it with a flourish and pouring its contents out.

  The response was very subdued: polite applause and kindly smiles, with the biggest reaction from the staff members who came in to take a look. Obviously the word was good, though, because it led to requests for me to go and do shows at other retirement homes around the area. It was useful practice for me and free entertainment for them: win–win. It also pushed me into thinking about how I carted my gear around. If I lost any little thing I wouldn’t be able to complete that trick properly, and I needed to get it all in and out of the car quickly and efficiently when Mum or Dad or John drove me there. I developed a detailed system right down to the order things got loaded or unloaded. It would prove incredibly useful a few years later when I took the plunge and started making my living as a travelling magician.

  Magic was by now a huge part of my life. I put every cent I had towards tricks and props and spent hours dreaming up ideas, practising and learning new tricks. When I found out David Copperfield was bringing his live show to Australia in May 1997 I was over the moon. In confirmation of how big a star he was, and how big his illusions were, he would be playing not at a theatre but at the Rod Laver Arena, a sports and concert stadium seating 15,000. I was desperate to go, but the tickets were expensive and it took a lot of work to persuade my parents to agree. In the end Mum and I went, along with my cousins Mark and Vincent.

  We had nosebleed seats, so far up the back that I watched the whole thing through binoculars. Impressive as the illusions were it was hard to be completely swept up when you saw them through lenses, but when Copperfield flew across the stage it took my breath away. Despite all my reading and studying I didn’t know nearly enough to be able to figure out how most of his illusions were done and even having the binoculars at top magnification I couldn’t spot any wires or get any other clue as to how he was flying.

  Wilson Du

  Even in our seats you couldn’t help but get swept up by the scale of the event. Copperfield had thousands of people completely under his spell, awed by what they were experiencing. He was sophisticated and suave and somehow managed to make the show both romantic and sexy (those assistants!). In one stunning effect he made it snow right there in the arena, on the stage and the audience down close to the front. I had no idea how he’d done it so after the show I ran all the way down to the front seats and reached up and scooped some off the stage. When I had it in my hand I realised it was confetti, wet with froth and foam, but knowing that didn’t make the trick any less special, in fact just the opposite. He was an illusionist and the clue is in the name: illusionists don’t make the impossible real, they make it look real. As the American magician Karl Germain put it, ‘Magic is the only honest profession. A magician promises to deceive you and he does.’ David Copperfield had delivered on that promise and then some. It was the first live magic show I’d ever seen and it was going to be a very hard act to follow. (In case you are wondering, yes, I do still have that ‘snow’ filed away in a ziplock bag.)

  I’d been going to a young magicians’ club for a while by this point. It was run for under-18s by one of the magic shops and met once a month on Saturday afternoons. The idea was to come together, share ideas and learn tricks. There was an adult convenor and occasionally there would be adult magicians who would come in as guests to answer questions. But it wasn’t a workshop as much as an open peer forum. Kids were encouraged to perform for the rest of the group to get feedback and pick up tips. Generally between ten and fifteen kids came along, mostly aged between fourteen and seventeen and all boys except for one lone, gutsy girl.

  As 1997 began we often heard through the club organisers about the Adelaide Magic Convention — AdMagiCon to those in the know — to be held towards the end of the year. We were strongly encouraged to go on the basis that it would be a chance to see professional performers, attend lectures, watch other magicians competing for various titles and basically just immerse ourselves in magic for three days. I was sold, but when I told my parents about it their reaction was ‘No way’. It was 750 kilometres away and would require one of them to take me, spend three days at the convention and pay for flights, accommodation and registration.

  I understood their point but I just couldn’t let the idea go. I reasoned and asked and begged and pleaded and cajoled and eventually they said yes, Dad would take me. I was ecstatic and decided that since I was getting this great opportunity I should make the most of it by entering the competition in the Parlour Room Magic category (bigger than close-up magic, smaller than stage illusion magic). There wasn’t a junior division, it was all ‘open’, but while that was a little daunting I figured I’d give it a go. I knew I would need a tight eight- to nine-minute act and I started putting it together, buying more tricks, trying different running orders, working on my skills and my patter. I also developed my costume. My intro music would be taken from Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ featuring that great beat and Vincent Price’s sinister laugh. To add mystery and drama I had Nonna make me a big swooping hooded cloak. I would dance out to take my place at the front of the stage and push the hood back to reveal a skeleton mask. Then I would whisk off the cloak and mask, revealing my white mime mask underneath, and then I would do my tricks with dance moves woven all the way through.

  Aware I’d en
tered the competition, the magic club convenor asked me to showcase the routine for the young magicians’ club. I agreed and brought in all my gear and did the show for them. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and at the end everyone applauded. I was feeling pretty good until the convenor gave me her feedback. Taking the charitable view, I can see now she was trying to help me because what I was doing was so new and different she thought the judges would mark me down for it. What she said was, ‘It’s great, but this isn’t a dance competition, it’s a magic competition. If you want to do well, you need to cut all that dance stuff out.’ What I heard was, ‘Change your act, it sucks.’ I held it together until the end of the meeting but I was so devastated that thinking about it on the way home I started to cry.

  Talking about it with Mum and Adam later I tried to explain that I’d got so upset because for me the dancing was intrinsic to the act. Telling me to drop the dancing was like telling me I walked wrong or I was the wrong size — at least that’s how it felt. Yet who was I to ignore an expert opinion? The two of them listened sympathetically and then talked me down off the ledge, convincing me I should follow my instincts and stick with the act the way I wanted it to be. After I’d had a bit of time to think it over I decided they were right. If I believed fully in what I was doing and if we liked it and found it entertaining then surely someone else would too.

  Keeping the dancing in meant that I needed to have the music for the act on a CD at high enough quality to play through a professional PA system, and that meant finding someone who could mix and burn it for us. Adam did all the research and tracked down a man who had the skills and equipment. Unfortunately he was in Ballarat, nearly two hours’ drive away, but instead of saying, ‘Just make do with the tape you have’, in a hugely generous gesture Mum agreed to drive Adam and me to Ballarat, and then hang about there while our expert made the mix using big old reel-to-reel tape equipment hooked up to a CD burner. I was definitely appreciative at the time, but the more I look back the more grateful I am to have had such staunch, unconditional support.