I don’t think there’s anywhere in Melbourne that holds more sentimental significance for me than Bernard’s Magic Shop on Elizabeth Street.
Founded there in 1937, it’s no doubt a curiosity to almost everybody that walks past. And as one of the only retail spaces in the CBD not occupied by a 7-11, Subway or JB Hifi, I’m sure it’s also dear to many a heart that reminisces some ideal of a ‘lost Melbourne’. To me, though, it’s more than that. There’s a bit of me in that store, and a bit of that store in me, but I’ll come to that.
The front window of Bernard’s Magic Shop folds in sharply, creating a small arcade from the street to the front door, like I’m sure so many other shops around it once did. From here, you get a great, lasting view of all the comical, mildly obscene, colourful oddities that are forever set up for passers-by, without getting in the way of the foot traffic.
On one side, filling the largest window as you make your way inside, terrible fake moustaches, fake dog crap, fake vomit, plastic spiders, adhesive windscreen ‘cracks’ and other showbag-fillers. This, presumably, is what stops people in the street. This is where the day-to-day money-making operation finds its basis. If Mad Magazine was a shop, that’s what that window would be. Need a plastic ‘ice cube’ with a fly trapped inside it (ha!)? You’ll have a selection to choose from.
But it’s not for this window that the shop is named, nor the reason for my affection. To me, this stuff is to this shop what those packing peanuts are to my mail-order bride.
For me, it’s all about the other window.
Bernard’s Magic Shop, as the name resolutely suggests, stocks magical equipment. From plastic magic trick sets for kids to professional magician supplies, if you want to make something vanish, cut someone in half or pull a rabbit from something, you come here. Like I used to.
My grandpa, and I’ve always felt like I’m endorsing a cliché here, was a magician. Truthfully, I only actually remember two or three tricks that he would pull from his pocket and entertain us with in the back of the car on the way home from church, but for a German immigrant who didn’t seem excited by the idea of showing affection or too much of himself, these tricks made me love him.
When he died, a whole box of tricks (literally…) was dragged from the top of a cupboard and handed down (again, literally) to me. Fake fingertips that red scarves came out of, vanishing cigarettes, mysterious pieces of metal and plastic whose secrets, without any instructions and without anybody ever having seen them used in any kind of trick, were lost forever.
The box was mine, and with only practice standing in my way, so was my fate as a magician and the opportunity to ensure my grandfather’s otherwise stoic legacy endured.
That’s when I first discovered Bernard’s. I was only 14 and been given license, under controlled circumstances, to catch the train from Altona into the city by myself. Luckily, all I needed to know was how to get from the station to the magic shop, and back again.
I may not have done much else in the city, but I still made the most of it. I would buy new tricks, watch demonstrations from the staff, stand back and see what the older magicians were buying; the whole experience was intoxicating. I didn’t have much money in my pocket, but there was still always something new for me to pick up. Even if it was only a book of card tricks.
Like so many things, the fantasy I would ‘conjure’ (…) in my mind while I was standing in the shop would end up being nothing like the reality. I didn’t have the patience to master slight-of-hand, on which so many tricks rely, and opt instead for gimmicky items that would reveal their own secrets after you’d shown your parents the trick any more than three times. So no matter what I bought would end up sitting abandoned a fortnight later. The magician’s graveyard.
After not too long, posters began to appear around the store for something called the ‘23rd International Convention of Magicians’, to be held that year in Melbourne. I begged mum and dad for the money, registered myself as a participant and entered the Under 18 competition.
The convention was, in hindsight (which is the only way you can judge these things), one of the highlights of my childhood. Constant performances, lectures that went far over my head, rooms of products for sale (which, gloriously, means product demonstrations), it was all unreal to a young teenager who fancied himself a budding magician.
Sadly, it became increasingly clear that I wasn’t ‘budding’ enough. While my passion was well-and-truly there, my discipline wasn’t. Magic needs a lot of practise, I was learning, and while you could cover a lot by connecting the tricks with a complex story featuring a colourful character with a flashy costume, it was never going to be a total substitute for magical content.
And that’s exactly what my post-competition judges’ critique said; ‘Too much acting, not enough magic’.
It wasn’t long after that convention that I discovered another shop in the city I would grow to love; Fine Music. Fine Music sells/sold (I suspect the latter…) play scripts.
Captivated by the store and the potential inherent in each script, I bought some from a discount table, went home and acted them out in my bedroom. It didn’t take me much longer to realise that what I had truly loved wasn’t the magic at all. It was the idea of performing; of standing up in front of people and being somebody else. Acting, I discovered, was a portal that could take both an audience and myself away. Magic was just the road I’d taken to get there.
I joined the local theatre before long. One day, bags and bags in hand, I traded most of my bigger tricks for cash at the magic shop then, in a symbolic act of transition worthy of a cinematic Rocky-style montage, walked straight into the play shop to spend all the money I’d just gotten.
While I get sentimental about that part of my life sometimes, particularly when I walk past Bernard’s, there’s no regret. The magic gave way to acting which would become, and remains, one of the biggest loves of my life. That, in turn, led to a joy of writing and ended up introducing me to 99% of the friends I have now. And while it wasn’t directly, and he never saw it, my grandfather gave me that.
Bernard’s is still there, as I said, and it still seems to catch the interest of people who walk past. This morning, it was my interest. I went inside for the first time in years. Part of me thought, maybe, that buying a little trick would be a nice way of igniting something creative inside me. But I didn’t buy anything. I didn’t need to. Instead, I left happily, knowing that who I am is tied to this city.
“Can I help you with anything?” the lady in the shop asked as I started to leave.
“No, I was just reminiscing,” I told her, my head still swimming from the combination of the spirit gum, fart gas and playing cards smells that hung still in the air.
“Let me guess,” she said, smiling, “your grandfather used to bring you in here.” I smiled back at her. “We get that a lot,” she added, almost sadly, as though she wouldn’t be able to say that in a generation’s time.
“That’s exactly right,” I said.
“Would we know him?” she asked.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think he knew this place existed.”
Tristan Lutze, 2010
