Anything Is Possible

Prologue

Trapped underwater in agonising pain, shackled and sinking and desperately trying not to give in to the urgent need to breathe, I really thought maybe I had pushed myself too far this time. The scar was still fresh from my most recent near miss, when a razor-sharp knife had carved into my chin in a stunt gone wrong. But at least I’d lived through that one. The situation I was in now was exactly the kind where one small problem starts a chain reaction that ends in serious injury or even worse. And it was all of my own making. Scrabbling for the chains, I knew I had only seconds before water started to fill my lungs . . .

When I am moments away from disaster as I was then and have been too many other times for comfort, the world takes on a deadly simplicity. When things are dangerously out of control I focus on my fingers, praying they don’t slip on the locks, I focus on the air I have left so I can tell myself to ignore the bursting pressure in my chest, and I focus on the numbers ticking relentlessly down to the point of no return. If I can focus hard enough I’ll keep at bay the panic waiting to flood over me.

Why do I do this? Why do I, again and again, put myself in harm’s way performing these wonderfully elaborate, wickedly complicated, wildly dangerous stunts? The simple answer is that I am compelled to push myself as far as I can go and then keep on pushing — and that’s the way it’s been since I was a little boy.

Magic has changed my life and shaped my world. When I was young my path was altered forever by a magic book. I’m a believer in destiny and stumbling upon that book felt like the first step in unlocking my true destiny. The book was about magic but its power was much greater than the information it contained. The way I felt about it worked a deep and unexpected spell on me, opening up endless possibilities. Being able to perform magic took that shy, struggling boy who had been written off by many and put him on the path to my life today, travelling the world to appear before thousands of people and astounding, shocking, delighting and entertaining them.

It’s impossible to overstate what magic means to me. It’s my life, my work, my purpose and my passion. I commit everything to it, and risk everything for it. Stage magic has an elemental power and not just on the audience. When you learn to make a dove appear you feel you are controlling life. When you have an audience in the palm of your hand you feel you’ve been given a remarkable gift.

The best magicians have an impact that lasts far beyond the final curtain. The power Houdini achieved through magic spoke to the people of his time, telling them that nothing can stop you, nothing can hold you back as long as you really believe in yourself. Looking at him and what he had created they could see the truth that we are all free to be extraordinary, in whatever form that might take. It’s an incredibly powerful message.

I hope that my life in magic speaks to people in a similar way. I’ve lost count of the number of things I was told were impossible before I did them. If I’d listened to the doubters and the self-proclaimed experts I wouldn’t have achieved anything. Instead I listened to my heart and to the believers who were always there for me. With their support and my own stubborn determination to succeed I found I could do anything I set my mind to. Trust me, anything is possible if you just believe.

So come with me and let me tell you my magical story . . .

Twenty-two years ago I stumbled across an enchanted key. It changed my world, UNLOCKING A FUTURE I’D NEVER EVEN GUESSED AT. THIS PARTICULAR KEY WAS HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT ON THE SHELVES OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY: A BOOK ON MAGIC. IT WAS FOR ADULTS, NOT CHILDREN, AND WHEN I PICKED IT UP I WAS TWELVE YEARS OLD AND COULD BARELY READ. BUT FROM THE MOMENT I STARTED LEAFING THROUGH ITS PAGES I WAS TRANSFIXED.

At that age school was torture for me. When I’d first begun it was fine. I couldn’t read at age five but hardly any kids could; that’s one of the things you start to learn in your first year. I liked books and Mum read bedtime stories to me every night. I especially enjoyed the silliness and the language of Dr Seuss and the amazing richness of the illustrations and story in Dinotopia. In Prep year it didn’t matter that I jumbled up the letters in my name, Paul, when I was asked to spell it out in stickers, and it still didn’t matter that I didn’t know how to write my name when we were supposed to carve it into the clay pencil block we made.

But by the end of the year I hadn’t progressed in the way the other kids had. In Year 1 expectations were higher and I was aware I was slipping behind. I started developing techniques to hide my problem. I always sat up the back and kept quiet, hoping to remain under the teacher’s radar. I never, ever put my hand up to answer a question for fear of making a mistake. Like many illiterate adults do, I came up with tricks to deflect attention anytime my inability to read was in danger of being exposed. But with every month that passed my anxiety increased.

What made me even more self-conscious was my awareness that education was highly valued in our house. My dad arrived here from Italy as an eleven-year-old migrant who didn’t even speak English, and yet within a short space of time he mastered English and did well enough at school to go on to university and become a structural engineer. My mother was a school teacher, soon to be promoted to assistant principal and then principal. She worked in the public system but we boys went to a private school. Not a Catholic one, as many children from Italian families did, but the Anglican Wesley College, a co-ed school that ran from Prep to Year 12.

For a while I got away with it. If I was ever asked to stand up and read aloud I would start crying. The teachers assumed it was a case of extreme shyness and before long they automatically skipped over me when they were selecting people. And so I continued to fall between the cracks. By the time I got to Year 2 just the thought of school made my stomach clench. The kids around me were doing their work and learning while I spent the whole day thinking, ‘If I do get called on what am I going to say? How am I going to get out of it?’ It was a self-perpetuating cycle that put me further and further behind.

That year we moved from North Dandenong to Lysterfield. It was only a few kilometres away but it represented a huge change for me because in the previous house we’d been closely surrounded by friends and now we were on two hectares of land. There was lots of room to explore but it felt far from familiar faces. My sense of isolation grew but I was so determined to hide my problems, even from my family, that it wasn’t until Year 3 when the other kids were reading fluently and I was just starting to handle tricky words that my teachers really tried to find out what was going on.

Being an educator, Mum was well aware that my literacy skills weren’t yet where they needed to be, though she knew I was bright enough. But I hid my unhappiness from her and did my best to disguise just how hard I found the work my classmates could do with apparent ease. She took the long view: she’d seen enough kids who were late bloomers when it came to academic skills not to panic. She remained encouraging and kind when she sat with me in the evenings as I stumbled through simple readers.

She also systematically worked her way through all the possible functional problems that might be holding me back. She knew it wasn’t a sight issue because early on she’d taken me to the optometrist. I couldn’t read the letters on the sight chart correctly and as a result I came home with glasses, despite having been able to see perfectly well the whole time. No sudden improvement followed so the investigations continued. There was a lot of deafness and hearing difficulty on Mum’s side of the family — maybe that was my problem. Off I went to have my hearing tested and to get a speech therapy assessment. No, that wasn’t the issue. Nor was it dyslexia. One by one the possibilities were crossed off the list without any answers being found. Meanwhile I continued to languish.

My brothers couldn’t really help. John, being six years older, was fully absorbed by the demands of high school. He had student leadership roles, he was great at sport and he worked hard and got good marks: a classic responsible oldest son. And while the two years between Adam and me are nothing now, at school a two-year gap is a big deal. Adam also had his own challenges, having been born with mild cerebral palsy. Even now too many people are uninformed about CP, a physical condition affecting your ability to control movement and posture. Adam dealt with it by becoming a social butterfly, always in demand, with lots of friends.

As we all know, children are experts in homing in on other kids’ vulnerabilities so I was already copping comments along the lines of ‘I’m reading this cool novel and you’re reading baby books like Grug’. Then I was moved to a ‘special’ class for reading. Everyone in the class was struggling in some way, but there was a huge gap between kids who were having trouble reading and kids with very serious learning or social difficulties. The idea was that you got intensive help to catch up, but in reality it just painted everyone in the class as less than. The message I absorbed was that I was dumb: really, truly dumb. I didn’t have a specific diagnosis but the invisible mark against my name meant I no longer had to even try, I just had to endure each day until the final bell then I could go home, play with my mini fox terrier Mighty, get on my bike or dress up and act out movies and forget about it all until the next morning.

A few things got me through the torture of school. I had friends who looked after me, protecting me from playground bullying and slipping me answers whenever they could. Sports lessons were good — it was always a relief to be able to run around. And I loved drama and movement class. This was the only time I excelled. If the teacher asked us all to act like tigers or monkeys or mice or trees I could do it easily. Physical expression of emotions and thoughts made perfect sense to me. If only we could have spent the whole day doing that I’d have been happy.

In fact, one of the few things in my life that made sense to me and gave me just pure pleasure was dancing. At some point I saw the movie That’s Entertainment! which had been released in the mid-seventies by famed movie studio MGM to celebrate its 50th anniversary. It featured people who had been among the biggest stars of their day introducing clips from some of the best, most lavish musicals ever made. It was, in effect, a fond farewell to the Golden Age of Hollywood, but it was all new to me. I didn’t care whether the clips were in black and white or colour, I was riveted by the skill and artistry of Cyd Charisse and Ann Miller and the many other brilliant singers and dancers. But it was Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire who really blew me away — Gene Kelly’s exhilarating athleticism, Fred Astaire’s smooth and charming grace; I had to see more of them.

‘I am a great admirer of mystery and magic.

Look at this life — all mystery and magic.’ — Harry Houdini

At our local video store, I rented anything I could find that had Kelly or Astaire in it. I lost track of the number of times I got out Singin’ in the Rain, but I do remember the video store owner commenting to Mum on how unusual it was to see a kid my age interested in all the old stuff. I would watch the VHS tapes over and over in our family/games room, standing in my socks on the tiles, remote control in hand, playing and rewinding endlessly, trying to copy the steps. I wanted to explode like Gene Kelly, be as effortlessly loose-limbed as Fred Astaire. I would dance until my feet hurt, wanting more than anything to be transported into another world. And in the classroom, instead of listening, I’d replay the movies in my mind, longing for escape.

By the time I got to Year 5, school was getting harder and harder for me. We had new teachers, an influx of new students, and an increase in the amount of work we were given and the expectations placed on us. If you still can’t read and write properly at that point it becomes a lot harder to hide. Ours was the first school in Victoria to get classrooms equipped with computers for every child. If anything, that made things worse for me. On top of the classroom work I couldn’t do, we now had extra homework sheets that had to be filled in on the computer. Every week I spent hours in the school library laboriously copying the answers from my friends’ work, feeling humiliated and hating every second of it. I longed to feel normal but too much of the time I felt strange, inadequate, isolated and alone.

Magic and Michael Jackson came into my world at almost the same time and both were incredibly influential and important for me. I hesitate to think where I’d be now or what I’d be doing if I hadn’t discovered them. Michael Jackson came first. His Thriller album had been released just a couple of weeks after I was born, in 1982, but the video clip was a perennial favourite that got played on TV right through the following decades. The first time I saw it I was twelve and I was completely amazed. It was like a movie, with a storyline and big-production choreography. It was, in fact, a modern take on the musical numbers in the old movies I lapped up. The effect was electrifying. I just had to teach myself how to dance like that! The next time we went to the video store I scooped up all the Michael Jackson videos I could find.

I loved his style — not surprisingly, since it was directly influenced by both Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire. As I had done before, I played the tapes again and again, getting the dance moves down. Even though I’d never had a dance lesson I found I was good at it. I could nail even the trickiest steps if I just stuck at it. This, I got. This made sense. And I found so much joy in it. Somewhere inside my head something began to unlock. But I needed one more discovery for the door to swing open.

One seemingly ordinary day my mother took me to the public library near Fountain Gate Shopping Centre, twenty minutes’ drive away. We’d go there if I needed to photocopy maps or pictures or other material for school projects, or so she could borrow something new to read. Even though the library was, obviously, full of books, I wasn’t tense there the way I was at school, where books meant pain and humiliation. Here no-one bothered me or asked me to do things I couldn’t and I was free to wander around as I chose. I was fascinated by Ancient Egypt and often looked through books that had pictures of pyramids and mummies. After that I would generally gravitate to the puzzles section, where there were games and toys as well as books.

It was when I was looking around in the puzzles and games section that I came across the Encyclopedia of Magic. The book didn’t really belong in that section, but had been put there because it had how-to diagrams to teach yourself tricks. So I was lucky. Or maybe it was fate. The book covered the history of magic, including some of its most famous names, and what first drew me in were the pictures: wonderful old vaudevillian playbills, sepia-toned turn-of-the-century theatrical postcards and etchings, and atmospheric old black and white photographs of magicians. I imagine most twelve-year-olds wouldn’t have given it a second glance, but my love of musicals meant I wasn’t put off by the historical feel. In fact, I was mesmerised.

I’d never heard of Houdini at that point but I kept turning back to this photograph of a short, stocky man with dark hair and incredibly striking eyes. Who was this guy, looking with such strange intensity straight into the camera, and what on earth was he doing with all those chains around him? Mum came to get me and I can only imagine how thrilled she must have been when she found me absorbed in a book, but she cleverly kept her tone casual when she suggested we borrow it so I could continue to enjoy it.

At home, once I’d had my fill of the pictures, I turned my attention to the diagrams. They were so cool! They showed apparatus for doing stage illusions and you got to see inside, via cross-sections and cutaways, so you could understand how the device worked. There were step-by-step guides to card and coin tricks. The book showed you exactly how to hold your fingers so you could make something vanish. It was exhilarating to suddenly know a special secret that could fool a whole theatre full of people. Ah, so it’s a trapdoor in the stage that makes the magician disappear! Oh, so that’s where the rabbit in the hat went! I couldn’t get enough of it.

The book was thick and wordy and difficult — all the things I hated. But I didn’t stop to think about that, I was too intent on understanding the diagrams. I wanted to learn to do a trick myself, and that meant tackling the detailed instructions. If someone had handed me such a hefty book and told me to read it from front to back I would have been in despair. But being so entranced by the subject and being able to skip around and find the parts that particularly interested me meant I became so absorbed that I didn’t stop to think about what I was doing and get intimidated.

I could only get so far through it on my own, so Mum sat on my bed with me with the book in front of us, as she had so often before. Only this time she didn’t have to cajole me into persisting. Now it was me trying to race ahead through the description of the steps and her saying, ‘Hang on, let’s go back and look at that sentence again.’ I asked her what unfamiliar words or turns of phrase meant, soaking it all in.

The trick I set my sights on was one of the first ones in the book, perfect for beginners. It’s called the ‘French Drop’. It’s very basic sleight of hand that relies on one of the keystones of stage or performance magic (as opposed to Harry Potter fantasy magic), which is misdirection. Your audience sees you holding a coin or some other small object in one hand. They see you pass it to the other hand, then you open that hand and it has gone. Of course, it was never in the second hand at all. The ‘passing it over’ was the illusion; the coin is tucked away in the hand that first held it.

Yes, it’s simple, but so are a lot of the best magic tricks. The feeling of delight you can get seeing something like this isn’t about layers of mystery, it’s much more basic than that. Our human brains tend to operate in a rational and logical manner. I know it might not feel like that when you look around the planet, but stay with me. If you see a train go into a tunnel you automatically expect to see it emerge. If you see water come out of a tap and pour into a glass, you expect to see the glass fill. If you see a ball hit a brick wall you expect to see it bounce off. These are rational expectations, predictable outcomes, they follow logically: 1 + 1 always adds up to 2. Magic turns all that on its head.

The joyful feeling you get from a magic trick done well springs from unmet expectation. You thought you knew what was going to happen, you anticipated it, your brain knew exactly how the path should run from A to B. But suddenly your eyes are telling you we’ve detoured off the path and jumped from A to P or Q or even Z, and your brain is scrambling to catch up.

You’re fully engaged and alive in that moment because you’ve been taken by surprise. It’s not the adrenaline surge of a sudden horror movie scare, it’s a cerebral jolt. How on earth did he do that?! And you can enjoy it because nothing’s at stake, it’s purely entertainment. What the magician has made vanish is a coin, not the contents of your bank account. (Even if they have borrowed something of yours, you feel sure you’ll get it back by the end of the act.) All the elements are in place to put you into a state of childlike wonder . . . which is what the magic I do now is all about.

Wilson Du

I didn’t understand it enough back then to articulate it in that way to myself, but somewhere deep down I had the first inklings of understanding the power that was just waiting to be unleashed: the power to amaze people, to mystify them, to evoke in them a pure sense of wonder. Mostly, though, I just knew the French Drop looked cool and I wanted to be able to do it. Once I fully understood the instructions I practised the trick in private in my room. I hadn’t done much that required finger dexterity — playing guitar and violin for compulsory school music lessons was about it — but I found it really didn’t take me long to pick up the necessary moves and hone them. Even now I don’t have very large hands and they were much smaller in those days (the bigger a magician’s hands the better, because it’s easier to conceal things). But even so it started to look convincing very quickly. Within a day or two I was ready to try it out.

I went and found Dad. He was relaxing after work, sitting on the sofa watching TV in our open-plan living room. I said, a little nervously, ‘Dad, I want to show you something.’ He turned to me obligingly, ‘Yep, no worries, what is it?’ I didn’t tell him it was a magic trick, it could have been a piece of homework or a new toy or anything else for all he knew and, looking back, I can see that the element of surprise of me even doing a magic trick, let alone the surprise of the trick itself, all fed into his reaction.

I executed the trick well and he looked at me in amazement. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘How did you do that?’ The effect of his amazement made me feel the world had shifted a little on its axis. Most young boys idolise their dads, who seem to know everything. Well, not only could my dad fix things and make impressive-looking creations in the garage, he had his own company that made buildings and bridges. He seemed to me to be the font of all wisdom when it came to how things worked and I was forever asking him to explain how this piece of machinery ran or what that piece of equipment did. And now, I had done something that impressed him. To have him ask me how something worked was an incredible, powerful feeling.

I wanted to go straight back to the book and learn a new trick. Although I didn’t know it, a magic trick had been worked on me: for the first time since I started school I brought positive associations to a book, not the anticipation of misery. I picked it up not thinking about how many pages I had left to slog through, as I normally would, but full of excitement about all the secrets it contained. I wanted to find out everything there was to know about magicians and their tricks. I practised every day and that book became my bible — and also my gateway to reading. (I have to confess that after the first time or two of renewing the loan, it might not have quite made its way back.)

Cosentino family collection

The next step in turning a newfound interest into a full-blown obsession impressed my brothers, John and Adam. I learned to make a handkerchief disappear and when they were both in the kitchen I did the trick for them. They were just as amazed and baffled as Dad had been, although their focus was on trying to get me to tell them how it worked. I refused, of course. The book had told me that a magician never revealed their secrets, but even without that I wouldn’t have given up the trick: even then, I knew instinctively that the power lay in the mystery. I was only in Year 7, Adam was in Year 9 and John had done his HSC and left school the year before, but I had a skill they didn’t. It was a feeling I’d never had before.

1 + 1 always adds up to 2. Magic turns all that on its head.

Something profound shifted inside me. The door that was unlocked when I’d started dancing now swung fully open, letting the light flood in. My reading abilities improved in leaps and bounds. Between the reading and the magic, one feeding the other, I felt more confident by the day, although I held my new interest close at this point. It felt too important to reveal so I didn’t even talk about it with my friends.

I didn’t tell them about my dancing either, but Adam was a Michael Jackson fan and so were a couple of his friends, Andrew and Tim. When they saw my moonwalk and spins and pops they were impressed and when they came to visit during the summer holidays we would muck around trying to get various steps from the music videos down for