The magical art of being ‘an expert at a skill that doesn’t exist’

If you look to the right as you walk inside Tim Ellis’ home in Northcote, underneath an ersatz replica of Houdini’s gravestone, you’ll see a bottomless abyss – fair warning that you’ve entered a magician’s lair.

Visitors must pick their way over raised paving stones to avoid falling into the (non-existent) chasm below. Survivors reach one of Melbourne’s best-kept secrets: the Laneway Theatre – a purpose-built theatrette (alongside a “magic laboratory” crammed with memorabilia and tricks of the trade) hosting weekly magic shows for a select audience.

Magician Tim Ellis with his lorikeets.Credit: Joe Armao

Ellis is also the director of the upcoming Melbourne Magic Festival, now in its 18th year, and one of the linchpins of Melbourne’s close-knit magic scene. After avoiding plummeting to my doom, I join him upstairs in his elegant townhouse and ask how he become a magician.

“My grandfather gave me a magic set, the Hanky Panky set, when I was nine or 10,” says Ellis with a grin. “He used to work as an electrician in Myer and every week we would go to his house. He’d have hand puppets and things, sometimes a toy, and one week this magic set. I learnt all the tricks … and put on shows for my family.”

Ellis developed a show, The Magic Box, based on the set, comparing what the tricks are like when you start off, and what they’re like after 50 years honing stagecraft and misdirection skills.

Why did Ellis stick with magic – something many children try and few persevere with? He laughs: “Because I have no other tangible skills!”

For Ellis, the art of illusion has been a lifelong journey.Credit: Joe Armao

But there was a more personal reason, Ellis thinks.

“As I discovered later, I have autism,” he reflects. “So, I guess in my brain it was, ‘Aah! People are paying attention to me now, and I don’t have to understand their complicated social interactions, all the shades of grey and body language and stuff. I can just create this world that I’m in charge of. People come into my world. I amaze them. And then I go away!’ … I got to retreat into my little hermit cave or whatever.”

With a flourish, he mimes retreating under an invisible cape: “Essentially that’s what I’m living in now.”

At this, Ellis’ two pet lorikeets, curious or alarmed at my presence, begin to squawk with the regularity and volume of a smoke alarm going off. As he removes one to its cage downstairs, I get the lowdown from ‘The Honest Conman’, Nicholas J. Johnson.

He, too, started his magical career as a young boy, performing with a Canberra-based youth circus, and being driven by his parents to work at kids’ birthday parties until he was old enough to get his licence.

Now, Johnson is as interested in the neuroscience behind why we’re fooled, as he is in fooling people. It’s led to some intriguing side hustles, including as a consultant to law enforcement and supermarket chains on scam detection and prevention.

“Houdini was very anti-scam,” says Ellis as he returns to the room. “People pretended to be mediums and contact the dead, just after [World War I]. Spiritualists stole his tricks. He would bust all those people and started a tradition.”

“You often get magicians doing that – exposing scams, exposing psychics – and promoting scepticism,” Johnson agrees. “But the goal of a magician is, essentially, to appear to be an expert at a skill that doesn’t exist.

“A magician makes people feel like magic is real, even though they know it isn’t. If you’re trying to make people believe that magic is real, you stop being a magician and start being a con artist,” he says.

“A lot of effort goes into establishing a shared reality before seeming to break its rules – easier to do with adults than children, apparently, and a particular challenge among younger audiences who’ve obsessed over magic videos on social media, without ever seeing it live.

“There are two reactions. Some audiences who’ve watched a lot of magic on TikTok see it live, and it blows their minds,” Johnson says. “The other response you get is they don’t want to be amazed. In their heads, they’ve reduced magic to a puzzle and when you’re fooling them in real life, they don’t like it, because you’re a puzzle with a piece missing. They don’t get that you’re not supposed to figure out how it’s done.”

Ellis might have to wave a wand to manage the bumper schedule of events at the magic festival. Melbourne’s best magicians will perform alongside a line-up of international stars (including Germany’s Tobias Dostal, who “can make your phone disappear… while you’re filming it with your phone”, Ellis says), as well as close-up and stage magic galas, shows for all age brackets, lectures and seminars, and a junior championship where eight aspiring magicians will compete for glory.

Despite all that, Ellis will be heading to Turin mid-festival for the triennial World Championship of Magic. Australian Josh Staley will join 160 competitors vying for the international crown, and Ellis, who’s judged the competition three times, never fails to be amazed by the talent.

“I love judging it,” he says. “People think there’s nothing new under the sun in magic, it’s all just rehashes. But every month I see something I’ve never seen done before – a type of magic I did not think was possible – and when you find out how it works, you’re like, ‘That is really outside-the-box thinking’.”

The 18th annual Melbourne Magic Festival runs from July 7-19.

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