The voyage from Marseilles, France, to Adelaide, Australia, lasted 29 days and Houdini was seasick the whole way, save for an interlude amid port stops in the Suez Canal where he mustered the strength to dance with Bess. By the time he arrived Down Under he’d lost 25 pounds and, for the first time, he had grey in his hair.
On February 17, 1910, early in his eight-week engagement at the New Opera House on nearby Bourke Street, Houdini stood on Melbourne’s Queens Bridge before a crowd of 20,000 cheering Australians and was locked up in chains and irons — 25 pounds’ worth as if to match the weight he’d lost in reaching the Antipodes . He then dived 20 feet into the polluted Yarra River, about 10 feet deep at that time of day, and found himself up to his armpits in mud, which no doubt helped conceal the secret of his escape even as it slowed his progress.
There’s a story on the loose that Harry’s leap into Yarra disturbed a corpse that had been held in the muck on the bottom of the river. When he resurfaced it bobbed up right next to him, and he was so frightened that he lost his head and had to be pulled numb into the recovery vessel. Biographer Ruth Brandon accepted this anecdote as the truth, but online commentators closer to the scene call it an urban legend.
The same event produced another macabre story — are Australians more given to these yarns? While Houdini was still underwater, a man in black handed a business card to one of his assistants “in case he shouldn’t come up”. It was the local undertaker.
These are, to be sure, classic Houdini hauntings. Having survived his own ordeal and re-emerged to tell the tale, he is stalked by death from the very depths of Hell. It’s easy to imagine how stories like this would evolve, quite organically, after his own premature death, a melding of fact and conjecture, first in the collective consciousness from which mythology springs, and then in the social chronicle.
The Tivoli Arcade in an office building on Melbourne’s Bourke Street is all that’s left today to remind people of the Tivoli Theatre that stood there until 1967. From 1900 to 1914 it was the 1,400-seat New Opera House, and from February 7 to March 19, 1910, Harry Houdini was in charge. Many in the audience watching him perform his escapes from a straight jacket, a packing crate and a milk can had bought tickets after seeing him leap shackled into the Yarra.
At the March 9 show Harry accepted a challenge by the Willsmere Certified Milk Company, which was sure he would be unable to escape from the milk can if it was indeed filled with milk instead of water, since (it was thought, though not well thought out) that he’d be unable to see what he was doing. The vessel was dutifully filled with milk, and Houdini emerged just as quickly as ever — in about three minutes.
Leann Richards provides a marvellous account of a Houdini show and all its trappings on the History of Australian Theatre website, authentically setting the scene at Harry’s opening night in Melbourne, complete with opening acts and pre-show movies of his most famous escapes.
In the spring of 2008 Melbourne’s City Museum at Old Treasury hosted an exhibition called “Melbourne, and Other Myths” that included an installation by writer Martyn Pedler, who had “found” a Houdini artefact in a local train station.
Pedler peddles in “secret, unwritten histories that fiction writers and artists can exhume, imaginatively”, as The Age newspaper put it. He’d earlier written short stories about three Melbourne characters, among them a young woman obsessed with Houdini’s visit to the city in 1910. These tales have since been “corroborated” with physical evidence — maps, notebooks, tape-recordings, even cigarette butts — items ostensibly found by chance or by researchers that makes them all the more convincing. In Harry’s case, it was a copy of “No Magicians”, a book written by the obsessed woman, that was “found abandoned at Flinders Street Station, Platform 4, on November 23, 2005″.
“Melbourne,” said The Age, “is the sort of city, despite its youth, whose intricate layers of history can sometimes be hard to find. Buildings get razed, stories are forgotten and people misremembered. Yet those ghosts of the past and the dim echoes of events can sometimes be excavated in the most unlikely places.”
Just before his Melbourne engagement finished, Houdini demonstrated the new magic of aviation at Diggers Rest, 20 miles away. On March 18, with the Voisin biplane he’d bought in Germany, he flew for 100 feet — in about three minutes (which seems to have been his patented elapsed-time record in those days). It was Australia’s first manned flight.
There’s a memorial today on Holden Road, just south of the site where Harry soared aloft, pictured below in a Google Earth satellite image.
In “The Secret Life of Houdini”, William Kalush and Larry Sloman (more here) suggest that “Harry the undercover spy” was in fact also trying to promote the use of aeroplanes for defence.
ADDED MAY 2008: On May 10 the Sydney Morning Herald took an anniversary look back at Houdini’s accomplishment at Diggers Rest, and quite amiably pointed out that he was not, in fact, the first person to fly a motorised plane in Australia at all.
Reproducing the above photo with a caption headlined “Soar point”, the newspaper noted that “15 spectators signed a declaration on what they had seen … there were photographs, and he had it filmed”. Harry then travelled on to Sydney and duplicated his aerial feat at a place called Rosehill, where the picture was taken, and “even the Herald,” writer Max Prisk reported, “said he had ‘fully established his claim to be the first successful aviator in Australia’.
“Pity poor Fred Custance and Colin Defries. On the day of the Houdini flight at Digger’s Rest, the Herald carried a report of a flight made by Custance in a Bleriot monoplane at Bolivar, outside Adelaide, the day before, March 17. He was up for five minutes and 25 seconds, said the report, flying at between 12 and 15 feet, and Custance reported the experience ‘exhilarating but not disconcerting’. But it was about dawn, to catch the still air, and there were no witnesses with stopwatches and cameras, just a few locals who had wandered over to see what was up.
“Colin Defries and his Sydney flight — on Thursday, December 9, the year before — is not so easy to dismiss. It was watched by a paying crowd and two journalists, one of them from the Sydney Morning Herald.
“Defries, piloting a Wilbur Wright biplane, was the main attraction at a ‘Flying Fortnight’ at the now-gone Victoria Park Racecourse at Zetland in inner Sydney. After six days of motor-revving and flightless circuits of the track he finally took to the air … ‘As the machine rushed forward it kept in the air, and rose quickly from 3 foot to fully 15ft or 20ft, and then tapered down again to earth, after covering about 115 yards’. There it was in black and white, ‘the first aerial flight in Australasia by a motor-propelled machine’. Duration of the flight: 5 seconds …
“Between now and next year,” Prisk wrote, Defries’ supporters “will decide if they will celebrate the centenary of his flight by making Houdini disappear from the record books.”
Houdini brought his amazing stunt show to Sydney in April 1910, winding up the citizenry with his usual public spectacle — a dive into the harbour while shackled. Tickets were snapped up for his string of shows at the Tivoli Theatre on Castlereagh Street. Demolished in the ’60s, it’s now a shopping complex.
Here Houdini accepted several public challenges. On April 15 he escaped from a specially built packing crate in 11 minutes. On the 20th he was bandaged and chained to a hospital bed and then doused with water to shrink the restraints, but got out of it, in full public view, in 30 minutes. On the 29th he was sewn into a unique, sleeved canvas bag that stretched from neck to ankles, and then he was bound with leather straps. That didn’t hold him long either.
Once when I was a kid and came home bearing the agonised muscles of the day’s adventure, my mother produced an ointment that sounded far more exotic than our usual vaseline. It was called Zam-Buk. I thought she was making it up, but I found that it worked quite well, and so did Harry Houdini.
“Never known anything so wonderful and soothing,” an advertisement in the Australian newspapers quoted the Great Houdini as saying during his time Down Under. “Mr Harry Houdini, the originator of the Handcuff Mystery, and the highest paid Variety Artist who has ever visited Australia, is drawing large audiences to the Tivoli Theatre, and sounds the praises of Zam-Buk as an antiseptic healer.
“Owing to the rough usage of his wrists with the handcuffs, cuts, scratches, bruises and sores are the daily lot of Houdini, whose only fear is the danger of festering and blood-poisoning. Therefore, his pronouncement in favour of Zam-Buk, which he prefers to all the ointments, salves and liniments he has tried during the last 16 years, should carry considerable weight, not only with the wife and mother in the home, but with the breadwinner in the workshop and factory.”
The ad went on the quote from a letter that Harry, in his enthusiasm and obviously with plenty of time on his hands, had supposedly sent to the manufacturers. “It was first recommended to me by my landlady, Mrs Burns, at 5 St James Street, Halifax, for at my engagement at the Palace Theatre my wrists were badly lacerated from the handcuffs locked on them.”
Apparently absent from drugstore shelves for some years, the balm is back and, for the record, it’s a mix of “Petrolatum, colophinium, eucalyptus globulus (eucalyptus oil), camphor, cera alba (pure golden beeswax), thymus vulgaris (thyme oil) and chlorophyl”. Something every escape artist should know.
