My magic opa
A TALE OF FAMILY AND SLEIGHTS OF HAND.
Ever since I can remember, my opa – or grandpa – has been magic. But not the kind of magic every kid sees in their favourite adults: my opa could read minds, make things disappear and compel broken objects to be whole again. Though Sjoerd Rasker is now 86 and resigned to performing at the occasional grandkid’s birthday party, an old photo album, lovingly put together by my late oma, shows him in his prime. “She gave me this as a celebration of our second career,” he remembers. “The first career was a job and the second career was magic.”
In 1957, aged 22, Sjoerd was completing his mandatory military service in the Netherlands. On the cobblestone streets of Haarlem, he met a magician. This magician needed an assistant – and unsurprisingly, given their surroundings, there weren’t too many dazzling showgirls around. So, Sjoerd stepped in to help, and was brought into a secret world. Performing for the troops, he watched how a compelling trick could dupe an audience – and he was hooked.
“I was flabbergasted,” he says. “The thing that hit me the most is that I could see things he would do, then realise the audience didn’t see that. And it was so simple!” He started experimenting with tricks, taking what he’d learnt from the magician and making it his own. Soon, he left the army and began performing solo – but there’s a limit to the stunts you can pull with only one set of hands. “You have to manipulate a lot of small things with your fingers, and it can be hard to master,” he says. “If you're young and you're on stage, you're nervous and things can go wrong.”
Sjoerd met my oma, Carrie, at the local theatre, where his mum was performing in a play. Carrie was an actress. Watching her up on stage, Sjoerd knew they were meant to be together: “When I saw her, I said, ‘Well, that’s my girl. That’s the one I want to marry.’” In the early days of their courtship, he would bring her along to his shows – because, of course, magic was a foolproof way to impress a girl on a date.
Two years later they were married, Sjoerd had a fabulous assistant in his new bride, and their stage name, de Boranis, was born.
means ‘the’ in Dutch, while ‘bo’ was for Bonn, Carrie’s maiden name, and ‘ra’ was for Rasker, their now-shared surname. As for the ‘nis’? “It made it sound good,” Sjoerd says.) They performed extravagant stage shows together with giant cards and mind-reading stunts, while always decked out in their finest duds. For one trick, Sjoerd would pour raw rice into a canister – when he said the magic words the rice was gone, replaced by a never-ending stream of scarves. Another con involved cutting a circle out of newspaper, which Carrie would show off to the audience. But when Sjoerd opened the paper back up, the hole would be square instead of round. Magic. With political tension building and the threat of another war on the horizon (not to mention the frosty temperatures), the couple were soon pretty keen to pack up their life and migrate abroad. Sjoerd had spent most of his early years in Indonesia and missed the warmth, the spacious houses with big gardens, and the laidback lifestyle the Netherlands couldn’t offer. “We looked at a world map,” he says. “We sort of considered the States, but it was too hard to get in without a green card. Canada was too cold. South Africa was a migrant country, but then we thought, what about the racial problems? No. So then Australia came on the scene and we said, well, let’s go to Australia.”
They took a cruise across the world, travelling via the Suez Canal, which runs through Egypt. There, a local magician boarded the ship to perform. His signature trick was making live chicks appear from thin air, continuously magicking them into existence until the stage was full of tiny birds. His magic words were “sim-sala-bim”. Sjoerd was so impressed he adopted the catchphrase, too.
Carrie and Sjoerd were given a small shipping container to house their belongings during the journey – although the only piece of furniture they brought was their bed, since they needed the rest of the space for all their magic equipment. On arriving in Australia, they were taken to a camp for new migrants in outer Sydney. These former army barracks were set up as a helping hand, to give arrivals a place to live and food to eat while looking for a job. Even so, finding work proved a little tricky, as they were isolated from the rest of the city.
“We could go to Sydney by train, but it took about an hour and a half to get there,” Sjoerd says. “So if you looked at any ads in the paper, by the time you got there the jobs were gone.” Instead, they started doing magic shows. (Though with no car and plenty of magic paraphernalia to lug about, they’d often spend all their earnings on the taxi ride home.) Even when they did find more stable jobs, Sjoerd and Carrie continued performing as a hobby. “One of my favourite tricks was with a page out of a magazine – a double sheet,” he says. “I used to fold it, then tear it to pieces. Then ‘sim-sala-bim’: open it up and it was all in one sheet! Carrie really played the part well – to be an assistant, pretending to look surprised. It was also very important for her to distract the audience from what I was doing.”
Over time, the couple started a family, and birthday parties became their main gig. Performing for their children and grandchildren made the shows all the more special. “It makes you feel good to make them happy,” Sjoerd says. “That’s with everything I do, not specifically magic. I love helping people and satisfying them. That’s what makes me happy.” These casual shows continued for 20 years, until Carrie sadly passed away in 1991. It was then that Sjoerd’s daughter Patty stepped in as his new assistant.
Sjoerd worries what will happen to his magical legacy as he grows older. “I would like to hand it over so it doesn’t die out, because some of the tricks are good tricks, and I’d like that to continue,” he says. He does concede that magic “probably isn’t cool now”, though – despite teaching his grandchildren a few stunts when they were young, he’s noticed their interest fade as they’ve reached their teenage years. Sjoerd still gets his fix by watching up-and-coming magicians on TV shows like Australia’s Got Talent. Sometimes, he can even work out the secrets behind their illusions from the comfort of his lounge room. “You have to look at what they’re doing when you’re not expecting them to do something,” he says. “That’s the basic lesson of magic. That’s when you get tricked.”
Sjoerd encourages anyone interested in picking up magic to just start experimenting. “It’s a very satisfying hobby,” he says. “To see people’s enjoyment when you do a trick – that’s what I love.”