When conjuror and magician Gustave Fasola was showing at the Melbourne Opera House (later the Tivoli Theatre), he hired Wallace the African lion from the Melbourne Zoological Gardens.

Gustave (1875-1929) was a British magician – born Fergus Greenwood – who toured Australia and New Zealand from 1911 to 1913 as ‘The famous Indian Fakir’. Wallace was an 18 year old lion who had performed in circuses in his youth, but was drawn out of his peaceful retirement at the Melbourne zoo to play a starring role in Fasola’s daring illusion, ‘The Lady and the Lion’. The illusion transmuted the lion into a lady in front of the audience’s eyes.¹

The advertisements breathlessly proclaimed ‘A REAL LION IS USED’. For the audience of Fasola’s Saturday matinee on the 11th February 1911, there was to be no doubt about this by the end of the show.

Comedian, radio entertainer, and vaudeville performer Charlie Vaude (1882-1942), gives us a colourful account of Wallace the lion’s escape:

Wallace figured in an act that possibly has no parallel, and so carried away with Fasola’s magic were the audience, that nothing he did seemed impossible…That is why nobody moved when Wallace escaped from his cage and walked down to the footlights. They thought it part of Fasola’s magic. The orchestra under Fred Hall, went on playing as though nothing usual had happened. Many notes sounded tremolo that shouldn’t have been, but uncaged lions have that effect on musicians.

Sporting Globe, 1 July 1939, p 7

The audience was delighted until they realised that Wallace’s escape was not part of a clever illusion:

Wallace sauntered off stage, through the wings to the stage door. At the time I was talking to Harry Daniels, the stage door-keeper. I felt something brush past me, “Whose dog was that?”, I asked.

Sporting Globe, 1 July 1939, p 7

Wallace trotted out of the opera house into Rainbow Alley and down Little Collins Street, while his keeper James Pearson followed cautiously behind. He walked for about 400 metres, before he decided to take shelter at the doorway of the Temperance and General buildings (otherwise known as the T&G building), which ironically enough housed the Victorian Society for the Protection of Animals (est. 1871). The unflappable Pearson managed to coerce Wallace into the building lobby while he waited for reinforcements.

In the meantime, a large crowd gathered to watch the unique spectacle. The curious crowd became so big that mounted troopers were called in to keep the area clear. ‘Someone rang the fire brigade’, Charlie Vaude recounted, ‘Firemen arrived, but declared that they knew how to put out fires, not lions’.² They brought a net that was deemed unsuitable. In the meantime Wallace, who was growing weary of the T & G lobby, was placated with large chunks of meat from a nearby butcher.

Some two hours later a cage was finally procured, and Wallace obediently jumped in to be taken swiftly home to the zoological gardens to recover from his big adventure.

Cat-astrophe averted.

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1. Fasola apparently claimed to have invented this illusion in his biography. It was an illusion subsequently performed by other well-known magicians, including Howard Thurston
2. (Sporting Globe, 1 July 1939, p 7)