Recently a Sydney ‘fortune teller’ was charged over an alleged $70 million fraud. A Queensland town had its own fortune telling madame in residence a hundred years ago. I told a version of this story live on Ipswich’s West Bremer Radio.

The decade after the First World War were the golden years for fortune tellers. Australia was exhausted from the war, everyone from all walks of life just wanted to know there were better days ahead, and so clairvoyants were in high demand.

In Brisbane at the time were fortune tellers like Madame de Lee who operated out of the Lyceum Chambers by the halls of power on George Street, and Madame Loft a clairvoyant for the working class on Wickham Street.

There were travelling fortune tellers, the early ones being Mr. Joseph Bostock and Madame Langdon (pictured top of page) who visited Ipswich and held sittings in Mrs Walter’s boarding house on Brisbane Street.

Fortune tellers had to be very careful how they advertised their services. You see while fortune telling in itself wasn’t a crime, taking money for something you couldn’t do was, it was fraud. In fact Bostock was convicted of fraud in 1909 for claiming he had the ability to predict future events, which evidently he did not.

While Brisbane had their fortune tellers, nearby Ipswich was part of a travelling circuit for the industry. That was until 1920 when Ipswich got its very own resident fortune teller Madame McKenzie otherwise known as Mrs. Alice Maud Roberts.

In February of 1920, Alice married Ipswich man Mr. Stephen Roberts, he was a coppersmith at the Ipswich railway workshops. In August of that year, she relocated to Ipswich and immediately made her first visit to the Ipswich courthouse when she made a fraudulent statement to the electoral office and was fined £1 with costs.

She really should have seen that coming, because Alice then set herself up in the fortune telling business as Madame McKenzie.

The quality of her work was somewhat questionable, however, and attracted the ire of the authorities which culminated with an undercover sting in 1926. That’s when a team of undercover police agents led by Mrs. Ada Patterson and Mrs. Mary McEwan undertook an operation to blow the lid off the fraudulent fortune telling industry, and they targeted Ipswich’s Madame McKenzie.

Madame McKenzie didn’t just claim to foretell the mundane future, she went for the really dramatic predictions. She told Mrs. Patterson that she would be badly hurt in an accident, and that one of her sons was going to be killed in an explosion. With the benefit of historical research, I can confirm that none of that happened.

What’s more, Madame McKenzie said that Mrs Patterson had four children including three boys and a girl, and that she had been married twice because neither husband had been faithful to her. That was also not true, in fact Madame McKenzie was more than likely talking about her own marital experience.

Madame McKenzie was charged and convicted in the Ipswich courthouse of falsely pretending that she could foretell the future. Her lawyer asked for leniency because for a long time she had been fortune telling with the full knowledge of the police, and her prosecution was the first of its kind in Ipswich for a very long time, since Mr. Bostock seventeen years earlier. But that didn’t make a difference, and she fined £2 with costs.

That didn’t stop Madame McKenzie continuing to charge three shillings a sitting, however, and come 1929 she had taken her talents back to Brisbane where she operated right by police headquarters from her home on Upper Roma Street. She was again charged and this time fined £3 with costs.

By this time, trouble was following Madame McKenzie and her family wherever they went. Her stepson, who was a dairy farmer in the North Burnett, was fined for tax evasion twice, her house was set on fire, and her husband died.

Madame McKenzie herself lived to the ripe old age of ninety, having claimed the honour of Ipswich’s first publicised resident fortune teller, although surprisingly she never saw any of her trouble coming.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A VERSION OF THIS STORY TOLD ON WEST BREMER RADIO.

Photo credits:
Agnes Charlotte Dwyer aka Madame Langdon – Jill (McMillan) Mills, via Wikitree.
View of Adelaide toward George from the Edward Street, Alfred Buckley medical clairvoyant sign hangs from the second floor railings – State Library of Queensland.
George Street Brisbane, c1920 – State Library of Queensland.
Probably Mrs Walter’s Boarding House in Brisbane Street, Ipswich, 1910s – Ipswich City Council.
Ipswich Old Courthouse, 2024 – Harold Peacock 20241020_060709.
View of Albert Square showing Roma Street Police Station, 1920 – Queensland Police Museum.