Captured: Portraits of Crime 1870-1930 - Flipbook - Page 112
This was not O’Sullivan’s first conviction for fortune
telling. He was convicted of the same crime in 1918 and again
in 1923. Fortune telling was a popular form of entertainment in
Australia in the early 1900s, but it was also an offence in NSW
under legislation inherited from England. Policing of the
practice was uncommon until the 1910s when there were periodic
crackdowns and a reaffirmation of its criminal status. Women
were perceived as being vulnerable to pedlars of the future,
particularly during the First World War when there was a lack of
certainly over the fate of loved ones. Fortune telling was
considered to be a relic of the past that did not fit well with
the scientific and intellectual advances of the time or the
ideal of a modern and sophisticated Australian society.
O’Sullivan did not only foretell the future as a way to
make money during the war era, but he also falsely represented
himself as a returned soldier, an offence which he was convicted
of in early 1919 — the day after finishing a two-week sentence for
fortune telling. Under the Defence Act 1903, a person is ‘guilty
of an offence if the person represents himself or herself as a
returned soldier, sailor or airman; and if the representation
is false’.
More than ten years later O’Sullivan was still acting with
deception. In January 1930 he was found guilty of false
pretences in Dubbo Police Court having misrepresented himself
as an official from the Post Master General’s Department and not
paid for meals and accommodation. ‘Barry O’Sullivan’, the Court
heard, was ‘a fair-haired son of Erin, with an exceptional
stock of ginger hair for the seventh milestone’ who had
‘champagne tastes’.
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