1943-09-05

JACK CHARLES, widely known as “Uncle Jack Charles”, an aboriginal honorific, was born on this date (d: 2022); Uncle Jack Charles was one of Australia’s leading Indigenous actors and activists, who has been called the “grandfather of Aboriginal theater” and who spent years in prison for burglaries that he saw as acts of reparations.

Mr. Charles had a voice that made people stop and listen. Gravelly and majestic, with rounded vowels honed by elocution lessons in a rough-and-tumble boys’ home, it assured him an audience even over the scrum of the Australian prisons, where he spent much of his life.

“It’s very unusual for a crim or a screw to listen to a prisoner talk for very long,” he wrote in a memoir, using slang for fellow inmates and prison officers. “But for whatever reason, they’d let me run with whatever I was talking about and actually listen.”
 
 

That voice catapulted Mr. Charles onto the stage, where he captivated Melbourne theatergoers, and helped make him one of Australia’s leading Aboriginal screen actors. He ascribed his talents to his Indigenous heritage. “We’re great orators,” he wrote in his memoir. “That is merely one element of our culture that white people never saw in our development.”

Mr. Charles co-founded Australia’s first Indigenous theater company, Nindethana Theater, with the actor Bob Maza in 1971. He was known in Australia as Uncle Jack, an Aboriginal honorific denoting his status as an elder. His life was chronicled in an unsparing 2008 documentary, “Bastardy”; his memoir, “Born-again Blakfella”; and the 2010 one-man play “Jack Charles vs. the Crown,” which he co-wrote and performed around the world, despite multiple convictions that would ordinarily have limited his ability to travel.

 
His road to stardom was a rocky one. Mr. Charles wrestled with heroin addiction, homelessness and an almost lifelong flirtation with burglary, for which he was incarcerated numerous times. He spent his 20th, 30th, 40th and 50th birthdays behind bars. It was also a journey of self-discovery: of who he really was, where he had come from, his sexuality and what it meant to be an Aboriginal Australian and a member of the Stolen Generation, Aboriginal people who for decades as children were removed from their families by the government and forcibly assimilated into white society.
 

Raised in an almost entirely white home for boys, Mr. Charles had no knowledge of Aboriginal culture and did not even know he was Indigenous until other children bullied him for it. He would later use that self-knowledge to educate others about Australia’s history and race relations, whether from the back of a taxi cab or on the set of the 2015 Warner Bros. movie “Pan,” where he draped the Aboriginal flag over the back of his trailer. He played a tribal chief in the film, alongside his fellow Australian Hugh Jackman.

In his final years, after he had kicked his heroin addiction, he was a familiar and striking figure plying the streets of Melbourne atop a mobility scooter, an Aboriginal flag fluttering on the back.

 
“He was someone that embraced everything, even the bad things,” said Wesley Enoch, an Australian theater director who had worked with Mr. Charles. “He embraced them so that he could understand them and incorporate them in who he was.” He added that to be embraced by Mr. Charles himself, who stood less than five feet tall and whose luxuriant white Afro and beard were perfumed with patchouli oil, was a memorable experience.
 

In later life he became somewhat of a role model for young Indigenous men fighting institutionalised racism, and lacking a connection to culture, and, after being eventually allowed into the prison system, mentored Aboriginal prison inmates in Victorian prisons and youth detention centres. He also advocated for more Indigenous community centers in regional centres for young people to gather in “a sanctuary for Aboriginal people where the community can get together and talk about our personal issues with each other…”. He said that he had petitioned local councils and later the Victorian Minister for Aboriginal Affairs to create a community center for people after their release from prison, but had not been listened to. However he found it gratifying that in later life young Indigenous men would come up to him in the street and excitedly tell him that they had come off heroin and methadone. He lobbied the Victorian Government to expunge criminal records after a period time, which brought about a change in the law enabling him to work in the state’s prisons. The story of his efforts was told in the show Jack Charles v The Crown (2010).

As a gay man, Charles was an icon and role model for  young LGBTQI people. In his work with youth in youth detention centers and in speaking about other young queer Indigenous people, he encouraged everyone to be true to themselves.

Charles died in hospital after having a stroke, on September 13, 2022 in Melbourne. He was 79.