What I can (and can’t) tell you about the stories of Uncle Jack Charles

To know Uncle Jack Charles, even just a little, felt like being let in on a grand old mischief.

His magnetism – in life, on the boards and on camera – made him the celebrated performer he was. The magnificent shock of hair, beard and million-watt smile helped as well.

The late Uncle Jack Charles with The Age’s Indigenous affairs reporter, Jack Latimore, in Carlton.

Uncle Jack’s extraordinary life story is all too common among First Nations people in Australia and has been so often shared, not least by Jack himself – so much so that upon meeting him, you already felt like you knew him.

Over the last few years, I was fortunate enough to occasionally share a smoke and a drink with Uncle Jack at a regular gathering near a busy corner in Carlton. Uncle Jack would roll in on his scooter after zipping around inner Melbourne wearing a high-vis vest. There, he would sit and laugh and curse for a few hours with a mob he’d known for well over half a century. I was merely an interloper across the last half a dozen years, but it was there that I came to admire the roguish raconteur.

The tales Uncle Jack told there are not for sharing beyond that setting: Many present-day institutions would be too rocked to learn of the truths identified by Uncle Jack’s discerning eye.

Most of his stories were about resistance and defiance at varying levels; even the yarns that were not revealed a passionate elder who had made a firm decision to bring attention to the aspirations and issues of Blackfullas.

In that way, Jack Charles was an uncle to so many of us. It’s also why we all loved him so dearly.

Like his brother-boy and fellow artist and activist, Uncle Archie Roach, he embodied this country’s violent, inhumane and enduring colonial history. Over the past several years, Uncle Jack and Uncle Archie regularly visited prisons and juvenile detention centres to mentor inmates, drawing on their own life experiences of homelessness, addiction, and Jack’s cycles of incarceration as a younger man.

Both men embodied remarkable survival against the odds.

To have lost both in such a short time is a gut punch that is a struggle to accept, yet, sadly, it is again not an uncommon phenomenon in our communities for two lives bound so close together.

Uncle Jack was warm-hearted and vibrant on and off the stage and screen.Credit: Joe Armao

In April, I covered Uncle Jack’s appearance before Victoria’s landmark Yoorrook Justice Commission, where he was among the first to provide testimony to the inquiry about the damage colonialism had wrought on their lives.

In his testimony, the Boon Wurrung, Woiwurrung, Taungurung, Dja Dja Wurrung, Mutti Mutti and Yorta Yorta elder told of his earliest memories of the Box Hill Boys Home in Melbourne. He was placed there as a two-year-old after being removed from his Aboriginal parents aged four months at Daish’s Paddock, an Aboriginal camp outside Shepparton in Victoria’s north, as part of the government’s racist assimilation policy that removed Indigenous children from their parents and resulted in the stolen generations. He grew up with no memory of his mother and no photographs of either of his parents.

During what he described as a 12-year “term” at the home, Uncle Jack revealed his experience of what amounts to a private hell.

After leaving the home at 14, Uncle Jack did an apprenticeship as a glass beveller, finishing at age 17. Around the same time, he began to reconnect with the Aboriginal community in Fitzroy and soon learnt of the existence and location of his family.

At times during his testimony, Uncle Jack slipped into the rote of lines delivered in his stage play, Jack Charles v the Crown, or recounted in his 2020 memoir, Born-again Blakfella.

As an actor, Uncle Jack began his career in theatre in the early ’70s and was involved in establishing the country’s first Indigenous theatre company, Nindethana, in Melbourne’s Pram Factory. He would later appear in the feature film The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith in 1978.

In 2008, Uncle Jack was the subject of the film Bastardy, which documented a period of his past as a heroin addict and cat burglar. In 2012, his show, Jack Charles v the Crown, premiered at Melbourne’s Ilbijerri Theatre. More recently, Uncle Jack starred in Pan in 2015 as well as in television productions Cleverman, Wolf Creek and Preppers.

He was honoured by the Victorian government as Victorian Senior Australian of the Year in 2015. In June this year, he was named Male Elder of the Year at the NAIDOC Week Awards.

In an interview with The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald in 2020, Uncle Jack candidly reflected on death and said that he’d died many times during his wayward past but had fortunately been protected and brought back by Bundjil, a powerful First Nations ancestor and creator spirit in the south-east of Australia.

Pressed to reveal any special requests for his eventual funeral service, Uncle Jack said he’d like it to be held in “the theatre in Spring Street”.

Asked if he was worried by death, Uncle Jack replied: “No, it doesn’t worry me. I only worry about what’s gonna happen in the body after ... I don’t want to be buried in the cold, old ground. I’m going to be judged by the fire! That’s how I’m going, mate.”

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.