Jack Charles would rob from houses after acting on stage

Jack Charles started life as a child of the Stolen Generation – but he ended up stealing Australians’ hearts.

Portrait of legendary Aboriginal entertainer Jack Charles. Picture: Tony Gough

OBITUARY

Jack Charles

Actor. Born Melbourne, 1943. Died Melbourne, September 13, aged 79.

Jack Charles’s face sat at the centre of what appeared to be a monochromatic daisy. A deep swirl of silver ringlets encircled Aboriginal dark features beaming from which was the irresistible smile of a survivor. Life had thrown so much at him. He’d thrown so much back.

The casual, misanthropic approach to Aboriginal Australians back then, based on the assumption they could not look after themselves, much less anyone else, saw Jack taken from his mother Blanche and placed in an infants’ home and later an orphanage for boys in the eastern Melbourne suburb of Box Hill. He was sexually abused there. Perhaps they all were. Dickensian describes social poverty overseen by comically cruel men. If only any of it had been funny.

So Charles learnt early to make his own fun. One day he was among a group of orphanage boys who put on a show for inhabitants of the nearby Winlaton home for girls. There he spied two Aboriginal youngsters and asked their names. They were Esme and Eva-Jo Charles. He said: “My name’s Charles. Wouldn’t it be funny if we were brother and sister?” They were. Blanche had 13 children. Two died in infancy, the others were farmed out by a state that knew better than a mother’s love.

Charles’s journey from then twisted and turned down well-trodden paths to alcoholism and addiction. To fund it all he robbed from houses, mostly in well-to-do suburbs, especially Brighton – “my mum’s land”. He was making them “pay the rent”. He thought he entered thousands of houses, but not always as stealthily as he’d have liked. He was convicted of many “burgs” and was sent to prison 22 times.

He spent his 20th, 30th, 40th and 50th birthdays behind bars. “I wanted to stay out (of jail) for my 60th, even though the day after I was plucked.” He saw jail time as a break from his deep commitment to drugs. He would “get on heroin to get off methadone”, he said. “It allowed you to leave your miseries behind.”

On a visit to the Builders Arms Hotel in inner-suburban Fitzroy aged 17 he met many other Aborigines, some related to him. One told him Blanche was living in Swan Hill. He enjoyed the “beery hugs” and bought a few rounds.

He had never opened his pay packet before. It was always given to his foster mother, Mrs Murphy. That evening she kicked him out, called the police and he spent his first night in juvenile detention.

His employer bailed him out. The boss liked Charles and would bring in friends to meet him – “where’s his favourite little Aboriginal worker?” One was Donald. Don Bradman. Years later Charles would play Eddie Gilbert, who twice bowled Bradman out for a duck.

He became interested in acting at 19 and sometimes found roles in Melbourne’s legendary alternative theatre hotspot the Pram Factory where, with Bob Maza – an Aboriginal Tent Embassy pioneer – he founded Nindethana, an Aboriginal company that in 1972 produced Jack Charles is Up and Fighting, whose poster proclaimed: “It’s tough for us Boongs in Australia today.”

Homelessness and addiction ruled his life back then and after stage appearances “I’d be up in Kew doing a burg”. They didn’t all go to plan. The owner of one house found Charles in his wardrobe. The man asked him to empty his pockets. His wife came in from parking the car: “You’re Jack Charles!” She had seen his play Bastardy. They said they wouldn’t call the police but that he should make his living from acting. “You’re a good actor,” she said, preparing Charles a cup of tea.

He played Harry Edwards in Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, and appeared in the films Bedevil and Blackfellas. He appeared in the TV series Wolf Creek, Preppers and Cleverman. And he almost scored a role in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, itself a reworking of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but whose Marlon Brando character, Colonel Kurtz, is almost certainly based on the legendary exploits of Australia’s Lieutenant Colonel Barry Petersen with his guerrilla force of highland tribesmen during the Vietnam War.

Charles said the original script called for an Aboriginal deserter from the Australian Army who joins the Montagnard villagers and “delivers messages, but also drugs, into Marlon Brando’s camp … they rewrote it and put Dennis Hopper in”. Hopper’s character was based on English-born Australian photographer Tim Page, whose obituary appeared in The Australian on August 25.

Charles died in the Royal Melbourne Hospital, next door to the Royal Women’s Hospital where he had been born.