Jack Charles was part of the “Stolen Generations”, a term given to the tens of thousands of children who were forcibly removed from their families between 1910 and 1970
In parts of indigenous Australia, the reproduction of photographs of the deceased may be restricted. Jack Charles’s family have given permission for the press to use his name and image., an indigenous Australian actor and activist who died on September 13th, was a man of many words. As a senior elder of the Boon Wurrung, Dja Dja Wurrung, Woiwurrung and Yorta Yorta nations, he was defined by his voice. It was booming and resonant. He used it to perform and advocate, to teach and encourage.
Born in 1943, at four months old he was taken from his mother by the Australian authorities. At two years old he was placed in the Box Hill Boys’ Home in the suburbs of Melbourne, where he was beaten, sexually abused and told repeatedly that he was an orphan. He was kept apart from other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.
This left a painful wound. It was through performance and storytelling, he later reflected, that he reclaimed his cultural identity; he described his life and work as a “journey of discovering that which was denied me, when I was taken from my mother’s breast”. The stage became the place where Mr Charles felt most at home and where, as a young gay man, he was subjected to the least persecution.
Mr Charles loved to read; he described books as “the one great pleasure I indulge in no matter where I am”. He was sent to prison more than 20 times during the course of his life, and he read incessantly whenever he was behind bars. His writing talent kept him safe there, as he would produce love letters for other inmates to their wives in return for tobacco and chocolate. “It was always whitefellas getting me to write their letters,” he wrote in his memoir.