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#AceNewsDesk – Actor, musician and revered Victorian Aboriginal elder Uncle Jack Charles is being mourned as a cheeky, tenacious “father of black theatre”, after his death aged 79. See details of streaming services below:

NOTE: This story uses Uncle Jack Charles’s name and image with the permission of his family.

In a statement, his publicist said the Boon Wurrung, Dja Dja Wurrung, Woiwurrung and Yorta Yorta man, who also had links to several other clans across south-eastern Australia, passed away peacefully this morning at the Royal Melbourne Hospital after suffering a stroke.

“Before he passed away, his family were able to send him off on Country during a smoking ceremony at the Royal Melbourne Hospital,” the statement said.

“We are so proud of everything he has achieved in his remarkable life — Elder, actor, musician, potter, activist, mentor, a household name and voice loved by all — as is demonstrated by his numerous awards including this year’s NAIDOC Male Elder of the Year.

“He will live on in our hearts and memories and through his numerous screen and stage roles.

“May he be greeted by his Ancestors on his return home.”

Uncle Jack’s sister, Christine Charles, said she was “pretty much numb” at the loss.

“He was my big brother, he looked after me, he was always calling in, making sure I was alright,” she said.

“I loved him.”Uncle Jack Charles’s sister, Christine Charles (left) and niece, Ajia Jacklyn Charles-Hamilton.(ABC News: Jedda Costa)none

Uncle Jack’s niece, Ajia Jacklyn Charles-Hamilton, said it had been an emotional 24 hours as the family gathered by her uncle’s bedside at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.

“Uncle Jack was a great man, loved by many, it’s very overwhelming all the phone calls and messages and just everything that’s coming through,” she said.

“We just want to say a big thank you on behalf of my family for all of your condolences and thoughts.”

Ms Charles-Hamilton also thanked the hospital for enabling the family to farewell Uncle Jack with a smoking ceremony.

“It’s an important part of the healing, the journey that Uncle Jack’s gone on, it’s very important,” she said, adding she felt it should be offered at all hospitals for Aboriginal families.

‘Saved’ by a gift for acting

In a career spanning several decades, the Stolen Generations survivor used his creative platforms to share painful and personal truths about the brutal impact of government policies on his community.Uncle Jack began his acting career at the age of 19.(ABC News: Jeremy Story Carter)none

Taken from his young Aboriginal mother at just four months of age, Uncle Jack’s early childhood was spent cycling through a range of institutions.

They included the Salvation Army Boys’ Home at Box Hill in Melbourne’s east, where he was physically and sexually abused.

“It’s hard to convey the damage that place did to me,” Uncle Jack told Victoria’s Yoorrook truth-telling inquiry earlier this year.

“It wasn’t just the abuse that traumatised me, the Box Hill Boys’ Home stripped me of my Aboriginality.”During the COVID-19 pandemic, Uncle Jack fronted campaigns to support vaccination.(ABC News: Danielle Bonica)none

But he said discovering his acting gift as a young man was a turning point.

“In a way it [acting] saved me,” he said.

“I think I owe my life to having found the theatre.”

Uncle Jack appeared in the groundbreaking 1978 Australian film The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and co-founded Australia’s first Indigenous-led theatre group in Melbourne.

In 2008, he appeared in the documentary Bastardy, which explored how trauma from his childhood had fuelled years of drug addiction and burglary, leading to stints in prison and homelessness.

In a personal piece of theatre, the actor starred in Jack Charles Vs The Crown, which was staged in Melbourne in 2010.Uncle Jack learnt his pottery skills in prison, where he taught the art to other inmates.(ABC News)none

Uncle Jack remained highly active into his later years, starring in ABC TV series Cleverman and appearing in SBS’s Who Do You Think You Are? program last year, where he discovered the identity of his father and his family’s ties to more Aboriginal nations across Victoria and Tasmania.

He also worked with the late Uncle Archie Roach to support Indigenous prisoners.Uncle Jack starred in a raft of Australian productions across the stage and screen.(ABC: Lisa Tomasetti)none

In 2019, he published his memoir, Uncle Jack: Born-again Blakfella.

In his submission to the Yoorrook Justice Commission, Uncle Jack said sharing the details of his personal journey offered a broader truth for Australia.

“The idea of putting that all down on a big screen for the world to see, doesn’t embarrass me,” he said.

“It’s no shame job, because my life, as I see it, is a variation on so many other lives, they don’t have the opportunity like I have … to be given the full scope of that which had been lost, denied and hidden from me.”

‘Cheekiness’ and spirit saw him rise as much-loved star

Indigenous rapper Briggs, who worked alongside Uncle Jack on the TV series Cleverman, said “you’d never have met a more warm, funny and friendly soul” in a tribute on social media.

Actor and stage director Rachael Maza, whose father Bob Maza co-founded the Nindethana Aboriginal theatre group with Uncle Jack in the 1970s, said Uncle Jack had blazed a trail for young Indigenous actors.

“He represents to me the extraordinary resilience and tenacity of who we are as a people,” Ms Maza told ABC Radio Melbourne.

“His incredible sense of humour, his cheekiness, his graciousness, how he was able to be admired and had the time of day for everyone.”

“He’s the father of black theatre and continued to be a part of some of the most extraordinary theatre, film and television and has become such a household name, particularly in the last 15 years.”Uncle Jack’s sharp sense of humour is being mourned after his death aged 79.(ABC News: Danielle Bonica)none

Ms Maza said Uncle Jack never let his experience as a member of the Stolen Generations dampen his sense of optimism and positivity.

“Never was his spirit put down,” she said.

“He was a shining, vibrant celebration of life and I think that’s why we’re all so touched and moved and why he was so loved.”

Victoria’s Aboriginal treaty body, the First Peoples’ Assembly, described Uncle Jack as a “true King” in a tribute on social media.

A story ‘permanently etched’ in Victoria’s history

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said Uncle Jack “blazed a path in Australia and around the world” and telling his story at the Yoorrook Justice Commission “permanently etched it into our state’s history”.

“There is no actor, no activist, no survivor and no Victorian quite like Uncle Jack Charles,” he said.

The Premier said the title of the actor’s first hit play, Uncle Jack Is Up and Fighting, was “prophetic”

“At a time when Aboriginal actors were overlooked for even Aboriginal roles he co-founded Australia’s first Indigenous theatre — Nindethana,” he said.

“And against all the odds he’d become a household name”.

Mr Andrews said like many other members of the Stolen Generations, Uncle Jack would spend his life searching.

“With his stories he gave us so much,” he said.

“Laughter, anguish, insight — and justice.

“He will be sorely missed. Vale Uncle Jack.”

In sharing his story, Uncle Jack Charles opened Australia’s eyes to wider truths: Visit ABC iview and the ABC listen app to explore collections celebrating the work of Uncle Jack Charles, including his appearances on Conversations and Speaking Out.

NOTE: This story uses Uncle Jack Charles’s name and image with the permission of his family.

The way Uncle Jack Charles saw it, acting saved his life.

“I think I owe my life to having found the theatre,” he told Victoria’s truth-telling inquiry earlier this year.

But as news of the 79-year-old actor and Aboriginal elder’s death sinks in, a nation is marking the debt it owes to him.

Like his friend and fellow artist Uncle Archie Roach, Uncle Jack took his personal stories of searing pain and injustice at the hands of the nation’s institutions and turned it into an image Australia could not unsee.

‘I was not told anything about Aboriginal people’

For Uncle Jack, the injustices began early, when he was taken from his Aboriginal mother at just four months of age.

As he told the Yoorrook Justice Commission, she herself was a 15-year-old ward of the state at the time.

He spent several years moving through institutions, including the Salvation Army Boys’ Home at Box Hill in Melbourne’s east, where he was physically and sexually abused.

“I was not told anything about Aboriginal people, our languages or our culture,” he recalled.

“I knew I looked different, but didn’t understand the differences in culture at all.”

In a twist of fate, it was during this time Uncle Jack briefly crossed paths with the siblings from whom he had been separated.

He recalled learning the last names of his sisters and brother and musing “wouldn’t it be funny if we were brothers and sisters?”

“And of course, I later found out that we were.”

The search for a fractured family

At 14, Uncle Jack was placed with a non-Indigenous family, but said he always felt like a “tolerated outsider”.

So, he went searching for his family’s story.

It took him to the streets of Fitzroy in inner-city Melbourne, where a tight-knit Aboriginal community had formed.

It included other Stolen Generations survivors and people whose life on country had been disrupted by decades of government intervention.Uncle Jack grappled with the psychological fallout from his traumatic childhood for much of his life.(SBS: Who Do You Think You Are?)none

Uncle Jack recalled how walking into a pub, he found himself in a “sea of blackfellas”.

“I couldn’t believe it! For my entire life, I’d been the only noticeably black person in any space and yet here I was, in a sea of blackfellas,” he told the inquiry.

“I couldn’t believe this was Melbourne — I’d never experienced a Melbourne that looked like this.”

In time, Uncle Jack came to reconnect with his mother, but in his own words, “we didn’t exactly bond”.

“I believe this is because all of her 11 children were removed,” he said.

“All of us were taken, and I think, what a hard life my mum must have had.”

Stories of prison life take to the stage

Through his adult years, the fracturing of his family weighed heavily, leading to drug addiction, and then burglary to fuel that addiction.

The Stolen Generations survivor began burgling homes in Melbourne’s affluent suburbs of Toorak, Kew, South Yarra and Camberwell.

“When I started robbing people, I classified it as ‘collecting the rent’,” he recalled.

“I justified my actions as a hunter-gatherer, going onto prime Aboriginal land – my mother’s lands, to collect what was due.”

But it was a rationale that didn’t wash with judges, and the Boon Wurrung, Dja Dja Wurrung, Woiwurrung and Yorta Yorta man spent his 20th, 30th, 40th and 50th birthdays behind bars.Uncle Jack’s art helped elevate the stories of Stolen Generations survivors in the nation’s consciousness.(ABC News: Jeremy Story Carter)none

During his time in police custody, Uncle Jack said he experienced mistreatment on several occasions.

In one, he said an officer put a pistol in his mouth, threatening to shoot him dead.

Another time, Uncle Jack said detectives taking him up into the hills had told him he was going to be murdered.

“I thought it was gonna be the end of me,” he told the truth-telling inquiry.

“But no, no, they had to drive me back down.”

It was during his time in prisons on Dja Dja Wurrung country that he learned the fine art of ceramics, and became a “leading light” for other inmates.

“I taught people how to throw pots on a wheel, I taught them how to control and contain themselves in that environment,” he said.Revered Australian actor and artist Uncle Jack Charles has died aged 79(Jedda Costa)none

The ‘father of black theatre’ blazes his own trail

Throughout these tumultuous decades, Uncle Jack was also forging a path as an actor.

In 1971, he co-founded Nindethana, Australia’s first Aboriginal-run theatre group, with Bob Maza in Melbourne.

Pushing through an industry that offered few leading roles for Indigenous actors, they created their own, exploring issues of racism and injustice.One of the Indigenous theatre group’s first performances was Jack Charles Is Up And Fighting, in 1972.(The Canberra Times)none

In 1978, Uncle Jack appeared in the landmark Australian film The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.

Through the 1990s, he appeared in Australian films Bedevil and Blackfellas.

But his profile soared after he appeared in the 2008 documentary Bastardy, in which filmmaker and friend Amiel Courtin-Wilson observed Uncle Jack over seven years.

“There was an unbelievable outpouring of love for Jack when Bastardy was released,” Courtin-Wilson told the ABC after Uncle Jack’s passing.

“As Jack said himself, it sort of allowed him to enter a different chapter of his life.”

Courtin-Wilson said it was a “life-transforming” experience for him to bear witness to Uncle Jack move beyond his drug addiction, revive his career and reconnect with his community.

“Jack would treat a close friend exactly the same as a bus driver he’d met that day, there was an equanimity and a warmth and generosity that he really taught me, how to be a better human being,” he said.Uncle Jack Charles starred in the 2016 ABC TV series Cleverman.(Lisa Tomasetti/ABC)none

With Bob Maza’s daughter, actor and stage director Rachael Maza, Uncle Jack staged another personal piece of art, Jack Charles Vs The Crown, premiering in Melbourne in 2010.

The play ended up touring internationally, taking Uncle Jack’s story and Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal people to a global audience. 

Baring his life story never seemed to faze him.

“The idea of putting that all down on a big screen for the world to see, doesn’t embarrass me,” he said.

“It’s no shame job, because my life, as I see it, is a variation on so many other lives, they don’t have the opportunity like I have … to be given the full scope of that which had been lost, denied and hidden from me.”

‘Little in stature, but big in his way’

The Aboriginal elder’s commitment to truth-telling filled his work, including the story of the Coranderrk reserve and his own discovery of his Aboriginal father’s identity last year in SBS’s Who Do You Think You Are? program.

Most recently, he shared his own life story at the Yoorrook Justice Commission, which Victoria’s Premier Daniel Andrews noted would ensure it was “permanently etched into our state’s history”.

Ian Hamm, the chair of the Healing Foundation Stolen Generations Reference Group, described Uncle Jack as a true statesman who “dedicated his life to healing our nations”.

“When I heard of Jack’s passing, I cried,” Mr Hamm said.

“Jack, through telling his own life story, shone a bright light in the darkest corner of our national narrative — the stolen children.

“He did this without anger, but with purpose and the deepest of compassion.

“Thank you, Jack, for just being you.”The late actor’s sister, Christine Charles (left) and niece, Ajia Jacklyn Charles-Hamilton (right) say they’re honoured by the tributes to Uncle Jack.(ABC News: Jedda Costa)none

Uncle Jack’s niece, Ajia Jacklyn Charles-Hamilton, said her family had been overwhelmed by the flood of tributes from the nation’s political and cultural leaders in the hours after his death.

“He was little in stature, but big in his way,” she said.

“He loved so many people, he had the biggest heart, he leaves behind a long, big legacy.

“What a voice, what a man, what an uncle. Love you Uncle Jack.”

Here’s where you can watch Australian screen icon Uncle Jack Charles on streaming services

NOTE: This story uses Uncle Jack Charles’s name and image with the permission of his family.

With the death of Aboriginal actor and musician Uncle Jack Charles, Australia has lost a stage and screen icon.

The Boon Wurrung, Dja Dja Wurrung, Woiwurrung and Yorta Yorta man died at age 79, surrounded by his family at the Royal Melbourne Hospital after suffering a stroke.

A statement from his publicist listed the many achievements of his life, adding the revered actor “will live on in our hearts and memories and through his numerous screen and stage roles”.

Here’s where you can watch some of Uncle Jack’s best known and most recent work, available on streaming services.

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, 1978

This 1978 Australian drama film, based on the real-life story of Aboriginal outlaw Jimmy Governor, features Uncle Jack in the role of Harry Edwards, a victim of shocking police brutality after the title character helps a white police officer track him down.

A hit with critics, but commercially unsuccessful, copies of the film were briefly confiscated in the United Kingdom in the early 1980s under the Obscene Publications Act.

It’s currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

Blackfellas, 1993

Uncle Jack plays the role of Carey in this celebrated Australian drama, an adaptation of Archie Weller’s novel The Day of the Dog which also starred John Moore, David Ngoombujarra and Ernie Dingo.

The film follows the story of Doug Dooligan, a young Nyoongar man struggling to stay out of trouble as he relocates to a remote Aboriginal community in Western Australia following his release from prison.

Blackfellas is available to rent on Australian streaming channel Beamafilm.

Bastardy, 2008

A frank and fearless documentary from director Amiel Courtin-Wilson, Bastardy paints an uncompromising picture of Uncle Jack’s life over seven years in the early 2000s, exploring how childhood trauma from the Stolen Generations and sexual abuse in the years that followed led to stints of homelessness and drug addiction later in life.

It’s available on Amazon Prime, as well as documentary streaming service Docplay.

Mystery Road, 2013

Aboriginal “cowboy detective” Jay Swan returns to his home town to investigate the murder of a teenage girl in this 2013 Australian thriller, which later became a TV series of the same name.

Joining a stellar Australian cast including Hugo Weaving and Roy Billing, Uncle Jack plays the role of Jay’s eccentric uncle, Old Boy, who clues him in to the goings-on around town.

You can watch the 2013 film on Stan.

Cleverman, 2016

This six-part sci-fi series starring Hunter Page-Lochard and featuring A.B. Original’s Briggs re-imagines stories from the Dreamtime, setting them in a near-future dystopian setting and using them to explore modern-day issues like racism and Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers.

Uncle Jack plays the titular Cleverman at the series’ outset, portraying the character as a combination of similar traditions from different Aboriginal cultures. He later returns as a ghost to train his successor.

Cleverman is currently available on Stan.

Anh’s Brush with Fame, 2017

Uncle Jack is a natural fit for Anh Do’s portrait-painting series, with his character-filled face and raw honesty providing the ideal subject for both portrait and interview.

In addition to speaking about his early life and career, he goes into detail about his later-life work with Aboriginal inmates, relishing the opportunity to reach out to them and offer them “words I would have loved to have somebody come in and say to me”.

See the episode on ABC iView.

Preppers, 2021

Co-created by playwright and comedian Nakkiah Lui, this darkly comic take on Aboriginal identity and doomsday prepping saw Uncle Jack take on the role of Monty, the wise yet cheekily entrepreneurial founder of survival community Eden 2.

You can watch it on ABC iView here.

Who Do You Think You Are? 2021

Uncle Jack took a journey of self-discovery on SBS’s Who Do You Think You Are? last year, delving into a past that Australia’s government tried to take from him as a member of the Stolen Generations and discovering the identity of his father as well as ties to many Aboriginal nations across Victoria and Tasmania.

“I’m not a fatherless child. I’m not a bastard anymore,” he says after visiting his father’s grave.

See the episode on SBS on Demand.

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