I was stolen under the assimilation policy. I was in the Box Hill Boys’ Home to assimilate. Well, I truly did assimilate, but it broke apart the notion that I was an orphan for one, that there's something more to be, you know, with me, than being a dark skin kid; I was Aboriginal. I believe in the 50s, an uncle Henry and Amy Charles came in to take me out for a picnic and said they were my uncle and auntie. I said, “Oh, beaut.” So that's the first time I'm meeting family.
Didn't make such a big impact on me but I expected them to come back the next week; they didn't. And just before I left the boys' home, a group of other Aboriginal kids came in and one of them was Archie or Arthur Charles and he had the last name. I remember saying to him, "It would be funny if we were brothers, mate, hey?” And I wrote this in the book and play and all that kind of stuff.
This is a story that's been unfolding for generations here in Australia in so many other people's lives. And mine’s a variation on the same theme of the missing, denied, stolen.
Wolf Creek, Clever Man, Black Comedy – all these people lapping me up, lapping me, and I'm lapping it all up, getting work, getting back into it because everybody loves to see and witness for themselves the story of a reformed, rehabilitated, old coot that they feel they know so well, they've been following for such a long time. I have a following now, which is fantastic. You know, I find it very strange because I am Jack Charles, I am JC, I am perhaps the second coming, brown like the original. Who can tell? Because people just love that story.
