Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s documentary ‘Bastardy’ is a warts and all portrait of Jack Charles, one of Australia’s leading Aboriginal actors. Born in 1943 Jack Charles was a true child of the Stolen Generations, and spent many of his tender years in Melbourne boy’s homes. In 1971 he founded the first Aboriginal theatre company, Nindethana, and over the years he has performed with some of Australia’s leading performers and directors including Geoffrey Rush, Neil Armfield, Tracey Moffat and John Romeril.
In 1972, Romeril (‘The Floating World’), one of Australia’s leading playwrights, wrote a play ‘Bastardy’ about Charles, and Courtin-Wilson stole the title for his doco. Earlier this year, Charles was awarded the Tudawali Award at the Message Sticks Festival, an award honouring his lifetime contribution to indigenous media.
What Courtin-Wilson’s documentary brings out is Charles’s complicated personal life away from his achievements in the public sphere. The picture that one gets is of a man who is very much an outsider, and a renegade. For much of his acting career he maintained a strong heroin habit. To feed his habit he became a small-time criminal, involved in lots of house breaks in. Over time, he has done long stints in custody.
The portrait is of a deeply flawed, but also a very unassuming and incredibly honest man.
The one quality, above all else, that defines this documentary is its intimacy, its honesty, its nakedness. It must surely have come from the friendship, respect and trust that developed between the filmmaker and his subject.
I’m haunted by one scene. The director has come to Charles’s home. He is there to tell Charles that he has received a phone call from one of his woman friends concerned that Charles had ‘gone through’ her house and taken one of his prized rings. Courtin-Wilson asks Charles if it is true and Charles without hesitation says, ‘yes, it was me’.
Yes this doco was warts and all, unbearably so!
(c) David Kary
