Bastardy
If you have watched Australian films from the seventies, chances are, you’ve seen Jack Charles. He has had minor roles in a number of films over the years. His Indigenous Australian features, combined with the tendency of Australian media at that time to cast Indigenous folks in Indigenous roles, rather than in regular roles, meant that poor Jack was doomed, by birth, to remain on the fringe of a profession that provided the only opportunity he had, to feel positive, and at peace.
Amiel Courtin-Wilson followed Jack for six years, assembling a loving documentary that traces Jack’s ups and downs during the period. In one scene, during which Courtin-Wilson forewarns Jack of an impending warrant, is testament to his personal level of involvement.
A victim of the stolen generation, Jack was taken from his parents, and placed in foster care. His inability to procure or maintain long-term relationships appears to have been affected, at least by his own reckoning, by the fact that he simply never had any role models from which to learn how to treat loved ones. His one fulfilling relationship ended tragically, when Jack’s exasperated lover walked out on him some years ago.
Jack is a hopeless recalcitrant. As a young man embarking on an acting career, Jack was already involved in petty crime. At one point in the film, he stands in front of a house he has burgled nearly a dozen times. He even wants the cameraman to take a shot of him, standing in front of the ivy-flanked nameplate, as he tells the Director how comfortable he felt around Kew, pointing out various bushes behind which he used to hide when he heard a police car approaching.
It wasn’t greed that drove Jack to theft, but a drug habit that has consumed him for most of his adult life. There are several scenes in which he shoots up in front of the camera. He’s a dignified man (with a beautiful voice), but he insists that his drug taking be filmed, stating matter-of-factly, that it is a part of who he is. Whether he will remain that way, is for you to discover in the film.
In the meantime, suffice it to say that Courtin-Wilson has produced a documentary that honours the subject, but also raises a number of niggling concerns about the stolen generation, our treatment of Indigenous Australians, and even law reform. Just about every time he was released from a stint in jail, on the day of his release, Jack would burgle a house, to raise the necessary funds to survive. Criminals are squeezed out of the prisons, with few options but to re-offend, especially if they don’t have housing, or a job to go to. The fact that this documentary was filmed in Melbourne, drives these points with even more strength.
Jack Charles is such an interesting man. On the one hand, he calmly admits to his crimes: on the other, he talks as if he’s entitled to what he has stolen.
Bastardy premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival.