Bastardy

Synopsis: A documentary about Jack Charles, an Aboriginal actor who was a player in the 1970s Carlton push but slowly drifted into a life of petty crime, jail and heroin addiction.

Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s documentary makes it clear that Jack Charles is an intriguing figure and although he is an engaging subject it is a pity that the director didn’t do more with his material. For seven years Courtin-Wilson followed Charles, a theatre and film actor who audiences may remember from The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978). and his documentary is pretty much confined to Jack’s world as seen through Jack’s eyes. This is a unique perspective and particularly when it comes to his re-framing his activities as a burglar in Melbourne’s blue ribbon suburb of Kew as “collecting the rent”, a wryly amusing one. Thus, we find out how Jack understands not only his criminal behaviour, his heroin addiction, his homelessness, his being sexually abused as a child and so on, all things which he recounts with stoically bemused detachment, a state which is no doubt sustained by his habit.

A child of the stolen generation, Jack, unlike the better-known Aboriginal actor, David Gulpilil (who was the subject of a 2002 documentary by Darlene Johnson) is an urban Aboriginal. Indeed he regards the land on which Melbourne stands as his, hence his reference to rent-collecting. This means that, unlike Gulpilil, who has had his own shares of run-ins with the white man, Jack has no home to go to and this is in many ways the substance of what Bastardy is about.

By letting Jack tell his own story Courtin-Wilson does him a great service but not necessarily us the audience. Fortunately this “hand-off” approach is interrupted towards the end of the film when Jack robs one of their mutual friends. Clearly Jack's moral justification for theft can no longer serve him and his ingenuous self-image takes a knock (although he emerges from prison for this crime a year later seemingly no worse for wear). The incident suggests another, less appealing, side to Jack’s story (there is also an intriguing montage of mug-shots at the film’s end which indicates his extensive criminal record) but we are left to make our own inferences here

In short, one wonders to what extent the raw material of Bastardy was massaged into audience-pleasing presentability (for a homeless man Jack seems to have a remarkable wardrobe of clean clothes and one can’t help but wonder where he got the money for the flash scooter he is riding at the film’s end).  It would have been nice to know how Jack went from being a hot Aboriginal actor in the early 1970s to being a thief, an addict and a bum. On film he comes across as a charming scoundrel but I would have liked to have heard the other side of his story.

 

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