younger Jack Charles

Jack Charles was born on 5 September 1943 at the Royal Women's Hospital, Carlton, in Melbourne, Victoria,[1][2] to a Bunurong mother, Blanche,[3] who was 15 years old at the time,[2] and a Wiradjuri father, Hilton. Charles' great-great-grandfather was a Djadjawurrung man, among the activists who resisted government policy at the Coranderrk reserve in Victoria in 1881.[4]

Charles was a victim of the Australian Government's forced assimilation program which took him from his mother as an infant, and which produced what is known as the Stolen Generations.[5] He tells how his mother sneaked out of the Royal Women's Hospital and took him to a "blakfella camp" near Shepparton and Mooroopna (Daish's Paddock[6][7]), but the authorities came and took him when he was four months old.[8]