Jack Carlson, who appeared in what has been described as Australia’s most iconic meme and immortalised the phrase “This is a democratic manifesto”, has died aged 82.
Carlson, although there is debate as to whether this is his real name or one of many aliases, is a serial prison escapee and small-time criminal who rose to fame in 2009 after news footage of his arrest in a Chinese restaurant in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley in 1991 was uploaded to the Internet.
“What’s your crime? You ate? Juicy Chinese food?” Carlson asked theatrically, using his bear-like physique to push back against the line of officers.
Chris Reason, a Channel 7 journalist who covered Carlson’s arrest 33 years ago, paid tribute to him on social media site X, tweeting that “Mr Democracy Manifesto has died.”
Carlson died Wednesday at 6:31 p.m. surrounded by his family.
“He lived a full and colorful life and always lived by the motto of keeping on laughing, despite the challenges that were thrown at him,” his family said in a statement.
His niece, Kim Edwards, said Carlson spent the last weeks of his life in hospital, “trying to escape several times, unplugging several times, asking us multiple times to sneak him a pipe.”
Edwards said his uncle “battled many illnesses, but what ultimately got to him was [systemic inflammatory response syndrome]”
“As a final send-off, we gave him one last taste of red wine before his IV was removed,” she said.
Carlson died the day after his 82nd birthday, or at least the most recent one he claimed to filmmaker Heath Davis, who is making a documentary about Carlson’s life.
“This is real,” Davis said. “At least that’s what I’ve heard.”
Davis also said he learned the alias Carlson used in his later years (he believes his real name was Cecil George Edwards) which he cannot reveal at this time, but said it was not Jack Carlson.
“Let’s just say ‘John,'” Davis said.
The filmmakers expect “a huge amount” of information about Carlson’s life will come to light after his death — and it won’t just be names and dates: He and other writers, including Mark Dapin, have already uncovered the story of Carlson’s escape, which reportedly included prying the locks off a sleeping officer, handcuffing him, jumping off a moving train and swimming off Prison Island, only to be rescued by a sympathetic fisherman.
But Carlson’s life wasn’t all fun and games: his childhood was spent in institutions infested with sex offenders and bullies, and his various stints in Australia’s most notorious prisons included “Black Peter” solitary confinement (of medieval proportions) at Boggoroad Prison as a teenager.
“Any normal person with the life experiences he had would have been gone years ago,” Davis said.
“But Jack had a zest for life and this guy was made of mercury…it made you think he might live forever.”
Among the old friends and foes Carlson reunited with while making Davis’ documentary was Stoll Watt, then a senior sergeant with the Special Weapons Operations Command, who happened to be driving through the Valley on that famous day in 1991 when the call came in for assistance with the arrest.
Watt said there are different versions of what happened that day — his own is detailed in a book that’s yet to be published — but one thing he doesn’t deny is Carlson’s charisma.
“He was something of a prison-trained actor, but he was also a born showman,” Mr Watt said. “He bluffed his way into a Sydney courtroom, pretending to be a detective. He must have been a very confident showman to do that… and a bit of a con man too.”
Watt said one of Carlson’s fraudulent acts included his now-infamous line, “Get your hands off my dick!”, which he shouted upon his arrest.
“I was helping him out of the restaurant and there was a step and he stumbled a little bit and my hand was on his lower thigh to help him up,” Watt said. “He said I grabbed his ‘thing,’ but I was nowhere near it.”
Nevertheless, Ms Watt said she bore no ill will towards Mr Carlson and enjoyed a reunion with him last year at Mr Carlson’s hideout near Esk, somewhere in the south-east Queensland mountain ranges.
“He told me I was the only cop he’d never hated,” Watts said. “He called me his ‘comrade’ and said, ‘Let’s spend the night together and have a drink,’ which he called ‘red grape juice.'”
Mr Watt said Carlson was a “very skilled wordsmith”, adding that the once-arrested Mr Carlson would have been a multi-millionaire if he had been able to trademark his coined words which are now part of the modern Australian vocabulary.
Through these words, Jack Carlson, or Cecil George Edwards, or John X, will live on for generations to come. But Davis said his film’s protagonist, for all his crimes, was far from a tech-savvy man, and for a long time was naive to his online fame and probably never fully appreciated its value.
“He’s a legend and he doesn’t even realize it,” Davis said.
