Jack Davis AM BEM 1917-2000

Davis received a British Empire Medal in 1976, the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award in 1984,
the Order of Australia in 1985, and honorary doctorates from the Murdoch University and the University of Western Australia, where he established a course for Indigenous writers. And the Western Australian arts minister awarded the accolade of ‘State Living Treasure’ to a man who decades before had been imprisoned in Carnarvon for breaching a curfew designed to limit Aboriginal presence in the town.

Jack Davis died in Perth on 17 March 2000, widely mourned in both the Indigenous and white communities. His was a special talent: the ability to sympathetically encapsulate the differences between generations of blacks and between blacks and whites. He had an uncanny ear for reproducing the subtleties of the spoken word and he told even the most harrowing stories with a generous measure of humour and irony. Aborigines, he said, ‘learnt to keep themselves alive by laughing’.

Davis was survived by his wife, his son, and several siblings. His sisters Dot, Barbara and Judith also made stage appearances, and Western Australia’s only Aboriginal theatre company, Yirra Yaakin, produced a play about their lives. Widely accepted at home and abroad, Davis’s plays provided a showcase for a generation of Indigenous actors, including Davis’s niece, Lynette Narkle. In his last two years, Davis co-wrote a play, Triangle, with his wife Madelon. A working draft was completed before his death.

Davis also provided inspiration and encouragement for other theatre-makers – Jimmy Chi, for instance. The Western Australian-based Deaths in Watch committee described him as the 20th century’s Aboriginal Poet Laureate

Perhaps, had he lived longer, Davis would have written about the saga of his rediscovered son, Nick Davies – his surname taken from his non-Aboriginal adoptive parents. Jack and Nick did not meet until 1983, when set designer Robert Juniper recognised that they shared similar facial features. Nick was then 14. He has since graduated from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. He lived with his father during his last illness, and undertook to complete Triangle.

‘The biggest thing dad ever taught me,’ says Nick ‘is that you always have to fight racism with your head, not your fists. Contradict. Always look for the contradictions. I hate the ideology of “Look at me. I’m black and I'm oppressed.” I just bloody hate that.’

Frank Van Straten, 2007