The man who immortalised the phrase “this is democracy manifest” while starring in what has been described as the pre-eminent Australian meme, Jack Karlson, has died aged 82.
Karlson – although there are debates as to whether this was his real name or one of many aliases – was a serial prison escaper and small-time crook who shot to fame in 2009 after a news clip of his arrest at a Chinese restaurant in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley in 1991 was uploaded on to the internet.
“What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?” Karlson theatrically boomed as his bear-like frame resisted a string of police officers.
Chris Reason, the Channel Seven journalist who reported Karlson’s arrest 33 years ago, paid tribute to Karlson on social media site X, tweeting that “Mr Democracy Manifest has died”.
Karlson died surrounded by family at 6.31pm on Wednesday.
“He walked a full and colourful path and, despite the troubles thrown at him, he lived by his motto – to keep on laughing,” his family said in statement.
Niece Kim Edwards said Karlson spent the last few weeks of his life in hospital, where he “had a few attempts to escape and pulled his cords out a couple of times and asked us many time to sneak in his pipe”.
Edwards said her uncle was “battling many ailments but what got him in the end was [systemic inflammatory response syndrome]”.
“As a final send off, we gave uncle a last taste of red wine through his drip just before it was removed,” she said.
Karlson died the day after his 82nd birthday. Or, at least, it was the most recent of the birthdates he claimed to film-maker Heath Davis, who is making a documentary on Karlson’s life.
“This is the legit one,” Davis said. “Or so I’m told.”
Davis said he also learned the most recent alias Karlson – who he believes was really Cecil George Edwards – was going by in the last years of his life. And though he is not currently at liberty to reveal it, Davis said it was not Jack Karlson.
“Let’s just say: ‘John’,” Davis said.
The film-maker is expecting “huge amounts” of other information about Karlson’s life to be revealed, and it won’t just be about names and dates. He and authors including Mark Dapin had already uncovered stories of Karlson’s prison escapes that are said to include picking the lock cuffing him to a sleeping officer and leaping from a moving train and swimming off a prison island before being rescued by a benevolent fisher.
But Karlson’s life was far from just a rollick. His boyhood was spent in institutions rife with sexual predators and bullies, and his varied stints in Australia’s most notorious jails included time in the “Black Peter” solitary confinement of Boggo Road jail – the cruelty of which was medieval – when he was still a teenager.
“A regular person who experienced his life would have passed away years ago,” Davis said.
“But Jack just had this zest for life that made you go: this guy is made of mercury … he might just live forever”.
Among old friends and foes reunited with Karlson in the making of Davis’ documentary was Stoll Watt, a senior sergeant in the then Special Weapons and Operations Squad who happened to be driving through the Valley on the now famous day in 1991 when the call came through for support in an arrest.
Watt said there are many different versions of what occurred that day – his own is detailed in a yet-to-be-published book. One thing Watt does not deny, though, is Karlson’s charisma.
“He was some sort of trained actor, he learned that in prison, but he was also a natural showman,” Watt said. “He bluffed his way out of a court in Sydney, said he was a detective, and to do that he must have been a very confident showman … and a bit of a conman as well”.
Among Karlson’s cons, Watt said, was the now infamous line he roared during the arrest when he declared: “Get your hands off my penis!”.
“All it was, was, I was assisting him out of the restaurant and there was a step and he tripped a little bit and, to help him up, my hand grabbed him lower down on the thigh,” Watt said. “He said I grabbed him by ‘the thing’ – but I was nowhere near it.”
Still, Watt bears Karlson no ill will and enjoyed meeting him once again last year at Karlson’s hideout near Esk somewhere in the mountains of south-east Queensland.
“He said to me that I was the only copper he never hated,” Watt said. “He called me ‘comrade’ and he said ‘come up and spend the night with me and we’ll have a few’, he calls it, ‘the juice of the red grapes’.”
Karlson was “a very good wordsmith”, Watt said, adding the man he once arrested would have been a millionaire had he been able to trademark the phrases he coined that have now entered the modern Australian lexicon.
Yet it is through these words that Jack Karlson, or Cecil George Edwards, or John X, will live in posterity. Though Davis said the subject of his film – for all his sins, hardly a tech savvy man – was for a long time naive to his online renown and, perhaps, never fully appreciated it.
“He is folklore and doesn’t even know it,” Davis said.
