Rest in Peace to Democracy Manifest and the Man Who Became Australia’s Greatest Meme
Internet sensation and Chinese food aficionado Jack Karlson passed away yesterday on his 82nd birthday. He is mourned by his family, his country and his arresting officer.
In 1991, Queensland Police attempted to apprehend a diner at a restaurant called China Sea in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, Australia who stood accused of simple credit card fraud. But the arrestee would soon protest that those were not the true charges. Outside China Sea, a young reporter and cameraman named Chris Reason stood ready to film the arrest, and as senior sergeant Stoll Watt and his men strained to drag alleged conman and serial prison escaper Karlson into a police vehicle, Reason recorded the preeminent piece of video journalism in all of Australian history.
Much later, in 2009, Reason’s footage of police officers struggling to restrain Karlson while he shouted florid phrases such as “Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!”, “What is the charge? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?” and “Get Your hands off my penis!” with the booming panache of a trained thespian became a worldwide sensation after a fan posted the clip on YouTube.
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Today, the colorful life of the man known as Jack Karlson (among many other aliases) is the subject of an upcoming documentary titled The Man Who Ate A Succulent Chinese Meal, but the man himself met his life’s end surrounded by loved ones after an extended fight against many ailments, including systemic inflammatory response syndrome.
Tata and farewell, Jack.
“He walked a full and colourful path, and despite the troubles thrown at him, he lived by his motto — to keep on laughing,” Karlson’s family said of his passing in a statement for The Guardian. Karlson’s niece, Kim Edwards, noted that, though his final weeks were spent in hospital, he never lost his prison-breaking spirit, as her uncle “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 added, “As a final send off, we gave uncle a last taste of red wine through his drip just before it was removed.”
According to Australian filmmaker Heath Davis, who is in the process of directing a feature-length chronicle of Karlson’s life and fame, the name “Jack Karlson” was just one of many aliases used by the viral sensation during his career as a petty crook. Davis believes Karlson’s birth name to be Cecil George Edwards, but Davis continues to call the charismatic conman by his preferred moniker.
Davis says that Karlson’s early life was rife with struggle as he bounced around from brutal institution to notorious jail throughout his teen years. “A regular person who experienced his life would have passed away years ago,” Davis said of his subject. “But Jack just had this zest for life that made you go: this guy is made of mercury … he might just live forever.”
Sadly, no man is immortal — even one who once escaped from prison by picking the lock on a cuff connecting him to a sleeping police officer, or who made another break from a separate island institution by jumping out of a moving train and swimming to freedom. However, despite Karlson’s continuous clashes with the Australian justice system, even his pursuers couldn’t help but find his larger-than-life personality positively charming. During the making of Davis’ documentary, the director reunited Karlson with Sergeant Watt, who spoke highly of his most high-profile arrest.
“He was some sort of trained actor, he learned that in prison, but he was also a natural showman,” Watt said of Karlson’s viral theatricality, adding that his arrest hilariously failed to keep Karlson in custody for long. “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.”
Still, Watt said that the fuzz deserved to have their side of the story heard after 15 years of Karlson’s perspective on the China Sea incident being the definitive account. Said Watt of the infamous “Get your hands off my penis!" moment, “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.”
“He said I grabbed him by ‘the thing,’ but I was nowhere near it,” Watt insisted.
“He said to me that I was the only copper he never hated,” Watt concluded of his reunion with Karlson. “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.’”
Right now, I hope Karlson is pairing plenty of that juice with a succulent Chinese meal up (down?) in Australian heaven.
