Aaron Pedersen has been a regular presence on the big and small screens for the past 15 years, yet being recognised in public is a relatively recent development. It's in large part due to his role as fixer Cam Delray in the ABC's Jack Irish telemovies.

With a face full of hair, hat and dark glasses, Pedersen is not instantly recognisable as he returns from the bathroom of Red Spice Road. Unlike the signature Jack Irish moment in which he emerged from a Portaloo brandishing a shot-gun, on this occasion he's unarmed.

Pedersen is growing his beard in preparation for his next two gigs: as the morally righteous Detective Jay Swan in a sequel to the movie Mystery Road and a six-part miniseries based on the last of Peter Temple's Jack Irish novels, White Dog.

"I've a couple of great jobs next year," says Pedersen.

We're seated at the back of the deceptively large restaurant, on a small table to the side of a spectacular, horse-shoe shaped communal table, above which hovers a lightwell and massive red lantern.

"You invited me on this date, bro," says Pedersen when asked what he'd like to eat. Dietary wise, he says he's a compost bin, so we opt for the lunch tasting course. In short succession come an appetiser of soy and ginger chicken wings, pork belly, a bowl filled with delicious chunks of melting pork topped with a crisp apple slaw, braised lamb shoulder and a fresh and spicy grilled beef salad.

While Pedersen tends to be cast as a brooding, volatile and occasionally menacing character, in the flesh he is warm, gregarious, attentive and talkative.

It's only when the conversation turns to the topic of his broken childhood and the succession of foster homes he grew up in that he seems to turn weary. "I don't know where to start that conversation. It's too hard bro," he says when asked about his estranged birth parents.

He grew up in Alice Springs, alongside director Warwick Thornton and the loose collective of indigenous filmmakers and storytellers who have emerged from the Northern Territory over the past two decades.

"They say there's this black wave thing going on now. I just want to say the movement has always been there. It's just been this underwater tsunami for a while, now it's coming to the surface and we're getting great rewards from it, artists, writers, producers, the audience.

"I just believe the hard work of our pioneers is quietly paying off and everyone should be respectful that reward comes with their hard work.

"Uncle Jack Charles and his mob, I wouldn't have a career if it wasn't for their persistence. They worked hard at a time when no one took them seriously and no one even considered indigenous roles as a mainstream option."

Pedersen thought he would become a social worker or PE teacher until a career advisor suggested he apply for a cadetship with ABC-TV in Melbourne. He became a sports journalist and worked on the indigenous-themed series Black Out, before approaching the casting director of a new drama called Heartland in the staff canteen.

Ernie Dingo got the lead role. Pedersen landed a smaller one. "I always say the table is always wobbly the first time, but out of that I got into acting."

Roles in Wildside and Water Rats followed, and while Pedersen's characters in those shows didn't initially identify as indigenous, he believes it was more important for audiences to connect to his character's emotion than race.

"The indigenous stuff came out in episode 48 (of Wildside). They were going to bring it out in episode two. I was like, 'What are you doing, you're making a victim of me?'. [By episode 48] everyone's already joined the journey with him. Whatever sorrow or anguish is going on, they're connected to it."

When Deborah Mailman's breakthrough character Kelly in the network drama Secret Life Of Us bowed out, she left hand-in-hand with Pedersen. "She left with a black man, which was quite wonderful."

"We realised who we are and what we bring to the role. We just want other producers and storytellers to realise that."

Though he's played a lot of cops on screen, he shrugs off the suggestion of typecasting. "I'm not going to complain about playing a cop, there's a cop in every country town in this place. Policing the world and the community is a difficult job, because you get it wrong some times. I couldn't do it for real.

"If an Aboriginal actor gets to this point of his career and he's been typecast as a cop that's not a bad thing, actually. As long as I'm not a criminal."

In 2006, Pedersen wrote and co-produced a loving short documentary, My Brother Vinnie, about the inseparable bond he shares with his intellectually disabled brother, who he calls his "second shadow".

For the past 13 years he and his partner Sarah Bond have been Vinnie's primary carers.

"He's still with me. I'm forever grateful. He's still my journey. He'll always be in my life. He's a good passenger on this journey. He keeps it real. He makes me laugh. He always tells people, 'I'm more famous than my brother'.

"I play second fiddle to him all the time, but I like that. I take it that if the roles were reversed ... he would have done what I've done."

Pedersen was seven when he realised that Vinnie had special needs. "We were in homes together and it was a bit of a fractured moment. But he always loved me more than anything else in the world. And to this day great reward comes with it because we stuck it out together through the harder times.

"I have my gorgeous partner who helps me, Sarah Bond, who's been in our lives for 13 years. She's like a big sister to him and loves him like I do and that's all I ask. We came as a package really."

He says that having children of his own is not an option. "He's my kid. I chose this journey. I have to give him my full attention for the rest of my life. To bring kids into it would mean he gets second priority."

Beyond acting, he toils in his garden "all the time" and builds things, often from discarded wood he finds on the roadside.

"I've a secret desire to be a tradie really. I wouldn't mind taking time out to do a carpentry course."

If there's an ambition driving Pedersen, it's a card that he prefers to keep close to his chest. "I'm heading toward 50. I want to be a person who acquires as much as I can before that happens. I never said I want to be an actor. I just went quietly, quietly, I'm going to do this myself, so I chose the journey in my own way. No one knew about my brother until that film came out. I quietly, quietly kept it to myself. When I made the documentary people were like, 'Oh, that explains everything.' And I go, 'Of course it does, do I look like I've something on my mind? Well of course I do'."

He does speaking gigs for kids at schools, for carers and for prisoners, and sees unfortunate parallels between Australia's convict past and the disproportionate incarceration of indigenous youth, often for relatively petty crimes such as car-theft or shoplifting. "They stole bread, so didn't that set the benchmark?," he says in reference to convict arrivals. "A person is starving, they need food, and you're going to lock them up for [stealing] a piece of bread."

He says he "gets pulled up all the time by cops", though in the same breath he praises the local uniforms for looking after Vinnie, who is prone to storm off in a huff in the wake of an argument.

For now, however, he's relishing the prospect of returning to the "gift" of a role as driver and trigger-happy fixer Cam Delray, who protectively watches over shady bookie Harry Strang (Roy Billing) and private eye Jack Irish (Guy Pearce).

"It's a really unusual relationship," he says of the bromance between three people from vastly different walks of life.

"I want to enjoy the back-end of life in the way I want to do it. And not be forced to continue to chase something I already have. I'm happy. I'm content and I believe my place in the world, I accept it, I'm here for my brother and I'm doing what I do. It's very simple, but I love it".

Aaron Pedersen will MC Blak Nite Screen, February 6-7, Treasury Gardens. melbourne.vic.gov.au/whatson.