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<title>Steve Dodd</title>
<authors>Wikipedia</authors>
<publisher>wikipedia.org</publisher>
<publishedplace>network</publishedplace>
<publishedyear>2010</publishedyear>
<edition></edition>
<category>Living people</category>
<section id="49689" fatherid="0" title="" lv="" priority="-1" level="1">
This article is about the Australian actor. For the Welsh golfer, see Stephen Dodd. For the Australian footballer, see Steven Dodd.

Steve Dodd, born in Australia's Northern Territory, is an Indigenous Australian actor, notable for playing indigenous characters across seven decades of Australian film. After beginning his working life as a stockman and rodeo rider, Dodd was given his first film roles by prominent Australian actor Chips Rafferty. His career was interrupted by six years in the Australian Army during the Korean War, and limited by discrimination and typecasting.
Dodd has performed in some of Australia's most prominent movies, including Gallipoli and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, in which he played Tabidgi, the murdering uncle of the lead character. He has also held minor parts in Australia-based international film productions including The Coca-Cola Kid, Quigley Down Under and The Matrix. He has appeared in minor roles in early Australian television series, such as Homicide and Rush, as well as more recent series including The Flying Doctors.

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<section id="49690" fatherid="0" title="Background" lv="" priority="-2" level="1">
Steve Dodd, also known as Steve Mullawalla Dodd, is an Arunta or Arrente Indigenous man from central Australia. Dodd was born in the Northern Territory: one source states he was born in Alice Springs, while another states he was born at the Hermannsburg Mission, to the town's south-west. Neither source gives a date. In 1966 he was reported to be a bachelor; later sources shed no light on his marital status. In 1971 he remarked in an interview that his father and six brothers were living in the Northern Territory.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, Indigenous Australian men played significant roles as stockmen in the Australian pastoral industry, and as entertainers participating in competitive demonstrations of stockmen's skills, referred to as rough riding. Dodd worked as a stockman, horse breaker and rodeo rider prior to and during his acting career, including a period working for rider and entertainer Smoky Dawson. He was a member of the Rough Riders Association, and gave exhibition rides at the Calgary Stampede in 1964.
Dodd also served in Korea, during a six year stint in the Australian Army, with the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment; his service number was 41018. A photograph of him in uniform in Korea is amongst images on permanent display at the Australian War Memorial. From 1969 to at least 1973 Dodd worked as a guide for Airlines of New South Wales, escorting tours to Uluru and other locations in central Australia. Dodd has stated that he demonstrated boomerang and spear-throwing at Expo 70, and at an Olympic Games (though which year is unknown). He was also a participant in a re-enactment of Captain James Cook's landing in Australia, as part of the Australian Bicentenary celebrations. Dodd lives in New South Wales.

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<section id="49691" fatherid="0" title="Acting career" lv="" priority="3" level="1">
<section id="49692" fatherid="49691" title="Early career" lv="" priority="1" level="2">
Dodd's first opportunity to act in Australian film came in 1946, when actor Chips Rafferty noticed Dodd on the set of The Overlanders and gave him a small role. It was the first of three Rafferty movies in which Dodd secured a part, the second being Bitter Springs in 1950. This film was notable for being "a serious study of the relations of white settlers and Aborigines"Monthly Film Bulletin, 1950, cited in National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Educational Website, Aboriginal people in Australian feature film Part 1. Retrieved 26 February 2009. and "more honest than most Australian film-makers ventured to be at that time". Bruce Molloy described the film as a "lucid and dramatically effective representation" of black–white conflict in colonial Australia, giving Indigenous Australians "a degree of justice long denied them in cinematic representation".
Dodd was working on Bitter Springs as a tracker and interpreter for actor Michael Pate when Rafferty arranged for him to have an on-screen role. There was a positive relationship between the Indigenous Arrente people and the cast and crew, particularly Rafferty, involved in the location filming for Bitter Springs in the area of Quorn in northern South Australia. Michael Pate said that Rafferty "wasn't a prejudiced person ... Chips was a person who appreciated the Aborigine sic very much ... he got on very well with the people". Dodd, meanwhile, appreciated Rafferty's vision for an Australian film industry and its potential to provide opportunities for Indigenous Australians.
Rafferty was the star of the film that gave Dodd his third minor screen role, Kangaroo (1952). In 1957, the J Arthur Rank Organisation, an English company, came to Australia to make a film adaptation of Robbery Under Arms, an Australian colonial novel by Rolf Boldrewood. Dodd travelled to Britain and the United States with the company for six months; in what role is unknown. He said he worked with Rafferty on a fourth film, Wake in F, in 1971, but Dodd's name does not appear in published cast lists. In the same year, he was cast in the role of an Aboriginal caretaker for a film he said was called Sacrifice.
On stage, Dodd performed the role of Darky Morris in a 1966 J.C. Williamson stage production of Desire of the Moth, with a season of nearly three months in Melbourne and Sydney. Also that year, Dodd's work for Smoky Dawson included appearing in a television production, Adventure with Smoky Dawson: Tim Goes Walkabout, broadcast in June. In other television work, Dodd participated in a Channel 7 documentary series about pioneering Australian transport company Cobb and Co, and also worked on several documentary programs for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Dodd had minor roles in many early Australian TV dramas of the 1960s and 1970s, including Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Division 4, Delta (1969),  Riptide (1969), Woobinda – Animal Doctor (1970), Spyforce (1972–73), Homicide (1974), and Rush (1976). One of these, Woobinda – Animal Doctor, marked the first appearance of an Indigenous Australian in a television series lead role – not by Dodd, but by a Bindi Williams, playing an adopted son of the show's star. Web site Milesago suggests Dodd may have been the actor in Woobinda (rather than Bindi Williams), but the character is a child, and Dodd had been acting for 24 years by the time of Woobinda.
Although Dodd obtained minor parts in several television series, for many years he and his fellow Aboriginal actors found themselves included in only minor and typecast roles in television productions. According to Indigenous actor, historian and activist Gary Foley, Dodd joked that "he was sick of roles where his total dialogue was, 'he went that way, Boss!'" Reflecting on this issue, a commentator remarked on the 1978 film Little Boy Lost: "There are many irrelevant scenes, the most obvious one being where Tracker Bindi (Steve Dodd), an Aboriginal, is introduced – yet another tired reinforcement of a false stereotype."Brown, Suzanne, 'Little Boy Lost', in Murray, p. 18.

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<section id="49693" fatherid="49691" title="Later career" lv="" priority="2" level="2">
Dodd contributed to several films in which issues facing Indigenous Australians, such as land s and race relations, were the central subjects.Aboriginal people in Australian feature film Part 2. National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Educational Website. Retrieved 25 February 2009. These appearances included Bitter Springs (mentioned above) and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), the first of two films in which he appeared alongside Jack Thompson. Dodd played the character of Tabidgi, the uncle of the lead character, Aboriginal man Jimmie Blacksmith. In the film, Jimmie Blacksmith marries a white woman named Gilda Marshall (played by Angela Punch McGregor). When they have a baby, Dodd's character, "a tribal elder, ... is worried about Jimmie's marriage to a white woman and has brought him a talisman to keep him safe". Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, described the performances of the two black professional actors (Jack Charles and Dodd) as "wonderful as sots: ... Steve Dodds sic, who is tried for murder and simply says, 'You'd think it would take a good while to make up your mind to kill someone and then to kill them, but take my word for it, it only takes a second'".
Dodd's career was busiest in the 1980s. In 1981 he played Billy Snakeskin in the film Gallipoli, about the fate of young men who participated in the World War I Gallipoli Campaign of 1915.MacFarlane, Brian, 'Gallipoli', in Murray, p. 74. This was followed by parts in Chase Through the Night and Essington, both in 1984. In 1985 he played the role of Mr Joe in The Coca-Cola Kid, an Australian romantic comedy with an international cast including Eric Roberts and Greta Scacchi.Martin, Adrian, 'The Coca-Cola Kid', in Murray, p. 166. In 1986 he appeared in the film Short Changed, while through the mid 1980s he had minor parts in the popular television series The Flying Doctors (1985–1988).
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith was not the only film in which Dodd appeared that addressed topical Indigenous issues of the day. A decade after Jimmie Blacksmith, Dodd performed in Ground Zero, again with Jack Thompson in one of the lead roles.Klein, Fred and Nolen, Ronald (2001). The Macmillan International Film Encyclopedia (4th edition). London: Macmillan. p. 1352. ISBN 033390690X. This film is a thriller based on claims that Indigenous Australians were used as human guinea pigs in the British nuclear tests at Maralinga.See for example, Parkinson, Alan (2007). Maralinga – Australia's Nuclear Waste Cover-up. Sydney: ABC Books. ISBN 9780733321085. The film uses as its context the McClelland Royal Commission, which was investigating radioactive contamination at the site. In the film, Dodd plays a minor character named Freddy Tjapaljarri.Gardner, Geoff, 'Ground Zero', in Murray, p. 220.
Sources differ on whether Dodd had a part in Evil Angels, the 1988 film about the Azaria Chamberlain disappearance, with Dodd's name not included in the cast list published by Australian Film 1978–1994,Collins, Felicity, 'Evil Angels', in Murray, p. 250. but appearing in the longer cast listing provided by IMDb. In 1988 he also played a minor role in Kadaicha, an unreleased horror film about a series of unexplained murders. In 1990 Dodd appeared in two films: Quigley Down Under, a western made in Australia but starring American Tom Selleck and Briton Alan Rickman;Kerr, Greg, 'Quigley', in Murray, p. 323 and The Crossing, an Australian drama set in a country town.Caputo, Raffaele, 'The Crossing', in Murray, p. 296.
Dodd's career returned to topical Indigenous cultural issues when he played a minor role, of Kummengu, in the 1991 film Deadly. This film is a police drama based around the death of an Indigenous man in police custody.Quinn, Karl, 'Deadly', in Murray, p. 336. As in Ground Zero, the subject was very topical: the movie was released at the same time as the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which had for four years been examining why so many Indigenous Australians died in police detention.
In 1999, Dodd was one of three actors in Wind, a short film portraying the pursuit of an old Aboriginal man (Dodd) by a young black tracker and a white police sergeant. Dodd played a minor role in an episode of television series The Alice (2006), and in the movies My Country (2007) and Broken Sun (2008).

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<section id="49694" fatherid="0" title="Filmography" lv="" priority="-4" level="1">
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<section id="49695" fatherid="0" title="References" lv="" priority="-5" level="1">
<section id="49696" fatherid="49695" title="Notes" lv="" priority="-1" level="2">
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<section id="49697" fatherid="49695" title="Bibliography" lv="" priority="-2" level="2">
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<section id="49698" fatherid="0" title="External links" lv="" priority="-6" level="1">
Category:Indigenous Australian actors
Category:People from Alice Springs, Northern Territory
Category:Living people

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