Steve Dodd - Acting Career - Early Career

Early Career

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" 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 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 Fright, 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. In 1971, Dodd acted in an early Sydney production of Kevin Gilbert's seminal work, The Cherry Pickers.

There were numerous small television roles for Dodd. His work for Smoky Dawson included appearing in a television production, Adventure with Smoky Dawson: Tim Goes Walkabout, broadcast in June 1966. 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. In 1973 it was reported that a television film Marra Marra featuring prominent Aboriginal actors David Gumpilil and Bob Maza, together with Dodd and Zac Martin, had been completed.

Although Dodd obtained small 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."