Book Reviews

Little Black Bastard: a story of survival

Style Biography Reviewer Anita Heiss Released 2004 Language English Distributor Hodder 2004 RRP: $35.00 248pp ISBN: 0-7336-1798-0

Noel Tovey is a director, dancer, actor, choreographer, storyteller and author. He has just celebrated 50 years working in theatre, having performed everywhere from the Princess Theatre in Melbourne, to the West End in London, and has worked on productions in Hamburg, Denmark, Paris, Glasgow and South Africa. His CV is so diverse and impressive that most artists wouldn’t even allow themselves to dream of one so outstanding.

Noel Tovey on ABC TV's Message Stick

But it is his life as a street kid in Melbourne in the 1940s and 50s and the consequences of years of sexual, emotional and physiological abuse that makes up much of his autobiography "Little Black Bastard". The title itself is a phrase that Tovey recalls hearing too often as a child partly raised in a house without a father, and a mother who was always drunk. But Tovey’s father, before jailed, was a vaudeville performer billed as “The Original Coon Singer”, and there is no doubt some of his artistic genes live in Tovey.

In "Little Black Bastard" (with a stage production of the same name), Tovey has finally told his colourful story, although he claims from the start:

"I’m not a writer. The only craft and related skills I know are the ones that I have been practicing in theatre for fifty years. They are the ones that I have used to tell my story."

Noel Tovey triumphs in "Little Black Bastard"

And tell it he does. With grim and disturbing detail, focussing on the years of rape he endured at the hands of his foster father Arthur Challenger after he was removed by the Welfare. Tovey also shares his memories of considering suicide at the age of 17 in a Pentridge Jail cell.

His book is also a name-droppers paradise with memories shared about locals like Dame Edna Everidge, Bunney Brookes to stories of teaching Patti Harrison (wife of Beatle, George) to tap dance and selling artworks to actress Debbie Reynolds. Tovey, you see, amongst everything else, also ran an art gallery in London for many years, specialising in ceramics and glass and then major antiques.

But while Tovey relished in the costumes, lights, make-up and famous friends, the life he lead overseas also meant the denial of his Aboriginal ancestry for 30 years, living a theatrical life both on and off the stage, almost always in character, as he became whoever he was suspected of being – “part-Spanish, part-Jamaican, part-Negro”.

Noel Tovey came home in 1990 to face his Aboriginality and to make a difference using the skills he learned abroad. The Hon, Bob Carr has said of Tovey “No Indigenous Australian has made a more admired contribution to the theatrical and cultural life of our country”. While this is a big claim by the NSW Premier, there is no doubt that Tovey continues to be a star contributor to the theatre in Australia, black and white.

"Little Black Bastard" is the story of a survivor, for a weaker person, or someone without the artistic ability and personal drive of Tovey, would never have made it beyond their teens, let alone to their 70s.

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