Jimmy Little biography is a gripping and miraculous story of survival

Warning: This story contains the name and photographs of an Indigenous person who has died.

John Little was a toddler found hiding in a hollow log and given that name by a white family near Charleville 150 years ago. The adults in his camp had been massacred, according to oral history handed down by his son, John “Kunkus” Little. It’s feasible, Frances Peters-Little writes, as “this was the usual practice of the Queensland Native Mounted Police”.

Her father, who would grow up to be the great singer-songwriter Jimmy Little, was a babe in arms when Kunkus and his wife, Frances “Sissy” McGee, joined the 1939 walk-off at Cummeragunja mission near Echuca. They were protesting an overseer named McQuiggan who cut residents’ pay and fed them rancid meat and tainted milk and water. Jimmy’s two siblings died there.

Jimmy Little in 2002.Credit:Georgia Metaxas

As the family pursued a long, meandering trail of itinerant work, Sissy cut her hand on an oyster shell and died of tetanus. Jimmy was 11, living in fear of forced removal by the Aboriginal Welfare Board. Kunkus kept him close, finding him work as a timber mill rouseabout and encouraging him on the vaudeville stage, where he’d made his own name with the Wallaga Lake Gum Leaf Band.

The juxtaposition of showbiz in this unimaginably fraught, institutionally oppressed hand-to-mouth existence is beyond surreal. Young Jimmy’s extended family included leaf-whistlers, yodellers, fire-eaters, blackface and choral performers, slapstick comedy and trad jazz ensembles, and he took to the life with a born star’s radiance and grit.

Here’s where you’d normally expect a celebrity biography to get interesting. The beloved entertainer’s career is obviously the driver of his daughter’s book, from 1950s country radio to his signature hit, Royal Telephone; his glory days as a recording and touring artist; a natural popular decline in the 1980s and spectacular rebirth as a national treasure in the early 2000s.

Jimmy Little and Marj Peters in 1957. They married in 1958. Inset: The cover of Jimmy Little: A Yorta Yorta Man.Credit:Noel Stubbs

What makes it gripping, though, is not so much the star’s own measured and modest progress as the backstory he miraculously survived, a trail of genocidal brutality that the author traces five or six generations deep into colonial history.

No less harrowing is the lineage of her mother, Marj Peters, Jimmy’s teenaged sweetheart and lifelong anchor. Marj’s grandmother Clara Frail was underage when Frank Akers was acquitted by an all-white male jury in a petty sessions court in Cobar of her kidnapping and rape. The judge ordered the girl be taken to work as a domestic servant at the Brewarrina Aboriginal Station, 300 kilometres from the parents who had reported her missing.

“Shortly after her arrival, in 1908, Clara gave birth to a daughter, Fredia Frail, who has never been found since,” Peters-Little writes impassively. Clara’s younger daughter Doreen never recovered from her mother’s trauma, let alone her own. Denied a church wedding “because she was Aboriginal”, Doreen married Henry Peters at Angledool Police Station amid a hail of jeers from the officers.

“With this family history, it was understandable that Marj learned to be mistrustful of others, to never back down from a fight,” the author writes of her mother, who died in 2011, less than a year before her celebrated husband.

A research fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra, Peters-Little is upfront in her preface about her struggle between personal involvement and academic discipline in writing this book. Her voice certainly errs on the detached side, referring even to herself in third person and prone to slightly dizzying documentation of names and places to serve historical accuracy.

A less personally invested, less academically rigorous biographer might opt for more dramatic licence: the job perhaps of a future screenwriter colouring-in intriguing family connections to Afghan cameleers, bushrangers and trackers, visiting eugenicists from America and a card sharp (Clara’s husband) with the excellent name of Jack “Smart Guy” Simpson.

Most challenging for the author, one suspects, is the chapter she spends evaluating her father’s solidarity with his people, despite a famous outward serenity that some – including his sister, Betty – have characterised as a lack of political engagement.

The author’s sympathies are clear on this point, as is her evidence of his lifetime commitment to extended family and community. But it’s Jimmy’s own words, quoted at length in song lyrics and from a detailed father-daughter interview in 2003, that reveal the big, soft heart of the man, as well as his rare distinction as a communicator.

“I’m pleased that I come from a strong family of traditional fighters even though myself, I’m very passive,” he says at one point. “I’m proud of the way they handled it with dignity and strength of mind.” That much clearly runs in the family.

Jimmy Little: A Yorta Yorta Man by Frances Peters-Little is published by Hardie Grant, $45.

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