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History Lab
Season 7
Episode 3
Caribbean Echoes: Nellie Small – Queer Black Caribbean-Australian Icon
5.0
0 MIN
- Synopsis
- Credits
Who was the Caribbean-Australian cabaret star who could bring down the house — and come back at racism with a joke?
“Come sit by me, we don’t eat people anymore.”
Nellie Small was born in Sydney in 1900, just before the White Australia policy was introduced.
She became one of the country’s most beloved performers, famous for wearing men’s suits on stage and off, and for her sharp comebacks.
In show business circles around Sydney in the 1940 and 50s, the phrase was: “When a show’s not strong enough — send for Nellie!”
“I’m proud of my Australian birth. But I’d be much happier if more of my fellow countrymen would forget my skin colour is different from them.”
Negotiating Australia’s vexed racial politics, Nellie carved out a public space for Black music and queer performance in 1950s Australia. We explore her career and uncover the previously unknown stories of her Caribbean forebears.
Nellie Small is played by Jamaican-Australian actor Zahra Newman.
Voices
Alana Valentine is a librettist, playwright, and director who is an expert at working with real life subjects and stories, dramatizing them with respect. She has three plays on the NSW HSC Syllabus: Parramatta Girls, Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah, and Cyberbile. Her play, Letters to Lindy, has seen hundreds of amateur and school productions. Valentine is particularly distinguished in her skills as a co-collaborator, notably with Barbara and the Camp Dogs, which won the 2019 Helpmann Award for Best Musical and Best Original Score. She has chronicled her practice in Bowerbird and published the memoir Wed By The Wayside.
Professor Cassandra Pybus FAHA specializes historical narratives about people who have been marginalized, forgotten or written out of history. An award-winning author she has published 13 books including Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia’s First Black Settlers and the bestselling biography, Truganini. She has held research professorships at the University of Sydney, Georgetown University in Washington DC, the University of Texas and King’s College London. She is descended from a colonist who received the largest free land grant on Truganini’s traditional country of Bruny Island.
Vanessa Cassin is Education Manager at Society of Australian Genealogists with extensive experience in providing training and assessment in the trustee industry, both as an in-house trainer for the NSW Trustee & Guardian and as an assessor for Western Sydney University the College’s Registered Training Organisation. Vanessa holds a Diploma in Family Historical Studies from the Society of Australian Genealogists and has been researching her own family history for over 20 years.
Zahra Newman was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, and moved to Australia at age 14. A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, Newman has an extensive list of credits in theatre, television, and film. Her notable works include her performance as Nabalungi in the original Australian cast of The Book of Mormon, and her lead role in the play The Hate Race and in the film Long Story Short. She has received a Green Room Award, a Sydney Theatre Award, and multiple Helpmann Award nominations. Newman played all 23 characters in the Sydney Theatre Company’s recent one-person production of Dracula.
Graeme Rhodes’ acting career spans over 30 years and includes numerous theatre, film, television and radio credits. Most recently he has been working as a writer and director for Forum theatre based Industrial safety programs. When he’s not acting he sings with a jazz trio and builds electronic noise making machines.
Credits
This series was produced on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eeora Nation and Burramatagal people of the Dharug nation.
Narrator, writer, and producer: Sienna Brown
Sound recordist, writer, and producer: Ben Etherington
Supervising producer: Jane Curtis, UTS Impact Studios
Executive producer: Sarah Gilbert, UTS Impact Studios
Sound designer and engineer: John Jacobs
Support
The research for this series was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project Creole Voices in the Caribbean and Australia: Poetics and Decolonisation (DP220101256).
We are also grateful to the Writing and Society Research Centre and School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University for their generous support in the production of this series.
More reading about Nellie Small
- Nellie Small on Wikipedia
- Nellie Small: the trailblazing, cross-dressing cabaret star who Australia forgot The Guardian Australia
- From the Archives: The great live music war of 1954 Sydney Morning Herald
- Zoe Coombs Marr on Queerstralia Sydney Morning Herald
- A letter to the editor about soup Sydney Morning Herald
- Send for Nellie in the 2024 Sydney Festival and article by Alana Valentine on the State Library of NSW website
Podcast playlist
EPISODE 6
Caribbean Convicts
Caribbean Convicts weaves together the story of the Caribbean men who arrived in Sydney onboard the convict ship the Moffatt on August 30, 1836. Most had been enslaved, including William Buchanan, a Jamaican man transported for participating in the Christmas Day slave uprising in Jamaica in 1831-32.
Join historical novelist Sienna Brown as she explores the diverse fates of Buchanan and the other men who arrived that day. As they fanned out across the country, some became bushrangers, others stalwarts of the community, but they all worked hard to make a new home for themselves.
EPISODE 5
Caribbean Echoes Live with Zahra Newman and Alana Valentine
In this special episode of Caribbean Echoes, series producers Ben Etherington and Sienna Brown are in conversation with star Jamaican-Australian actress Zahra Newman and acclaimed playwright Alana Valentine.
They discuss the making of the series and how performance emerged as a key theme across it. Zahra reflects on being a Black Caribbean-Australian actor today, and the persistence of the racial politics that afflicted earlier generations of Caribbean immigrants.
Alana takes us through the joys of bringing Nellie Small, the subject of Caribbean Echoes episode 3, back to the stage in her cabaret Send for Nellie! And we hear about Nellie’s solidarity with Indigenous performers.
The panel also talks bloopers and highlights from their performing careers in this conversation recorded in a packed room at the Abercrombie Hotel in Sydney on October 23, 2025.
EPISODE 4
Caribbean Echoes: Susannah Andrews – Jamaican Matriarch to Footy Legends and Mining Startups
What connects a VFL “Champion of the Colony” to a woman born enslaved in Jamaica?
In 1919, Richmond footballer Vic Thorp won the league’s highest honour for the second time — the equivalent of today’s Brownlow Medal. But just a century earlier, his great-grandmother Susannah Andrews was enslaved in Jamaica, before gaining her freedom.
This episode uncovers Susannah’s remarkable journey: from enslavement, to freedom, to becoming matriarch of an Australian family that would include football legends and mining startups.
We hear from her descendant Garry Chapman, who discovered Susannah’s story while sifting through his father’s papers.
Jamaican historian Suzanne Francis-Brown — a regular on the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? — helps us reconstruct Susannah’s life as an enslaved, then free, woman living with a Jewish merchant in Kingston.
So how does one woman’s survival ripple through generations?
And why does remembering Susannah’s life matter for how we tell Australian history today?
