media reports

media reports - 2003

Selected newspaper article reprints about people of short stature, including SSPA members, as well as short stature in general from newspapers and magazines around Australia from 2003.
For articles from around the world about people of short stature and short stature in general, go to http://www.shortsupport.org/cgi-bin/news_list.cgi

2003

Headlines

13 January 2003 The Culture - Snow White and the seven short-statured people
The Age (Victoria, Australia)

The Culture - Snow White and the seven short-statured people
The Age (Victoria, Australia), 13 January 2003, p. 1.

Does a beloved fairytale make a stereotype acceptable? Chris Johnston reports.
Nathan Monk is 20. He is a dwarf. To be polite, or to be politically correct, he is a little person. A person of short stature. To be medical, he is a sufferer of achondroplasia.
Until very recently, Monk worked in an office doing a clerical traineeship. But now he has embarked on a bold new career as an actor. And he found it very easy to land his first big job - as one of Snow White's seven dwarfs.
Monk had bit parts as a Christmas elf and also appeared in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in Sydney, where he lives. Now he is touring Australia's major cities in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
He accepts the strange position he is in: that, were he not a dwarf, he wouldn't have got the job. He also accepts that, were he not a dwarf, he may not have been able to become an actor at all.
He says that he is merely taking full advantage of his height: that he is exploiting it, in effect, to get whatever stage-and-screen work comes his way.
"I have friends who are short statured," he says, "who have worked overseas, doing TV ads in Asia. Some have done a Pokemon show in the United Arab Emirates. Take the opportunity, that's what I thought. I'll see where it takes me."
His father, Trevor Monk, was also one of Snow White's dwarfs in a pantomime production from 1968 until 1970. He, too, toured Australia and overseas as an actor, performing in Melbourne at the same venue as his son, 32 years earlier - The Comedy Theatre on Exhibition Street.
On the current tour, the seven dwarfs stay behind after the shows to meet audience members, particularly children, who are perennially enamoured with dwarfs - the "little people". Nathan says some parents even have autographed photographs of his father as dwarf Sleepy.
"My father never really talked about what he did," says Monk. "All this stuff I'm still learning about him. I tell him stories from this tour and he'll say, 'Oh yes, that's how it was in my day as well'."
Monk says because he has high self-esteem and has conquered the personal issues to do with his dwarfism, he has no trouble earning a living in a way that would be seen by some as dangerously hackneyed.
"I'm happy with myself and I got a job because I am a dwarf, so I did it. I don't have anything against it. I'm the one making a fool of myself on stage. No one is making a fool of me."
Despite this view, some "people of average height" may still cringe or feel discomfort at the spectacle. Are the people who have the most to gain from breaking down a stereotype helping to maintain it, albeit in the most innocent way - entertaining children?
Is it positive for short-statured people, or is it detrimental? Or is it just harmless Christmas fun? The seven dwarfs, after all, represent goodness, as Snow White's helpers.
Meredith Young, the national secretary of Short Statured People of Australia (SSPA), argues that it is harmful. She says short-statured people are not "fairytale dwarfs". They function in the real world.
Some are actors playing in pantomime, but others are "accountants, business analysts, teachers, laboratory technicians, gardeners, electricians, librar-ians, childcare workers and the list goes on".
She says "`short-statured individuals" are often "poorly misrepresented".
In this age of political correctness, it seems wrong to even call a dwarf a dwarf - unless you happen to be one and the word doesn't trouble you; or unless Snow White is on again in the city.
Scott Smith, 42, has appeared in seasonal productions of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, as a dwarf, for 26 years. He is, it could be said, having also done movies and television, a professional dwarf. In the current Melbourne production of Snow White he plays the dwarfs' leader.
"You've got to earn a living on what you have to offer," he says. "I'm not six-foot-four so I can't play basketball. But look at Nathan. He's four-foot-two (127 centimetres) and he can act so he might as well be one of the seven dwarfs. Everyone has a talent. It's a matter of knowing what that talent is and being happy making a living from it."
Smith grew up in the tough surrounds of Broken Hill and started performing as a teenager at boarding school in Adelaide.
"I joined a drama group and we wrote comedy sketches around me because of my height, to get laughs. I never had a problem with that. I was quite happy when I found I could entertain people by having a dig at myself. It's better for people to laugh with me than laugh at me. I realised that fairly early on. It's like a form of self protection. Come out with all the one-liners before anyone else."
By the time he was 17, Smith had joined a big theatre company and was playing a dwarf in Snow White, touring Australia for months at a time. He settled in Sydney.
"That seemed to be where all the action was. I ended up living in a house in Kings Cross with a couple of other dwarfs."
He worked in a shoe factory between shows, but then decided to pursue showbiz full-time.
He has since appeared with Mel Gibson in The Year of Living Dangerously and shared a stage with Geoffrey Rush in Adelaide. He has toured as one of Snow White's dwarfs most summers since 1977.
Smith's main income, however, has come from television commercials, which pay well, but are often, for a dwarf, "costume work".
"I have been a Paddle Pop, a rubbish bin, a handbag, a shoe, a can of tomato soup. Or you put a furry costume on. It's not real acting, or not as I would class acting, anyway. You just have to bounce around and wave your arms up and down."
Smith says that, in his long career as an actor, there have never been any roles that he considered dubious, or demeaning to him as a short-statured person, or insulting to little people in general or even in bad taste.
Almost 20 years ago, a role seemed bad on paper and he wasn't going to to take the job, but he did.
In the end, it worked out fine and turned out to be a positive experience.
"The American All-Star basketball team," he says, "who were like the Harlem Globe Trotters, toured around the country towns. This was when basketball was just taking off in Australia. They wanted to make it light-hearted so they wanted to employ a dwarf to go round with them and do sketches during the games.
"At first, I thought they would just make a clown out of me," he says. "But it actually became all right because, in the sketches, I, as the little person, became the smart one and they, the tall people, were the idiots. So I got the last laugh."
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is on at the Comedy Theatre, Melbourne, until January 25.

Return to Top