Big
things
will grow
Kev Carmody, beloved Australian singer-songwriter, gently lifts his small, emerald green guitar pick up for me to have a closer look at. It has a hole punched out of the middle and every edge is rounded and smooth.
“I’ve been playing with this one for 30 years, actually,” he smiles.
It takes a gentle strum and immense care to make a guitar pick last that long, but this is the approach Carmody takes to everything he does: gentle, considered, but with a powerful edge that can make a crowd sing.
As Carmody returned to UQ for the launch of the new student residence named in his honour, Kev Carmody House, he sat down with Contact to share his memories of a life lived through story and song.
Kev Carmody returns to UQ for the launch of Kev Carmody House.
As a small boy, growing up in the Western Darling Downs in Queensland in the early 1950s, he lived a life connected to the land, stemming from deep roots to his Indigenous culture and which later infused a generation of iconic Australian music.
Carmody’s father was second-generation Irish-Australian, his mother was from Bundjalung country in northern New South Wales, and her father was a Lama Lama man from Cape York. He was born in Cairns but has lived most of his life in the southern part of Queensland, drawing inspiration from the land and oral stories learnt from the “old people” in this country.
“Granny Carmody would sing the old songs from Ireland accompanied by her walking stick on the floor.
“My grandfather from Cape York could speak four or five Aboriginal languages and English. As a kid he taught me so much, all the habits of the animals. He said it’s all right to know human languages but unless you know the language of the bush, you’ll never survive.”
In the 1950s, the family were droving – everything they owned travelled with them on horseback.
“Out on the stock routes at night, we would lay around in swags by the campfire and look at the stars,” Carmody says.
“My dad had a wireless that he’d always bring along. He’d run the aerial up a gum tree, and on a clear night you could get ABC radio loud and clear, but we’d also get foreign stations – a symphony orchestra in Hungary or in Germany, or something from England.”
“We listened to Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood on the BBC and these so-called illiterate men would have philosophical discussions about it in our creole like they were in a university tutorial. Because it was a kind of oral history, we related to it and it had great meaning for all of us.”
“It's funny, you know – this is my favourite pick.”
Kev Carmody, beloved Australian singer-songwriter, gently lifts his small, emerald green guitar pick up for me to have a closer look at. It has a hole punched out of the middle and every edge is rounded and smooth.
“I’ve been playing with this one for 30 years, actually,” he smiles.
It takes a gentle strum and immense care to make a guitar pick last that long, but this is the approach Carmody takes to everything he does: gentle, considered, but with a powerful edge that can make a crowd sing.
As Carmody returned to UQ for the launch of the new student residence named in his honour, Kev Carmody House, he sat down with Contact to share his memories of a life lived through story and song.
Kev Carmody returns to UQ for the launch of Kev Carmody House.
As a small boy, growing up in the Western Darling Downs in Queensland in the early 1950s, he lived a life connected to the land, stemming from deep roots to his Indigenous culture and which later infused a generation of iconic Australian music.
Carmody’s father was second-generation Irish-Australian, his mother was from Bundjalung country in northern New South Wales, and her father was a Lama Lama man from Cape York. He was born in Cairns but has lived most of his life in the southern part of Queensland, drawing inspiration from the land and oral stories learnt from the “old people” in this country.
“Granny Carmody would sing the old songs from Ireland accompanied by her walking stick on the floor.
“My grandfather from Cape York could speak four or five Aboriginal languages and English. As a kid he taught me so much, all the habits of the animals. He said it’s all right to know human languages but unless you know the language of the bush, you’ll never survive.”
In the 1950s, the family were droving – everything they owned travelled with them on horseback.
“Out on the stock routes at night, we would lay around in swags by the campfire and look at the stars,” Carmody says.
“My dad had a wireless that he’d always bring along. He’d run the aerial up a gum tree, and on a clear night you could get ABC radio loud and clear, but we’d also get foreign stations – a symphony orchestra in Hungary or in Germany, or something from England.”
“All these old blokes would be laying back in their swags soaking in the majesty of the universe – a few homo sapiens just listening to Beethoven’s Fifth [Symphony] together.”
“We listened to Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood on the BBC and these so-called illiterate men would have philosophical discussions about it in our creole like they were in a university tutorial. Because it was a kind of oral history, we related to it and it had great meaning for all of us.”
Carmody didn’t learn to read or write until he was 10 years old, when he went to a Catholic school in Toowoomba. He remembers getting to school and wondering what he was doing there.
“I was on a horse from the age of four, mustering, holding cattle, and droving with our family unit.”
He was a practical child, but he persisted with school, blending his old world with this new world.
He says spending his early years thinking and sharing orally, in the way his old people taught him, made song writing easy for him.
“I was taught that everything was connected, everything had a harmonic balance, you were even connected to the rocks and the trees. If you change one thing, something else moves out of alignment. It was cyclical, not linear like a western way of thinking about past, present and future. Past, present and future become the one cyclical entity.
“Because there was no written language, we also had to find different ways to make things stick in people’s heads – we’d speak in word images.
“Grandma would say ‘Hey, hey you boys, no fighting like that. You've got to be gentle, gentle like moonlight on the skin – be that gentle.’”
Carmody says when it came to writing songs, the words poured out. At age 22 he wrote the lyrics for one of his first songs to be released, ‘I’ve Been Moved’. A beautiful, yearning tune that spoke to the depth of life he’d lived at such a young age. Indigenous people had only won the right to be counted in the national census through a referendum the year before, in 1967, but he carried the words around with him for years until he finally set it down with music:
I've been moved by the tireless sea a-churnin'
All them scarlets of an inland dusk
Or when a close friend has died, and turned away and cried
As they laid ’em down and shovelled in the dust
His passion for his country and culture has shone through in the decades of writing since, telling tales of protest, anger at injustices that Indigenous Australians have suffered, and the constance of human experience, including the familiar warmth of a welcome home from your people in ‘On the Wire’:
We’ll take you home to the land we know
Give you that peace of the evening
Give you that moon with the wind on your face
The rains and the change of each season
After a delayed start to his formal education, Carmody left the paddocks and welding sheds to apply to study music at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education (now part of the University of Southern Queensland) at the age of 33.
Having not finished high school and with limited reading and writing skills, it was a long shot, but thanks to the Whitlam Government’s free education scheme and his undeniable skill on the guitar, the Institute accepted him into a Bachelor of Arts – with history, geography, and music – “on probation”.
He says he didn’t even know how to borrow a book from the library at the beginning. He was worried he’d fail his probation if anyone found out he didn’t know how a library worked, so he kept it to himself. Instead, spending a whole day pretending to read the Oxford English Reference Dictionary, but secretly watching the other students and slowly figuring it out for himself.
Kev Carmody outside Kev Carmody House, the new UQ student residence named in his honour.
Kev Carmody outside Kev Carmody House, the new UQ student residence named in his honour.
The higher education environment wasn’t designed for Indigenous students, coming from a background like his, Carmody explains.
“Oral history was a big part of my upbringing, but there was no place for it at university. I had really fantastic lecturers, but they used to put red lines around chunks of my essays and there would be notes saying ‘Where is your quote?’.
“I’d say – ‘well, that’s verbally what old grandmother told me.’ But they said it wasn’t allowed and I had to have quotes.
“It was hard because all the books are by non-Indigenous people, and I couldn't put in what uncle said, what great uncle said, what grandma said, what grandpa said … I'd have these huge arguments [with my teachers].”
“In the end, I thought, there's got to be a way around this, so I’d put Unpublished Manuscripts, Granny Carmody, 1954, page 221 – and I saw no more red lines! Until about the sixth month of the course, when they woke up to it.”
Carmody excelled at university, coming to UQ to study a Graduate Diploma of Education and graduating with flying colours in 1981, then continuing on with Honours, before starting his PhD in History.
“As a student, I had access to a postgraduate study facility – it was an old house down by the roundabout at the main entrance to UQ. It had a kitchen, a bath, a toilet – it had everything I needed.
“So, I got a foam mattress, cut it in half and popped it behind a filing cabinet. I let security know I’d be studying there overnight, and I stayed there for the next four years.
“I ended up helping UQ security and the UQ Union out – my study house became a halfway house for women crossing campus to the West End ferry. If anyone got into trouble, they knew to come into the house and they would be safe.”
After a delayed start to his formal education, Carmody left the paddocks and welding sheds to apply to study music at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education (now part of the University of Southern Queensland) at the age of 33.
Having not finished high school and with limited reading and writing skills, it was a long shot, but thanks to the Whitlam Government’s free education scheme and his undeniable skill on the guitar, the Institute accepted him into a Bachelor of Arts – with history, geography, and music – “on probation”.
He says he didn’t even know how to borrow a book from the library at the beginning. He was worried he’d fail his probation if anyone found out he didn’t know how a library worked, so he kept it to himself. Instead, spending a whole day pretending to read the Oxford English Reference Dictionary, but secretly watching the other students and slowly figuring it out for himself.
Kev Carmody outside Kev Carmody House, the new UQ student residence named in his honour.
Kev Carmody outside Kev Carmody House, the new UQ student residence named in his honour.
The higher education environment wasn’t designed for Indigenous students, coming from a background like his, Carmody explains.
“Oral history was a big part of my upbringing, but there was no place for it at university. I had really fantastic lecturers, but they used to put red lines around chunks of my essays and there would be notes saying ‘Where is your quote?’.
“I’d say – ‘well, that’s verbally what old grandmother told me.’ But they said it wasn’t allowed and I had to have quotes.
“It was hard because all the books are by non-Indigenous people, and I couldn't put in what uncle said, what great uncle said, what grandma said, what grandpa said … I'd have these huge arguments [with my teachers].”
“In the end, I thought, there's got to be a way around this, so I’d put Unpublished Manuscripts, Granny Carmody, 1954, page 221 – and I saw no more red lines! Until about the sixth month of the course, when they woke up to it.”
Carmody excelled at university, coming to UQ to study a Graduate Diploma of Education and graduating with flying colours in 1981, then continuing on with Honours, before starting his PhD in History.
“I could write a whole PhD on what I saw at the University."
Kev Carmody and his wife Beryl share a laugh.
Kev Carmody and his wife Beryl share a laugh.
Kev Carmody and his wife Beryl share a laugh.
Kev Carmody and his wife Beryl share a laugh.
Kev Carmody and his wife Beryl share a laugh.
Kev Carmody and his wife Beryl share a laugh.
Kev Carmody and his wife Beryl share a laugh.
Kev Carmody and his wife Beryl share a laugh.
Carmody became a regular face on campus, a fierce activist in the sphere of student politics, fuelled by a desire to improve the lives and representation of his Indigenous peers.
He became known for his protest music at this time, too, taking his guitar to the on-campus studio of community radio station Radio 4ZZ (now 4ZZZ), where he would chat and do live-to-air music with Ross Watson on the Murri Hour. He said it was like an “open conference”.
Together with his passionate “mob”, he pushed for change. He worked with UQ’s first Aboriginal tutor Lilla Watson and social work academic Matt Foley (who later became Queensland Attorney-General) to help establish what is now the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (ATSIS) Unit on campus.
“We had to face the full Academic Board and explain why they were getting [Indigenous] students but not keeping them, because our mob’s used to having big communities around them. Thank goodness they finally got it, and the retention rates went up straight away,” Carmody said.
While at UQ, Carmody met his now wife, Beryl. He encouraged her to go back and finish her schooling, and she went on to pursue early childhood teaching, taking up a post at UQ’s childcare centre. Together, they became a powerhouse for change – she, the super organised voice of reason to her artistic drover. They’re a truly complementary double act.
Now, Carmody is being recognised for his immense impact on Australian culture, his contributions to UQ and his passion for access to education as UQ names its new 610-bed student residence in his honour: Kev Carmody House.
The opening of a new student residential building is one of many steps UQ is taking to increase the participation of domestic undergraduate students from low socio-economic, remote or regional backgrounds. UQ also wants to help remove the barriers that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students face accessing university.
This is also the first time The University has named a building in honour of an Indigenous person.
Carmody says it was a privilege to have the new building named after him.
“This building is a place where we celebrate what unites us as a human society, and as a family – building on ideas of respect, culture and education.”
“My journey to formal education started a little later than most … but once I started to dive deep into the written and spoken word through music, the world took on a new meaning for me.
“I hope my story can help inspire students at UQ to follow their passions, to embrace and respect each other and to express their imagination in its fullest capacity.”
There is also a new scholarship named in his honour – the Kev Carmody Scholarship – that will support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students who are experiencing financial hardship or need residential accommodation support.
Walking through the building bearing his name, Carmody pauses often, appreciating every detail. A perfectly poured concrete pillar, an expertly painted windowsill, a Moreton Bay Fig that arches over a manicured lawn. In the student kitchen he sniffs a student’s curry and reckons he might be popping back later to share some.
In the custom-built music room, furnished with a piano, lounge chairs and recording equipment, he takes a moment in the sunny window seat and marvels at the unending potential for students to come.
“As two old fellows fairly close to here said 30-odd years ago … From little things, big things will grow.”
Gather 'round people, I'll tell you a story
An eight-year long story of power and pride
From little things big things grow
Kev Carmody performs 'From Little Things Big Things Grow' at the launch of Kev Carmody House.
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