Concert For Kev

The Age

Saturday December 8, 2007

John van Tiggelen

The sun is setting on the performing career of Kev Carmody, one of our most original singer-songwriters. John van Tiggelen joins him on the road less travelled.

This may be kev carmody's last drive to prison. He hopes not, but his body wants out. No sooner have we left the silvery sprawl of Cairns behind than he starts kneading the shoulder of his strumming arm. Reaching it takes a little grunt. After a pre-musical career of cutting cane, shovelling grain and lumping bags, his limbs don't so much stretch from his torso as buttress it.

He kneads and winces, then slowly hefts his right arm to suspend it in front of him, as if testing its will. It drops like a log. "Old Uncle Arthur has moved in," he says. "The bugger."

The old bugger's full name is Uncle Arth-u-ritis. And he hasn't moved in alone. Those early decades of hard labour have also ground down the discs in Carmody's spine, where bone is impinging on nerve. He can no longer stand on stage; his back gives him hell. His wrists, too, bear the cumulative brunt of so many cane-knife recoils that merely clutching a plectrum can inflame the tendons. Sometimes, after a gig, his tendons are so knotted he can't feel his fingers. To relieve the tension, surgeons have sliced open the bands of fascia across his wrist, but to no avail. Gigs have become finely calibrated events, leavened with stories, self-deprecation and didgeridoo-playing.

Just three days before this trip, Carmody supported two of the country's premier rock acts, Powderfinger and Silverchair, at a concert in Toowoomba. The chair provided for him on stage was too high, and the guitar kept slipping down his thighs. He survived the gig - the crowd gave him the lift he needed, he says - but he's feeling all the more gnarled for it.

We continue zigzagging up the range, Carmody reacquainting himself with the landscape (he was born in Cairns) while reaching across again and again in his futile bid to strangle Uncle Arthur. Outside, as we crest the range, the ascending tangle of rainforest cedes to a band of tall rose gums. Their graceful salute lasts just a few minutes, and the deeper we cut inland, the more stunted the eucalypts appear until, an hour and a half after leaving the coast, we're traversing a plain of shrivelled scrub surrounded by low grey hills to reach our destination, the Lotus Glen Correctional Centre, a place as leached of spirit as it is bleached of colour.

My dignity I'm losing here

And mentally I'm old

There's a system here that nails us

Ain't we left out in the cold

From Cannot Buy My Soul, 1991

KEV CARMODY IS COY ABOUT WHAT DRIVES HIM to perform in prisons. He'd rather I write about them, not him - he ain't the black Johnny Cash, he says. But his song lyrics say enough. All blacks are his brothers (and sisters) but some need brotherhood more than others, especially those who crowd the country's jails. Aborigines remain 15 times more likely to be incarcerated than non-indigenous Australians. In the past 20 years, Carmody, who has not done time himself, has played his black protest music for thousands of inmates, including those at Brisbane's Boggo Road, at Syd-ney's Long Bay and at women's prisons. He once spent 10 days at the Aboriginal-only Yetta Dhinnakal prison farm outside Brewarrina, in north-west NSW, overnighting in a cell of his own to workshop with the inmates by day.

At Lotus Glen, he hopes to get away with just a couple of songs. These days he prefers workshops to gigs: more yarning, less pain. Far North Queensland's sexual health team have commissioned him to get their hepatitis C and HIV awareness campaigns inside the jail. The team member behind the invitation has been an admirer of Carmody's protest songs since her university days in Brisbane, when Carmody earnt himself a police file for rallying students against the Bjelke-Petersen government.

She's so awed by the prospect of meeting and chaffeuring Carmody that her day passes in a fluster, and her driving is the shakier for it. It's odd that Carmody should inspire such depths of reverence. Not so much because he doesn't

deserve his pedestal in the country's musical pantheon, nor because he's always been well adrift of the mainstream, but because he's never put himself forward as anything other than a simple bloke called Kev.

"Aw, jeez," he says, when his hostess finally owns up to a stupefying nervousness. "I'm just a bush black."

PAUL KELLY, LONG THE DARLING OF MELBOURNE'S music scene, regards Carmody's oeuvre as "one of our great cultural treasures". Earlier this year, Carmody received what might traditionally have been a posthumous accolade with the release of a tribute album, Cannot Buy My Soul: The Songs of Kev Carmody, conceived by Kelly. Those paying their respects are the cream of Australian pop, including Missy Higgins, John Butler, Augie March, Powderfinger's Bernard Fan-ning, Tex Perkins, Archie Roach, and the Waifs. The quality of the assembled cast is testament both to the esteem in which Carmody's songwriting is held and to the degree of his obscurity - several contributors were utterly unfamiliar with his work until approached by Kelly.

It's an obscurity in which Kelly has had a vexed role. In the early '90s, Kelly and Carmody went bush and camped by a dam to co-write From Little Things Big Things Grow, about the gutsy Gurindji stockmen's strike of 1966 that sparked the Aboriginal land rights movement. It became the song that Carmody is most famous for or, more accurately, the one song he is famous for, and even so for the most part in the shadow of Kelly (who recorded the song first). It is no small credit to Kelly, then, that he has felt compelled to push the rest of Carmody's work into the sun.

Kev Carmody first came to prominence in the late 1980s, as part of the Aboriginal musical renaissance that rode the back of the indigenous rights movement. Back then, pre-Mabo, it was still gaining momentum. It was a time of optimism, of redress, of opportunities denied rather than squandered. Bush bands like Coloured Stone, Yothu Yindi and Warumpi Band began to attract a small urban following with their emphatic songs of identity and pride. Sig-nificantly, they nudged open the door for urban blacks, led by Melbourne-based Archie Roach, his partner Ruby Hunter and the Tiddas trio, whose more sonorous songs about loss and pain found instant resonance with sorry-minded metropolitan listeners.

With a foot in both camps was Kev Carmody, a drover's son with a degree in history. In 1987, his outspoken debut album, Pillars of Society, was dubbed by Rolling Stone the "best ever" by an Aboriginal musician "and arguably the best protest album ever made in Australia". With its wry opening line, "In 1788 down at Sydney Cove, the first boat-people land", the song Thou Shalt Not Steal became the indie anthem of the country's Bicentenary. Music writers instantly homed in on Carmody's flair for a simple chord progression, his feel for poetry, his love of storytelling and his scathing view of modern society. He was the black Bob Dylan, no less. Or, at the very least, the black Australian Bob Dylan.

Yet something jarred. Carmody's songs, for all their critical acclaim, fell between audiences. It seemed white society had no need for a black Dylan, and his albums - five in all - sold progressively less. Arguably, the downfall of the Bjelke-Petersen government left some of his more right-on harangues against politicians, development and rednecks sounding a little dated. His lyrics teemed with a disdain for technology, pro-gress and capitalism. The Left continued to love him, of course, but it was puppy love, really. The problem for Carmody remained that, commercially, a song called White Bourgeois Woman was always going to fall on white bourgeois ears. His strongest songs came with a sting, and people didn't like being stung. They would rather cry with Archie.

Richard Flanagan, the Tasmanian author, has described Carmody as "an enigma in these times of limited, limiting definitions, when there is -always a cage in which to jail the next bird". Flan-agan was referring to the "black Dylan" tag, but Carmody's cage is partly of his own construction. It should have come as no great shock that the louder he railed against "the system", the less it should want to hear him, yet Carmody maintains that he has been blacklisted and boycotted by commercial radio.

His frustration culminated in Mirrors, his last album, released in 2003. The lyrics have acquired a sarcastic edge, the music a desperate, experimental quality, mixing banjos with techno at one point. He tells me he's surprised I've even heard of the album - most of the available copies, pressed independently, are still in his shed.

If Carmody isn't the black Dylan, nor the black Johnny Cash, he just might be the black Eric Bogle. "Or Eric Bogle the white Kev Carmody," Bogle ventures. Although barely heard outside Australian folk circles, the Scottish-born Bogle is widely regarded as one of the country's finest protest singers, with his anti-war songs covered by the likes of the Pogues (And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda) and Billy Bragg (My Youngest Son Came Home Today). Bogle and Carmody embarked on a national tour in 1989 - the first and last tour of Carmody's career.

"Kev drank a lot of tea and snored like a chainsaw," recalls Bogle. "He's a nice bloke, just one of the good guys. He's also a very intelligent man who plays the bush Aborigine very well. But if you write the kind of stuff that Kev and I do, you've got to expect to be ignored by the mainstream media.

"Society will tolerate angry young men for a time, but if they become angry old men, they're just an embarrassment. I know this to my cost. Kev's mellowed now, although I think that, behind his music, he was always more conciliatory than angry. He realises we've got to get on for his culture to survive in any meaningful form."

In any case, says Bogle, angry young Aboriginal musicians are as thin on the ground nowadays as angry young white musicians. "The anger is gone, because the optimism is gone. Anger's about screaming for something better. If you don't get it, that anger becomes bitterness, then despair, then apathy. I think that's what's happening with [Aboriginal] music today. That's why Kev is so important, as he's still carrying the flag. It's a wee bit tattered and shot to shit, but he's still carrying it."

I say show me the justice

to be had here in this land

Show me the justice

for every black human being

Show us blacks the justice

in this white democracy

Where you can execute us without

a trial while we're held in custody

From Black Deaths in Custody, 1987

LOTUS GLEN PRISON'S CATCHMENT INCLUDES Cape York and the Torres Strait. As such, it is the only prison in the country dominated by not one but two indigenous cultures. This brings added tensions. A few weeks before Car-mody's visit, knives and homemade weapons were found stashed in apparent readiness for a stoush between Aborigines and Islanders.

We arrive late to find a prison band is already playing to the crowd in the covered assembly yard. The song is the early Nick Cave standard, Shivers:

I've been contemplating suicide

But it really doesn't suit my style

So I think I'll just act bored instead

And contain the blood I would have shed.

About 40 men in brown prison-issue T-shirts have arranged themselves around the edge of the yard, watching the singer on guitar. They're a big-armed, bear-like lot. Most are black, except for two trios of whites in opposite corners. Torres Strait Islanders and Aborigines are strung out on opposite sides. A few Tongans, enormous men, sit centrally in the back row, like tribal chiefs.

The Aboriginal singer on stage has pale hazel eyes, eyebrows that almost meet in the middle and a deep resonant voice. After he finishes he makes way for Carmody somewhat grudgingly - or so it seems. Carmody is told the band will want to jam with him. He says, "I just thought I'd talk a bit first. About my family and that."

His mother was Aboriginal, his father an Irish-man. He tells the inmates his Aboriginal grand-father, a stockman, was born under a mango tree on Breeza Plains station in central Cape York. "I wrote Thou Shalt Not Steal for him," Carmody says, fingering his guitar strings. "My old grandfather told me that Europeans came here with 10 laws, or 10 commandments, and that these were good laws, but they broke every one of them. And he said to me, 'When you go to school and learn to write, you tell them that their law is no good if they break it.' "

Cause your Jesus said you're supposed to give

the oppressed a better deal

We say to you "Yes white man, thou shalt

not steal"

Oh ya, our land you'd better heal

The song ends and the men stare back impassively. The wind rattles a clock on the wall above him. Dressed in black jeans, black elastic-sided boots and his trademark black "Make Indigenous Poverty History" T-shirt, Carmody talks of growing up poor but happy in droving camps, of how his Aboriginal uncles taught him to play the mouth harp, and of how he taught himself to play guitar after finding a soiled how-to book "in what we called the open-air supermarket" - the local rubbish dump. Playing both instruments simultaneously, he breaks into I've Been Moved, a song he wrote in 1968:

I've watched the moonlight flood

Across them sleepy hills and valleys

Heard the sadness in her requiem

Again, no reaction, just the wind hooting through the speakers. "I can't get a peep out of youse," says Carmody.

After two more songs the prison band lumbers back on stage. Carmody takes them through From Little Things. They pick up the rhythm very quickly, improvising with a few bluesy guitar licks. One of the boss Tongans signals to a guard for the need to take a picture. The band appears to be itching to take the gentle song up a notch, to increase the noise and tempo and let the lead guitar do violent things. As soon as the song is over, the men hunch forward over their instruments to launch into their own repertoire, including several the singer has written. Carmody tries to join in by playing a little harp, then a little guitar, but there's no room for him any more. He moves to the side and starts massaging his arm.

The exchange, or lack of it, reminds me of a travelling boxing tent rolling into town, and watching the local bruisers line up to take on the hot-shots. But I've misread the mood entirely. The warden, standing beside me, explains it's not aggression I'm seeing, but shyness.

"Life in prison is about self-preservation - you don't show too much of yourself," he says. "This afternoon actually means a lot to these blokes. They've been practising for a few hours every afternoon for weeks. Wayne Kyte [the singer/

guitarist] is so nervous he can barely speak. He just wants to impress Kev."

After his last song, an achingly raw version of Eric Clapton's Tears in Heaven, Kyte presents Carmody with a painting. It's of a guitar without strings, breaking free from stone. Kyte was up till 3am this morning to finish it. A guard jokes he must have run out of time to paint the strings, but later I hear that Kyte has spent most of his 11-year sentence in high security, where guitar strings are prohibited for being potentially lethal. I ask the warden what Kyte is in for but I'm not allowed to know.

As we drive back to the coast, something's stirring within Carmody. "That Clapton song they covered; the emotion he sang that with - that man has a heart of gold. He needs to be recorded. You know what gives me the shits about coming here? It is that I have to walk out. It's not enough. I have to come back."

He takes a break from tackling old Uncle Arthur to contemplate a landscape dominated by termite mounds. He looks tired; those four or five songs he played did him no good. Two marble-sized knots protrude angrily from his wrist, like uncoiled bedsprings.

THE DAY AFTER THE JAIL JAM, WE'RE EN ROUTE to Gordonvale, a sugar town half an hour south of Cairns, where Carmody is booked to talk and perform at a special assembly at Djarragun College, an indigenous primary and secondary school. "I'm just going to play From Little Things Big Things Grow," he briefs a slightly disappointed music teacher. "All the others are pretty full-on."

Local ABC radio is there to record it, including the school bell that peels mid-song. The year 11 English teacher wanders over afterwards to say the song's lyrics form part of her course. Carmody tells her that he never tires of playing it. "I see

it as part of the oral tradition, to tell that story."

Carmody is keen to drive into town, where we tool around looking for the football oval. In 1950, when Carmody was four, it was ringed by a cluster of mouldering weatherboard houses. The Car-modys lived in one of them, a little low-set place, next door to the Winkles, who had 13 daughters. Further down was a man who kept greyhounds and beyond him a madwoman who once snatched Carmody's little brother from beneath the mosquito net covering the cot on the front porch. (Baby bro was found and prised from the woman's arms hours later.) Other glimmers of memory are of the mudcrabs his mother Bonnie caught in the Musgrave River, of pawpaws, custard apples and mangoes, and of the sugar-cane stalks he and his mates sucked dry after letting a cane train crush them.

He hasn't been back since. The oval's still there, in a generic sort of way, as are the cane train tracks. So is the mill where his Irish father, Jack, used to work, shovelling coal into its boilers. But we can't find any trace of the cottage. Getting out of the car, Carmody is assailed by the sweet, sticky smell of burnt molasses, and with it the memory of his cane-cutting uncles, who used to piss on their cracked hands to soothe them. He spots the pub and recalls being propped up at its bar with a glass of lemonade, waiting for his father to finish work.

The mill-stack billowed a dirty black then, and the air was laden with soot. Then he remembers something else - the ever-present threat of police coming to take him and his brother away. "Old Dad never laid a finger on us. He didn't need to, because he used to scare the bejesus out of us with that one."

At the end of 1950, the family packed up for a droving life in southern Queensland, working the stock routes between Quilpie and Toowoomba. Carmody learnt to ride a horse by the time he was five. His baby brother slept in a fruit box, which was bolted to the back of a sulky pulled by a draught horse called Prince. "It was a good life," he reflects. "At each camp Mum would throw the fishing lines and yabby traps into the billabong. We'd have fresh roo every night."

There was also plenty of music. "Few of us could read or write so we'd sing all these songs. And we had a wireless. We'd hook it up to an old dry-cell battery and rig an aerial up a tree. We'd get hillbilly music in the mornings, radio plays of an afternoon and classical music in the evening.

"Ours was an oral culture. We'd lie back in our swags of a night time and discuss [the broadcast of Dylan Thomas's] Under Milk Wood like a uni tute: 'Crikey, that Mr Willy Nilly postman, he opened up your letters. Dunno about that fella.' "

At 10, Carmody's bush existence came to a halt when he was dispatched to a Catholic school in Toowoomba. (Most accounts of Carmody's life mistakenly claim he was "taken" from his family.) He lasted three years - not long enough to become fully literate. Shortly he was back in the scrub, ringbarking trees and droving. He became a silo operator, then a welder. By the time he was ready for a whitefella education he was a 33-year-old father of three (he and his wife Helen have since divorced, but remain "good mates").

His musical prowess won him a college place in Toowoomba. Until he mastered reading and writing, he took his guitar to tutorials and turned his assignments into song. He agitated against the Bjelke-Petersen government, eventually got his arts degree and worked briefly as a teacher (he says it was the advent of computers that did him in) before ending up back in the bush, building cattle yards with his younger brother.

He wasn't to become a recording artist till he was 41, and only then at the urging of his mother. "She said, 'You've got all these protest songs. There's a whole white Bicentenary coming. Let's get them out there.' "

THERE'S MUCH OF THE DROVER'S SON LEFT IN KEV CARMODY. To him, a hotel room is just a bigger swag. His un-rockstar-like requirements are

that the room have a stove and that there be a "tuckshop" nearby, so he might cook up some chicken and rice, or noodles and ham. He turns in early and is up at five, in time to greet the morning star. He breakfasts as if it could be a long way to the next camp - whatever's left and whatever's going. He won't answer email and does not own a mobile phone.

He lives on a 27-hectare bush block in south-east Queensland, "$108 from Brisbane" (the cost of the four-hour bus trip), with his partner, Beryl, and whichever of his 11 grandkids have come to visit. It's big-frost country. Every now and then, a company will track him down to ask to buy the rights to From Little Things for an advertising campaign. "We could be comfortably off by now," he says, "but I always say no. That song is not to be used for commercial purposes."

At 61, Carmody is aware that he has passed the average life expectancy of his people. That commercial success has eluded him no longer worries him. Much more satisfying is the web of connections, memories and history that he has spun across the country through song and story. "The older I get, the more I seep into this land."

He views death as part of this process, a final "wrapping in Mother Earth ... Death is easy business," he says.

There's just something he'd like to get done first. "I've got a heap of songs that I've never recorded, going back to the 1960s. They're all sitting in a box. I'm going to sit down at the kitchen table and record them, for others to use as they see fit.

"There are five albums out there now that have nailed the way I think. But I've written a lot of love songs, too. They're not conventional love songs. If you listen to the vast majority of mainstream lyrics, it's 'I, I, I', 'me, me, me' and 'you, you, you'. It's not 'we' and not 'us'. I'm wired a different way. From Little Things was a cultural love song."

TWO DAYS AFTER THE LOTUS GLEN GIG, Carmody is playing to 300 fans in a vast concrete water tank on a Cairns hillside. He's always had a strong fan base here, among the cliques of rainforest hippies and the well-intentioned "whiteys" running indigenous affairs. Cars are lined up for a kilometre along the forest road. Rain drums steadily on the tank roof.

Carmody's campfire-side manner soon suffuses the circular venue. No one minds the few times his fingers don't quite do what he wants them to do. Nor the long, wry rambles where he rests his arm on his guitar. "It's way past my bedtime, you mob," he tells them. "It's time I got off the road." And on he plays and on he yarns.

He winds up with a vigorous rendition of Eulogy for a Black Man, the song he says he wrote instead of writing a will:

Let me face the rising sun

Commend my spirit to the wind

Make no monuments or mortal crowns

Or speak my name again when you lay me down

The crowd claps and stomps, long and hard. But Carmody is already gone, having bypassed backstage to step out a side gate and into a waiting car, to be whisked to his room, where he'll lay himself flat on the floor, a rolled-up towel

prop-ped in his back, his leaden arms and numb fingers stretched out wide, waiting for relief to kick in.

Paul Kelly, Missy Higgins and Tex Perkins are among the artists who will perform Cannot Buy My Soul - The Songs of Kev Carmody over two nights at the Sydney Festival next month.

© 2007 The Age

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