One of Australia’s best-known singer-songwriters took one of his first musical steps at the University of Southern Queensland – performing many of his assessments through song.
To spend time with University of Southern Queensland Alumnus and honorary doctorate recipient Kev Carmody is to get an education in topics that are important, challenging, frivolous, interesting, and historical.
At 74, his body moves slower these days, but his conversation moves at a rapid pace.
Themes bounce quickly from droving mobs of cattle through western Queensland to the importance of the #MeToo movement, but chat always comes back to music; the power of the spoken word and speaking your mind.
His vast knowledge and interests – and his desire to talk about them all – should not come as a surprise. Kev Carmody is a man who has built a life and a career in music based on his words, challenging the ways of the world, and learning his place in it.
“I was brought up with oral tradition because I never went to school until I was 10 so everything was oral,” Kev said.
“You had to speak in word images, so they stuck in a person’s head because that’s all you had in your memory, no written word. Just what you’re listening to from Granny or Mum or Uncle.”
The stories of Kev’s childhood are built on strong, generational narratives thanks to his genetics – an Aboriginal mother and an Irish-Australian father.
Born in far north Queensland, a young Kev spent the first decade of his life between the stock route and the Western Darling Downs where his family returned between droving.
Image by USQ Photographer, David Martinelli
After a short formal education in Toowoomba from the age of 10 through to his high school years, Kev decided to return to cattle work in favour of further studies – but he’d already developed a keen knowledge around the virtues of teaching oneself.
He tells a story about finding a book titled ‘Teach Yourself the Guitar’ at a roadside dump.
It not only changed the course of his life, but the landscape of Australian music forever.
“As a kid I’d heard classical guitar and blues music on the radio where they’re using the 1, 2, 3, 4 fingers to play like bass, rhythm and lead and you don’t need a band! I thought bloody hell this is something,” Kev laughed.
“Then I found this flamin’ book in the rubbish dump and it said you, you, get off your rear end! You teach yourself the guitar! That book taught me the basis of how to use the four and that’s what actually got me in to the DDIAE.”
Kev didn’t go from droving life straight into the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education (later to become the University of Southern Queensland) though.
As he tells it, he was working as a ‘second-class welder doing a first-class job’ when the frustrations of not being able to land an official apprenticeship started to build, and he made the decision to start studying music of an evening.
“I was doing the Australian Music Board exams of theory rather than watch the TV at night,” Kev said.
“I was fascinated by how music was put together. This note put with this note produces that sound and this emotive feel and produced something pretty good.”
As the old Chinese proverb states, ‘Teachers open the door. You enter by yourself’, and that was certainly the case for Kev.
His evening music teacher identified that his core understanding of music was far advanced of what was required by DDIAE to study and suggested that he should audition.
“I sang a song and had a chat and was accepted on probation for 12 months to study a Bachelor of Arts, or as we called it, a BA,” Kev said.
“My brother said to me, ‘what’s a BA?’ And I say, ‘Bloody ‘Ard!’ Because I’d never read a bloody book!
“I didn’t know how to get a book out of the library, and I spent half a day watching others, trying to figure it out!
“I thought if I go and tell the lecturers I’m gone! I’m back in the welding shed again!”
In true Kev Carmody style though, he taught himself and figured it out.
It was 1978, he was a mature-aged student in his early thirties – and he never wanted to have to grace a welding shed with his presence again.
He delivered his first assessment orally and continued to do so for the first year of his degree until he was confident enough to put pen to paper.
“Singing and playing guitar was my safe space and I’m lucky that I had that natural talent, I guess. It made up for, or covered up at least, the fact I really didn’t know how to learn in a formal way,” Kev said.
“It was an education in getting educated for a while there, but then education for me just opened up this whole thing that I never knew existed.
“I went and read biology, education, mathematics, art – I couldn’t get enough of it! It opened this whole intellectual, massive cosmos of ideas.
“We had magical lecturers too. They weren’t there to climb the hierarchy or anything like that, they were there to teach! And they were committed about it you know.
“It was challenging, it was asking questions and that’s what I was taught before I even went to school is that you’re better off asking a good question than answering everything.”
Kev’s very first album was released a decade after he started university and was full of questions. Questions of race, questions of politics, questions of belonging.
True fans know those tracks off by heart – but it’s his work with fellow Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly in the form of the 1991 song ‘From Little Things, Big Things Grow’ that made Kev Carmody a household name.
A song of protest and hope, the track put Aboriginal land rights issues back into the mainstream conversation and has been recorded countless times – but most recently on the 2020 release of a collection of Kev’s songs, Cannot Buy My Soul.
The album includes six contemporary reinterpretations of his songs by Australian artists, plus more than 30 other covers of his songs that were originally released in the early 2000s.
For Kev Carmody, it’s given him a new lease on life but also delivered a newfound contentment for the future of education through music.
“The young ones reinterpreting your songs and putting their own words to it – I think it’s just fantastic,” he said.
“You look at Courtney Barnett, you look at Alice Skye, those young women do videos too and they’re not up there with the glitz and glamour and flamin’ hot pants business!
“These words, these lyrics mean something, and you don’t need that to sell music. And a lot of what we were singing about in the 70s and 80s is still flamin’ relevant today. If you look at the Black Lives Matter, if you look at the #MeToo movement and the whole women’s business, you know we’ve got a bloody long way to go.
“But these young ones, I’m so proud of them. You know I said to Pauly Kelly, you and I can just sit back now mate, we can just write a song and say here fellas have a go at it!”
‘Having a go’ is an intrinsic Kev Carmody trait.
And he’s full of encouragement for those considering next steps as potential music makers and song writers to do the same and consider their options at the University of Southern Queensland like he did, all those years ago.
“Oh God, do it! Just do it! Don’t worry about what people try to tell you about what to do in the sense of who you are. Your identity is your uniqueness and just go for it,” he said.
“Do it from your heart, not from your head, don’t get into the celebrity stuff – just go and express who you are.
“Don’t get disillusioned – one person can have one hell of an impact.”Feeling inspired? Check out the new offerings from USQ’s Music and Creative Arts available in 2021: https://www.unisq.edu.au/music