Kev Carmody Archives - thegoodwills.com

Time to befriend an indigenous person

NAIDOC-Week-Yes-Nawa — Musician Kevin Bennett

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that this blog may contain references to deceased persons.

Reading an online ABC story about Ash Barty and her newly-born baby, I was struck by two things. The first was that the story had clearly been assembled with no direct input from Barty. Since retiring from championship tennis last year, Ash has made it fairly clear she values her private life. All the same, she’s famous enough that a declaration (to friends) on social media was appropriated by deadline-hungry online media. The story was compiled from what old journalists used to call ‘the cuts’, meaning file stories, social media comment (and responses) and a photo of Ash on her wedding day (supplied).

The second thing about this shallow news story was that nowhere in the text was Ash identified as an indigenous person. You’d think that in NAIDOC week, that would be a given.

NAIDOC stands for National Aboriginals and Islanders Day Observance Committee (originally dubbed National Aborigines Day Observance Committee).

The ABC could at least have tried to contact Ash, perhaps in the guise of preparing a NAIDOC week story. The time-honoured protocols of mainstream journalism should at least contain the disclaimer – the ABC made attempts to contact Ash Barty for comment but was unsuccessful.

The most interesting thing about the newly-born son (Hayden) of Ash Barty and husband Garry Kissick is that he is now part of the Barty extended family.

Through her great-grandmother, Ash Barty is a member of the Ngarigo people, the Aboriginal people of southern New South Wales and north-eastern Victoria. Despite being declared Australia’s Person of the Year in 2022, Ashleigh Barty is entitled to her private life, so I will now move on to NAIDOC.

This is a week of observance during which indigenous people can feel free to celebrate their origins. White fellas can use the time to reflect on their attitudes to indigenous folk, hopefully in a positive way. It is probably fair to say (and feel free to let me know if you think this is a generalisation), most white people who are not in some way inter-married, know few indigenous people and fewer still can actually say they have an Aboriginal friend.

She Who Is Going to Canada Soon has been making attempts to meet First Nations people in our home town, with limited success. Her attempts to make eye contact and say Hi will on occasion elicit a shy smile or a nod. (Of course, it’s just possible we already have Indigenous acquaintances, as not everyone chooses to mention their ethnicity. Ed)

It’s probably no wonder that so many Indigenous people are reluctant to engage with ‘white’ Australians If I was an Aboriginal person living in this country I’d probably not want to make eye contact with white people either.Ed

This is a reference to the shocking periods in this country’s history when European settlers squatted on land once used by Aboriginal tribes for hunting, food-gathering and sacred ceremonies. From this arose seldom-mentioned Frontier Wars and the gradual marginalisation of indigenous Australians

We got chatting to a young person in Brisbane recently who we discovered has Aboriginal ancestry, though it was not obvious to us. We found this out because she was visibly upset by an overtly racist comment made in her workplace by a customer.

The comment was not addressed to the young person, but it was gratuitous enough to make her angry and upset.

The young person revealed that her grandmother was one of the Stolen Generation. This refers to a shameful period in Australia’s history (mid-1800s to 1969), when Aboriginal children were removed from their parents and adopted by (usually) well-intentioned white people. This tawdry period in Australia’s colonial past was best summed up by the late songwriter, Archie Roach:

Taught us to read, to write and pray
Then they took the children away
Took the children away
The children away
Snatched from their mother’s breast
Said this is for the best
Took them away.

Even today, people in their 50s and 60s are discovering or tracing back their ancestry and those who have the opportunity to spread the story do just that. Alt-country songwriter Kevin Bennett not so recently traced his family and now writes songs depicting or satirising that era. Check out his song Spaghetti Western and its reference to a ‘stolen land’. Bennett also referred to intermarriage in Goulburn Valley Woman.

“She said she was a Goulburn Valley woman, she felt connected to the land; Her mother was a flame-haired Irish lass, her father was a Yorta Yorta man.”

The ABC this week interviewed songwriters Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody, who did more to raise awareness than most with their seminal song ‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’. I first met Kev at a folk club in Toowoomba and was also aware that he was (like me) one of the mature age students studying at the university. Kev played guitar in a local bush band and on occasions would sing one of his own songs. I had no idea he was indigenous until the night he sang a song about someone being ‘zipped up in black skin’.

“This is a song about my Uncle,” he said, launching into Jack Deelin. Carmody released his debut album in 1988, the Bicentennial year. Along with indigenous bands Yothu Yindi and compadres including Gurrumul, Tiddas, Kutcha Edwards and others, Kev Carmody was at the forefront of raising awareness of indigenous culture and the injustices of the past.

The injustices and inequalities (which still exist) include a mortality rate 1.6 times greater than non-indigenous, chronic health problems, inadequate housing and over-representation among jail populations.

Over time, this led to the Apology by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2007 and the emergence of some now ubiquitous traditions. One is the warning at the start of this blog. This accords with the Aboriginal custom of not referring to the departed by name, unless special permission has been given. Then there is the acknowledgment of country which has become universal.

My attempts at befriending Aboriginal people stall on innate shyness and I suspect it is a two-way street. A fellow sometimes busks outside the IGA in town. He sings, plays guitar and harmonica and is not half-bad. I was tempted to sidle up and join in on the harmony to “Down on the corner, out on the street, Willie and the Poor boys etc.” Opportunity lost.

I remember visiting Derby in Western Australia and seeing the ancient Boab ‘Prison’ tree and reading the bleak history of the region. While the story of that hollow tree used as a temporary prison is said to be a myth, the Boab was a staging post and Aboriginal prisoners were chained to nearby trees. These are stark images which remind us of how European settlers mistreated the original inhabitants. But as is often the case, the historic records are often disputed, many because they were never written down.

It’s not that much different to the Highland Clearances, where my descendants were pushed off their land so the English aristocracy could run their sheep and lay claim to whisky production. The same applies to other colonial conquests around the world, although the mistreatment of Aborigines and Native Americans stand out as egregious examples.

The way I see it on this particular Friday is that come the referendum, we should all be saying ‘yes’.nawa.

A degree of merit

For reasons which may suggest the mind is searching for mental challenges, I have been admiring the initiative of a dozen or so older people who have chosen to go (back) to university. In some cases they are university virgins, spreading their intellectual wings for the first time, post-children, pre-retirement.

Others are going back, 20 or 30 years after their first degree, to take on post-graduate study. The concept of mature age study has been around a long while, but statistics suggest the incidence of older people taking on academia is rising. The Australian Bureau of Statistics says one million Australians aged 25-64 were engaged in study last year, compared with 780,700 in 2004. Merryn Dawborn-Gundlach, a lecturer from the University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education, completed a PHD on how mature-age students transition into their first tertiary degrees. Mrs Dawborn-Gundlach told The Age mature age students were motivated by the push for lifelong learning. “These days you don’t have the same job for life, you retrain.”
More than 40% of mature-age students in the study said they found juggling work and study a challenge, and around 60% experienced “a general feeling of stress.”

An expensive learning curve for some

I took on university for the first time aged 30. I’d left school at 15 so was full of trepidation about the challenges ahead. Luckily the academic year was split into four terms, so by Easter I had enough results back to suggest I could finish an Arts degree.

What set me on this subject was a Facebook post by freelance travel journalist Lee Mylne, a former Daily Sun colleague. Lee (pictured above) told her friends this week she was going to university after “many years.”
She was accepted into QUT’s professional doctorate program and in three years will graduate as a Doctor of Creative Industries (Journalism). What surprised me (and Lee) was the enormous amount of support and encouragement from friends; it seems more people would do it if they could afford it.
There is a fair bit of government support out there for study initiatives, including student loans, scholarships and funding for research degrees. For example, a Commonwealth scholarship in 2014 paid just under half the cost of a humanities degree (totalling $11,574), according to data in a piece by Chris Pash in Business Insider. Subsidised or not, it is a big financial and lifestyle commitment. My niece has ventured back into academia, looking to expand on her facility for languages. But at $2000 a subject she is reconsidering.
“Academia has gone through some serious changes in the past 12 years since I last studied. Not only do you have the regular essays/presentations, you also are marked on your contribution to online blogs on the weekly topic, adding to the weight of work you have to do. Everyone can see what you write and everyone can critique what you write, and it can’t just be an opinion piece, you have to cite it.”

Back in my day, oh aye

Wind the clock back 35 or so years and the first and best thing I did at university was a touch-typing course. No email or internet research in my day! Just typing and re-typing.
Luckily there was a coterie of mature age journalism students in the first-year intake at the University of Southern Queensland.
After a week or two it started to feel like home and there was the undoubted bonus of studying Australian literature with Bruce Dawe.
It was a bit of a (financial) struggle). I had a permanent debt at the university book shop and was paying off a large dentist bill at $20 a week. But for those of us who went to university in the late 1970s and early 1980s, tertiary education was still free. As music journalist and USQ graduate Noel Mengel says: “My kids would be outraged.”
In the early days I met Kev Carmody in the university library. I knew Kev from the local folk club where he played in a bush band and had lately started singing his own songs. In the late 1970s libraries were still using index cards. Kev says he had no idea how to take a book out of a library, so he sat there reading a book, quietly watching how people went about using the catalogue system.
You’ll get some sense of this Aboriginal man’s strength of character in the documentary Songman which is being shown on ABC TV on March 15. We had a preview at his live concert in Brisbane last month.

A learned foot in the door

There’s a lot to be said for acquiring some life experience and then going for an education. There was initial resistance inside daily newspapers to the idea of academic journalists. The old school, who had started as copy boys and served lengthy cadetships, resented the slow but steady influx of graduates.
By the mid-1990s, newspaper editors were starting each year with a pile of applications from bright young things, all of whom had at least one degree. Even with a Gap Year thrown in, new graduates emerge from the system aged 20 or 21, well-educated but light on life experience.
Mature age students benefit from having acquired some life skills and wisdom, but more importantly, if you are going to university aged 29 or 30, chances are you will be 100% committed to achieving your goal.
While technically not a mature age student, Noel Mengel went back to uni after working for three years in magistrate’s courts in the Queensland public service.
“I realised I was never going to get part-time study done,” he said. “And I had a disturbing vision of winding up as a country town solicitor.”
Noel recently left The Courier-Mail after 25 years as one of the country’s leading music writers. Along the way he wrote an award-winning book (RPM), played in rock bands and still does (The Casuarinas) and his name is frequently on the lists of judges for music industry awards.

Kev Carmody went on to become an internationally known songwriter with six albums to his name, a tribute album (Cannot Buy my Soul) and a collaboration with Paul Kelly, From Little Things Big Things Grow, which as Kelly remarks in Songman, became universally known without ever being played on radio.
Carmody was and still is an important voice for his people. There will be those who would say he would have achieved all that and more without having to go to university. But then we’d not have the wonderful story about his debate with the University of Queensland over parking fines, land tenure and who owed who money!

Is there a doctorate in the house?

Meanwhile my 40-something friend Kelli is on the cusp of graduating with an honours degree in occupational therapy, some new young friends and no regrets.
“I found it agonisingly difficult at times,” she said. There are commitments and expectations for a mature age student that simply aren’t there for most school-leavers. The other issue is I now have a whacking-great debt to the government which may or may not be paid out before I die.
“But I’m an infinitely more balanced person for having completed this study, although apparently I’ve now lost my mind entirely and intend to pursue a PhD!’
“My kids said ‘Mum, didn’t you tell us that if you started talking about a PhD then we should talk you out of it?’…

“Why yes, I did, but don’t worry about what I said then….”

Our Australian day of shame

Convict Road — Devine’s Hill convict road sculpture photo by Laurel Wilson

We were on the road somewhere outside Sydney when a hotted-up Mazda zoomed up next to us at the lights, twin cams throbbing. From each rear window protruded an Australian flag, fluttering like when you accidently shut your frock in the door. We sat there, waiting for the green, making cynical old fart, iconoclastic noises about faux patriotism, Bogans and drivers who just cannot sit behind a caravan.

Meanwhile, Australia Day has come and gone; Shane Howard got a gong and used the occasion to highlight the iniquities and injustices of this colonised land. As an accidental Australian (twice emigrated) I hesitate to write anything acerbic about this country, my adopted home. I did not go to school here, so even though I studied Australian history at university and watch Better Homes and Gardens, there are gaps in my education through which you could drive a Holden Ute laden with slabs of beer. But I seize every opportunity to learn more, to lift the rug and look under it for First Nation stories. As chance would have it, we stumbled across two relics of our colonial past while on a circuitous road trip to the Illawarra Folk Festival and back via Tamworth. The first was the remains of a convict-built, 43-kilometre road near Wisemans Crossing in New South Wales.

Working on the chain, gang

The Great North Road was built by convict labour between 1826 and 1834 to provide a freight route from Sydney to the Hunter Valley. From Wisemans Crossing (free ferry service, thanks to the NSW government), you can drive up the road a piece, park and walk your way up Devine’s Hill. It was a hot day, but we persevered, marvelling at the 19^th century engineering ingenuity and the harsh life lived by convicts. As we read about the convicts who were sentenced to serve time on ‘Iron Gangs’ to build roads, our aching calf muscles seemed a mere trifle. British convicts who had committed offences in Australia would often be sentenced to work in chain gangs, their legs in shackles. Once they had served their sentences, the shackles were removed and they were transferred to a Road Party.

Easier to work without shackles, but the work was still hard yacker, chiselling 250kg blocks out of the sandstone hills and building buttresses and retaining walls.

The chain gangs used hammer and chisels to make blocks or they bored holes in the sandstone using jumper bars and sledgehammers. The engineers then placed explosives in the holes and sliced large blocks from the hills above. There are tributes to the convicts along the 1.8 km Devine’s Hill walk which tell of the harsh terms of crime and punishment in those times, often being incarcerated for lengthy periods for what we would see as trivial offences.

Stumbling across the First Fleet

Later, we were heading for Nundle, a small town 60 kms from Tamworth, around which something of a fringe country music festival has developed. On the way, we stopped at Wallabadah, which hosts Australia’s only memorial to the First Fleet, which arrived in Port Jackson on January 26, 1788.

The personal mission of stonemason Ray Collins, the First Fleet Memorial is a small park festooned with stone tablets, listing the names of every person who travelled on the 11 ships sailing from Britain. Collins, whose interest in the project was driven by discovering his own convict heritage, has since included a tribute to the second fleet.

This is more of a pilgrimage site than a tourist attraction. Most travellers find it by accident, stopping at the public facilities which adjoin the memorial. It was strangely moving though, walking around the gardens reading the names of this country’s first European ancestors, who thought Australia was unpopulated (Terra Nullius).

Terra Incognito might have been a more apt term, meaning unknown lands which had not yet been explored. The original inhabitants were there, though seldom seen. Early explorers made ship’s log entries about seeing plumes of smoke, from fires deliberately lit by Aborigines as a means of caring for and regenerating an arid land.

What we were not taught

As most Australians are now aware, even if they were not taught the history at school, the original inhabitants pre-dated the first fleet by at least 40,000 years. Australia Day as we celebrate it now, with thong-throwing competitions, colonial re-enactments and cockroach racing, is grossly insulting to the First Nations people, the Aborigines. I could go on, but you all know the stories of land-grabbing, exploitation, the spread of (European) diseases, genocide and our often misguided removal of children from their families.

There was the grand gesture, the Stolen Generation apology in 2008 by former PM Kevin Rudd. Apology aside, nothing can make that right. All we Anglo-Saxon Australians can do is to make symbolic gestures, like outspoken songwriter Paddy McHugh did at The Dag (a sheep station converted into a wedding reception and conference centre and alt-country music venue).

He began his set by acknowledging the original owners of the land and then, the current owner. We could all do this when the occasion arises, but so few of us do.

Meanwhile on Tuesday

On Australia Day we went on a vintage train excursion from Warwick to Nobby, along with 90 other people, many of them sporting Australia Day paraphernalia and greeting friends with “Happy Australia Day”. Excuse me, but this country’s blood-soaked history is nothing to be happy about. As indigenous journalist Stan Grant said, in a stirring speech which has been seen around the world, Aborigines were “marooned on the tides of history to the fringes of Australian society”.

Still, is there really any harm in tourists using a public holiday to spend some money keeping the smoky smell of our colonial days alive? The Nobby craft shop, run by local volunteers, did solid trade, as did Rudd’s Pub, named not for a twice-ex Prime Minister, but the author Steele Rudd, of the Dad and Dave stories about sheep shearing and dances down the hall on a Saturday night, damper and billy tea.

It is a long way removed from Carnarvon Gorge and its ancient painted rock walls. Songwriter Garry Koehler’s song The Gallery was inspired, he tells me, by the painted hands, which to him appeared to be reaching out; imploring, “Help – can you fix this mess?” Koehler told his audience in Tamworth last week that the rock carvings at Carnarvon date back 30,000 years.

“And we’ve been here only 200 years and stuffed it up.”

Well, 228 years if you want to be picky, but there has not been much to write home about for Australia’s aborigines since 1988. Indigenous musicians and kindred spirits had plenty to say though, notably Kev Carmody and Archie Roach, Yothu Yindi, also Shane Howard and Neil Murray, to name a few.

You’ll have your own views on Australia Day, as do my 298 Facebook ‘friends’, and some of them have far more strident things to say.

She Who Is Finally Mentioned favours calling January 26 “Survival Day”. It’s less negative than Invasion Day and many of this country’s 669,900 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people already call it just that.

They have survived, despite everything.