I never intended to interview Kev Carmody. When I started my project at school, I had never even heard of the old folk singer; his name sounded like a used-car salesman to me. But, whatever, I guess fate had something to in store for me. If you were of a different disposition, you could call it something else.
I should start at the beginning. The real beginning. I was born on a bright Sunday, the 18th of March, at a small-town on the outskirts of Melbourne. Soon after, my parents decided to move into a central-city suburb. They had always intended to live out there in the wop-wops, but you have to follow where the jobs are, especially when you have a little mouth to feed. A concrete jungle was my playground growing up, as opposed to little creeks and weeds. I particularly enjoyed it, but hey, I had nothing to compare it to, did I? My formative years passed without much of a mention, apart from a particular scathing accident where I choked on a lollipop in kindergarten-I still can’t swallow a pill to this day. My teenage years began with entrance to Melbourne Central City High School (quite an imaginative name, in any book), which is where I met Rob.
Rob was one of those hippy-dippy, conservation types. His parents were divorced, and he lived with his dad, whose face peered out from many newspaper photographs displaying protests and picket lines in Melbourne central, lying around in their apartment. I fell for him, hard. One day in our Social Studies class, we were put together for a social justice project. I just wanted to talk to the local police officer, but of course Rob took it to the extreme. He went through a mental list of his; forest hippies, ocean freaks, ol’-timey anti-Vietnams, anti- establishment, anti-bomb, anti-homophobic, equal-rights loving electric car-driving Australians, seemingly an endless list of people that his father knew through one way or another. He was a bit exhausting. Every few days he would approach with some new hippy to talk about, confused about whether to choose Susan McDuff, the pro-choice campaigner or Lenny Brown, former motorcycle gang head-turned politician. Eventually I had to put my foot down and tell him we MUST choose.
A week after the assignment was handed out, we were at his dad’s apartment, with me sitting on the edge of their sofa precariously, trying not to spill any of my soda, with his dad (“Call me Alan”)’s folk record from the seventies blaring. Rob refused to turn the volume control down below 13. I wanted to impress this guy, so I was nodding along like I thought music fans did, every now and again anxiously looking over at him sitting cross-legged on the floor amongst a mess of paper. His tongue was poking out as he carefully cut out, arranged and re-arranged newspaper clippings onto our presentation board. “Now all we need is our interview!” he said brightly.
His father came in and turned a song up. A big, booming, male voice spoke over the stereo.
“Australia’s answer to Bob Dylan” Alan grinned.
“That’s it!” yelped Rob suddenly. “We could interview Kev!”
“Kev?” I turned to Rob. He ignored me.
“I don’t know, kid…I know him, but, he’s a busy man. I’m not sure he’d be willing to help a high school project.” He pushed his full-moon glasses up his nose as he peered down at Rob.
“I’ll do the dishes for a week!” Rob spluttered.
Rob’s dad grinned, despite himself. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Rob whooped.
So, that’s how I found myself, a week later, travelling in a car driven by Rob’s dad, to meet Kev Carmody. Rob had gotten sick over the week so there he was, unrepentantly stuck in bed with strict instructions from his dad to “REST!”, and snotty tissues surrounding him. Just before we left, Rob sniffily offered up his research notes and questions while showing a sudden interest in the pot plant beside his bed. He played with it as he mumbled something akin to “Have a good day” as he played with it. I beamed. “You too! I mean….as much as you can! Yeah…” Alan coughed in the hallway.
It was the heat of summer, and the countryside flowing past the open windows of the 4-wheel drive seemed to match my mood. The drier and drier the land outside got, the drier my mouth got. Soon I could hardly see any sprinkle-enhanced green and blotched sidewalks, just various shades of yellow-green and iridescent blue of the sky. Judging by the dust that was being picked up and thrown into the wind by the tyres, the ground was getting redder, too. I put my hand out of the window, riding the wind, but stopped. What a cliché! “This will certainly get you in the mood to talk to talk to Kev!” Alan yelled over the sound of the motor. I just laughed. Man, I felt sick.
We arrived, bumping along towards what looked like a collection of shacks. “Kev Carmody lives here?” I exclaimed “This looks like no place for a rock star.” “Kev Carmody is not a rock star.” Alan opened my door “He’s a folk singer”. I jumped out from the high seat to the dirty ground. A red mist came up to my ankles. “Ugh” I said involuntarily “This isn’t a good start.” A round-faced Aboriginal man with a red headband tied around his head approached us. “Hi, I’m Kev” he said to me, shaking Alan’s hand and then mine. “Now, let’s get cracking, shall we?” he said, a grin splitting across his face. “We can head over to the Inn”. I followed in his footsteps as Alan fell into step beside him, two old friends catching up on shared conquests. I was amazed at Kev’s clothes; they looked like real, old pioneering clothes, but actually used, as opposed to those stiffly starched collars of the British you saw in black and white photos.
We pulled up pockmarked chairs in the wood-paneled inn –it reminded me of a saloon. I half expected Clint Eastwood to arrive, guns blazing.
“Would you like some tea, dear?” Kev asked me
“Do you have Earl Grey?”
“We sure do!” Kev grinned. “Barkeep, an Earl tea and a soda, please” The bartender nodded. “What would you like, Al?” Kev added.
“I’ll get something for myself, you guys have fun…I’ll be over there in the corner if you need me” Alan headed over to the bar and had himself poured a long, cold beer. My eyes followed him.
“Bit of a card, that one.” Kev chuckled. “So! What would to ask me? Ask away” Kev relaxed back into his chair.
I killed time by asking general questions, and sneaking looks at Rob’s painstakingly thought-out queries every now and again. “Where did you grow up?” “When did you decide you want to become a singer?” and, “What, in your opinion, has the most recent economic policies effect been on the sub-standardisation of the Aboriginal race, and the representation of them in today’s media?” I knew I only had half an hour to go before I could, respectfully, call off the interview. The wooded inn was giving me the creeps. Kev, however, wheedled out of me that yes, it was a social justice project my friend and I were working on. “Tell you what, I’ll tell you a story” he said. I looked up, surprised, and made eye contact with him for the longest since I’d got there. His eyes were shining.
“There was a woman who lived in London in the 1780’s. She was 20, so, not much older than you. She was engaged to be married to this guy called Thomas Miller, who, it had to be said, was more of a movement on the part of her parents, than on hers. She loved kids, she wanted to teach, but it was looking like she would just be a wife and mother, and nothing more. She consoled herself by thinking she could teach her kids, behind enough closed doors, mind you. So, she was very keen to get on with this engagement, and get married. But something would set her back several months on this intention. Her husband-to-be, who her parents were so keen to marry her to, as they were a lower-middle working class family, and he was moving up in the ranks,! Well, he made a surprise exclamation to this woman and her family. He had been called up to go to this new land called Australia, with the other Marine Corps officers, to start a new penal colony there.
Well, this woman had no choice but to go, didn’t she? Thomas kept raving about exploration and service to their country, ya de ya de yah, and it kind of infected her. She would repeat a stoic chant many times during the 8 month journey to Australia; exploration, service to country. She was on board with hundreds of convicts; most for what we would now call menial charges, mind. She thought they must be ecstatic to have life sentences or death penalties transferred to seven or fourteen years, and a new country! A new start for them. She had no sense of challenge or opposition to the system, what was the norm. She just accepted it. And Thomas, Thomas could look after her. Well, that was what she was telling the other woman in the free-woman section, how she couldn’t wait to settle down on a nice patch of land with him.
It was a shock to finally arrive in Australia. She had sent 8 months on the ship and she couldn’t imagine life without the rocking seas-they had become a sort of comfort. The first bay they pulled into seemed tantalizingly close, viewed on board the ship, but like a mirage on the horizon, never touched. They soon moved on to another bay, more suitable, farther along the coast, and this one they did disembark at. It soon got the name of Port Jackson, and because of the hustle and bustle of the new settlement, she was in the unique position of being an unmarried woman being put in a house by herself, and having some servants thrown at her. Her husband-to-be stayed in the barracks with the other marines. Waiting to be married, she was cut off, as the other, married, woman put about the rumour that she was a harlot. She grew into a sort of reckless independence; the worst had been said about her already. She started talking to and befriending the servants. The ones that trusted her told her stores of the penal colony; how drastically low on food they actually were, how, if workers choose not to obey orders, they would be put in leg braces or flogged publically. She had seen what the marines called the natives, little brown faces of more curious children appeared sometimes. She had never seen people so dark.
There was a school for children began by one of the priests who had come over from England, and she decided to ask around and see if she could help there. One of her servants told her it was a school for convicts and aboriginals children. Those that wanted to move up in life, they were being brought up as Protestants. In appearance, anyway. That was the whole colony. They were all, on sight, Protestants. She went to this school one day, and met Keith, an aboriginal teacher who had quickly become ingrained to the ways of his colonisers. They started working together, all hours. He was gentle, and kind, to the kids. Soon, she began to adore him, and him her. They had many talks exploring each other’s roots and what they wanted to do. “It’s a new country, we could do anything!” He would always say to her. He never wanted to go back to the old ways. Until that is she went to the school one morning, and saw Keith sitting on the verandah, clutching a bottle of spirits. His right eye was black, and there was blood matted into his hair. Some of the Marine Corps had gotten him blind drunk, and then he set upon him. He stayed there for the day. She asked her fiancé, Thomas about this, and he laughed and said he’d “seen it”. A few weeks later the woman and Keith ran away and settled somewhere remote.”
Kev looked down at the dregs of his soda, and placed the bottle on the table.
“Did that give you enough material for your social justice project?” Kev smiled “I think it’s always good to start local, and know the social justice of the area”
“Wow “I said, staring at him “That woman was so brave…. Who was she?”
“That was my grandmother” Kev said quietly.
Well, my social justice project ended up being different from what I thought. I researched the colonization in Australia aboriginal history, Rob ended up ditching class that day and I learnt the basic chords to play on guitar to the class “Thou Shall Not Steal”.
In 1788 down Sydney Cove
The first boat-people land
Said sorry boys our gain’s your loss
We gonna steal your land
And if you break our new British laws
For sure you’re gonna hang
Or work your life like convicts
With chains on your neck and hands
CHORUS
They taught us
Oh Oh Black woman thou shalt not steal
Oh Oh Black man thou shalt not steal
We’re gonna civilize
Your Black barbaric lives
And teach you how to kneel
But your history couldn’t hide
The genocide
The hypocrisy to us was real
’cause your Jesus said
you’re supposed to give the oppressed
a better deal
We say to you yes whiteman thou shalt not steal
Oh ya our land you’d better heal
Your science and technology Hey you can make a nuclear bomb
Development has increased the size to 3,000,000 megatons
But if you think that’s progress
I suggest your reasoning is unsound
You shoulda found out long ago
You best keep it in the ground
Job and me and Jesus sittin’
Underneath the Indooroopilly bridge
Watchin’ that blazin’ sun go down
Behind the tall tree’d mountain ridge
The land’s our heritage and spirit
Here the rightful culture’s Black
and we sittin’ here just wonderin’
When we get the land back
You talk of conservation
Keep the forest pristine green
Yet in 200 years your materialism
Has stripped the forests clean
A racist’s a contradiction
That’s understood by none
Mostly their left hand hold a bible
Their right hand holds a gun
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