By Ignatius Kim
I recall being thunderstruck upon first hearing Kev Carmody's debut single, "Pillars of Society", in the summer of 1990. In fact, I could tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing. With a moving power, it expressed everything I felt at that time — the fury, the sadness, the contempt for the status quo. Everyone has such a song, one that articulates a certain period in one's life. For me, "Pillars of Society" was it. I'd found my anthem.
Yes, I'm tempted to gush when it comes to Kev Carmody.
But, he tells me wryly, "I'm too old for that. Anyway, you've got to look at where the songs are coming from. It's not just this one person called Kev Carmody. I express things that are beyond me."
Ahhh, such earthy modesty. Indeed, this man is no Morrissey.
The wellspring of Carmody's music is the richness of social history, the stories of the exploited and dispossessed in both their ordeals and their struggles.
It's a powerful muse. With much animation, he fires up about the reclamation of Wattie Creek by Gurindji drovers which sparked the land rights movement.
"That was a very symbolic event. I remember hearing about it in the mid-'60s in the bush when we were droving. They stayed out for eight years — the longest strike in Australian history. The government tried to starve them out, and the newspapers were painting it as a communist-inspired black uprising. But they won and the land rights movement really took off."
It is warmly and movingly recounted in the ballad, "From Little Things Big Things Grow", off his latest album, Bloodlines. Carmody the historian really knows where the heart of a tale lies.
Although it's doing better than the first two, Bloodlines still hasn't gone beyond critical acclaim.
"The people we appeal to, who're interested in what we're doing, are like us — poor. We're not in the Barnesy league yet because in mainstream music there's this structural block against what's being said.
"Black music in this country or music that's saying anything contrary to their consumer society just won't get airplay. For example, if women want to have their say and they don't fit into a Cleo-type image, then they won't get airplay."
Carmody has nothing but contempt for the corporate media. "If you look at the mainstream media they spend all their bloody time lying to people, telling them half truths.
"In 1984 George Orwell reckoned that Big Brother was going to get us to the point where we're just in a room with TV cameras in the corner taking information out.
"But he got it arse over head because we've got this thing in the corner that's beaming information in and people think they're free. It's the opposite way, but it's more effective.
"People imprison themselves within their own bloody intellect because that's the only input they're getting."
At the moment it's nowhere better demonstrated than in the coverage of the Mabo decision and its implications. With publications like Business Review Weekly running the front-page headline, "Aboriginal Takeover", last August, one wonders where all the misunderstanding and hostility come from. In an interview last month, the Koori actor Lisa Kinchela spoke of Koori children she knew getting beaten up at school by white kids accusing them of trying to steal their houses.
Says Carmody: "Just how the Mabo issue is presented on TV, you can see where the bias is. Under the guise of objectivity they're anti-Mabo. The terminology is like 'huge chunks of land', 'it's tying up billions of dollars'.
"The newspapers say 'Black Grab for Land', but they don't say 'Western Mining Grab for Land', do they?
"The only backyard it's going to threaten is the mining backyard. Up there around Mt Isa they've got a place bigger than France that they actually term a mining province; it's like a separate part of Australia. But they have that tremendous economic power and media manipulation that they can make a big noise.
"They've got more rights than anyone else. Even on freehold land, if they found oil under your house, they can drill straight through the centre of it as long as they pay you compensation. They don't have to tell you they're on the place at all."
And on the Year for the World's Indigenous Peoples?
"Well, if you look at the gamut of human evolution which is what, 2 million years, I suppose the indigenous people have got one year out of 2 million. Why isn't it every year? For all people?
"It's got to get to the point where we don't have to have these years, where every year's a year of justice."
He starts to ascend on a chuckle: "When are we going to have a year for justice? First of all, we ban the US, ban the bloody stock exchanges for 12 months." He ends on mirthful laughter: "Then we'll have justice!"
But Carmody is also a man of faith.
"The point is that ordinary people can do a massive amount. Their potential power is there, but all the time they're being told by the dominant mob in this society that they're powerless. But there's heaps and heaps of concerned people if you look at the broad spectrum of the social movements. It's just up to us to network our common concerns — OK, we're going to have a few blues along the way, but if we network our common concerns you're looking at a mass of people."