Kev Carmody - Early Years

Early Years

Kev Carmody was born in 1946 in Cairns, Queensland. His father was a second-generation Irish descendant, his mother an Indigenous Australian of the Murri people. His younger brother, Laurie, was born three and a half years later. His family moved to southern Queensland in early 1950, and he grew up on a cattle station near Goranba, 70 km west of Dalby in the Darling Downs area of south eastern Queensland. His parents worked as drovers, moving cattle along stock routes. At ten years of age, Carmody and his brother were taken from their parents under the assimilation policy as part of the Stolen Generations and sent to a Christian school in Toowoomba. After schooling, he returned to his rural roots and worked for seventeen years as a country labourer, including droving, shearing, bag lumping, wool pressing and welding.

In 1967 he married Helen, with whom he has three sons; they later divorced but remain "good mates". In 1978, at the age of 33, Carmody enrolled in university, Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education.

At the night time I was always just interested in music, so I started to study music (by himself) and got to a standard, when I moved to Toowoomba and got a proper music teacher. And she said to me, ‘you know, you're miles ahead of the standard they’d require to get into the music course at the University of Southern Queensland. —Kev Carmody

Due to his limited schooling, Carmody’s reading and writing skills were not up to required university standard. Undeterred, he suggested to the history tutor that until his writing was suitable he would present his research in a musical format accompanied by guitar. Whilst this was a novel approach at university, it was in line with the far older indigenous tradition of oral history. Although Carmody had extensive historical knowledge, learnt by oral traditions, much of it could not be found in library history books and was attributed to 'unpublished works'. Carmody completed his Bachelor of Arts degree, then postgraduate studies and a Diploma of Education at the University of Queensland, followed by commencing a PhD in History, on the Darling Downs 1830–1860.

I was supposed to be studying history and music, but I'd be in the library with books on everything, geology, theorems of thermodynamics. I wished I'd had the time to take every course. —Kev Carmody

Whilst at university, Carmody had used music as a means of implementing oral history in tutorials, which led to his later career.