Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Kev Carmody, an Indigenous singer and songwriter, explaining how he uses music to tell the missing history of Indigenous Australians. Carmody is shown in a library reflecting on an 'alien’s view’ of Australia, a sketch of the Australian landscape made by an early European settler. Archival photographs of Indigenous people are also shown. The clip includes footage of Carmody and his band performing his song 'Thou shalt not steal’, intercut with footage of Carmody saying that the inspiration for this song came from his grandfather, who told him that the British broke this Christian commandment when they stole the land.

Educational value points

• The clip highlights the work of Kev Carmody, an Indigenous musician and songwriter whose protest songs and lyrical ballads have been described as powerful and moving. His songs reflect a wide variety of musical influences and tend to focus on injustice and hypocrisy, raising issues such as land rights, the environment and Indigenous deaths in custody, but they also celebrate Indigenous Australians. His albums include Pillars of Society (1989), Eulogy (1991), Bloodlines (1993), Images and Illusions (1995), Messages (2000) and Mirrors (2003).

• In the song 'Thou shalt not steal’, Carmody draws attention to the hypocrisy of British settlers who brought Christianity to Indigenous Australians, including the commandment prohibiting theft, and yet took the land that Indigenous people had inhabited for more than 60,000 years. He emphasises the importance of land to Indigenous people ('The land’s our heritage and spirit’) and turns the Christian lesson given to Indigenous people around ('We say to you yes, whiteman, thou shalt not steal’).

• Carmody’s 'singing history’ has its roots in an Indigenous oral storytelling culture. In Indigenous societies songs are used to pass on and maintain Dreaming stories and to explain people’s relationships with each other, with the land and creatures and with ancestral figures. Carmody was inspired by the oral traditions of his Murri mother and Irish grandfather. His music career began at the age of 33 when he went to university and found that he was composing songs instead of writing essays.

• Estimates suggest that prior to the start of British settlement in 1788 there were between 300,000 and 1 million Indigenous people in Australia, who belonged to a number of different language groups. These groups belonged to homelands that, they believed, had been marked out by their spirit ancestors during the Dreamtime (creation time). Unlike European land ownership, ownership of these territories was not defined by fences or title deeds, but by geographic boundaries such as rivers, lakes and mountains.

• The response of early English settlers to Australia was informed by their European sensibility. Depictions by early settlers of the Australian landscape were often inaccurate, particularly their representations of animals not found in Europe. Artists made the landscape look English, partly to make the unknown familiar so as to find a place for themselves within it. This sensibility also influenced settlers’ responses to Indigenous people, who were seen as primitive and uncivilised or as noble savages, and were often objects of curiosity and study (as is shown by the photographs in this clip).

• Kev Carmody is a celebrated Indigenous musician who grew up on a cattle station near Goranba, in the Darling Downs area in Queensland. In 1956, at the age of 10, he was sent to a Christian school that he says was 'little more than an orphanage’ (www.kevcarmody.com.au). His removal and placement in the school was part of a government policy to assimilate Indigenous children, especially those who, like Carmody, were of mixed European and Indigenous descent. Boarders were allowed home twice a year. After leaving school Carmody worked as a farm labourer before taking up music.

Kevin Carmody is being interviewed in an office while looking through a book of drawings and photographs of Australia and Indigenous people by colonial artists.

Kevin Carmody I mean looking at the drawings and that, what they got in here. If that looks like a kangaroo, I could never find one in the wild. They just – their perceptions were just totally alien to this country. Like, that don’t look like a kangaroo. You can see the scrub in the background, but it’s all been cleared, almost like a British park, a British meadow. This book here is the basis of, of, of history. That’s what they based it on, with these misconceptions and preconceptions and Eurocentric values, and that’s the history that we get, comes from this 1844 book and books before that and pictures before that. But it was a, you know, an alien’s view of the reality of this country. But that’s what the history and all that’s based on, I suppose. And the first thing to do was try and get some oral concept then. That’s where the guitar came in for me. I just took the guitar into tutorials and used that as a way of saying, ‘Well, this is what I’m going to present’. She looks like my Auntie Jessie.

Video clip of Thou Shalt Not Steal. Kev Carmody is filmed in a white studio space with a backup singer, a drummer and a bass player.

(singing) 1788 down Sydney Cove, the first boat people land and they said, ‘Sorry, boys, our gains, your loss. We’re gonna to steal your land. And if you break our new British law, for sure, you’re gonna hang. We’ll work your life like our convicts with a chain on your neck and hands.’ And they told us, ‘Whoa, black woman, thou shalt not steal’.

Kevin is being interviewed in a kitchen with his guitar by his side.

Kevin The song Thou Shalt Not Steal came about with the influence of my grandfather.

(singing) ‘Hey, yeah, black man, thou shalt not steal.’

Kevin He said, ‘They came to this country, boy, with these 10 commandments, and they’re 10 of the best principles any society can have.

(singing) ‘We’re going to civilise your black barbaric lives and we’ll teach you how to kneel.’ But your history couldn’t hide the genocide the hypocrisy is what was real.

Kevin He said, ‘But they broke their law. They broke every one of their 10 commandments when they come here, worshipping these gods of greed.

(singing) Oh your Jesus said you’re supposed to give the oppressed a better deal. I say to you, yes, white man, thou shalt not steal.

Kevin In my black way of thinking, that’s exactly what happened – they stole the bloody lot.