Blood Brothers – From Little Things Big Things Grow

Clip 3: Singing history

Taken from the documentary Blood Brothers – From Little Things Big Things Grow (1993)

Original title classification not known – this clip chosen to be PG

Please be aware that this clip may contain the names, images and voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who may now be deceased.

Curator’s clip description

Carmody is flipping through records. He stops to examine a book. He tells us about the images from the book, of kangaroos and landscape drawn from within white sensibility. He shows us many images of Aboriginal people, and how Aboriginal people were depicted by white historians. This sequence ends with Carmody singing a song based on a saying by his grandfather.

Curator’s notes

Carmody’s music is the continuation of oral culture and the telling and re-telling of story through song. The translation of historical information through song means that what is sometimes complex and confrontational information is beautifully expressed through song. The ability to sing tradition is an ancient one, and one that Carmody does so well.

Romaine Moreton, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

This page is printer friendly

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.