Australian songwriting legend Kev Carmody has shared fascinating details of his secret childhood and eventual discovery by the authorities, all of which occurred long before he ever uttered the phrase "from little things, big things grow".
The 76-year-old giant of the Australian music scene has become one of the biggest names in the Aboriginal rights protest movement, instantly recognisable by his unruly grey hair, red-cloth headband and distinctive voice.
His early life as part of the Stolen Generation is well-documented, but the formative years leading up to his forced removal from his parents are lesser known.
Carmody's story starts in 1946 when he was born in Cairns, the son of second-generation Irish-Australian Francis John "Jack" Carmody and an Aboriginal woman named Bonny.
Even the location of his birth was remarkable for the times.
"Mum and Dad couldn't get married. It was illegal for an Indigenous person to get married to a non-Indigenous person," Carmody says.
"So Mum and Dad went to Cairns because the rules were a lot slacker there. There were a lot of migrants coming in after the second world war: the Maltese and the Yugoslavs and the Italians and the Greeks … and Thursday Island people.
"[They were] all working around the cane area and it was sort of overlooked, in a sense.
A boy kept under wraps
A hospital birth for a mixed-race child was unthinkable in most areas of post-war Australia, but Far North Queensland was a different sort of beast.
Carmody spent four years in Cairns before his parents packed up and moved back to southern Queensland so his father could work on a cattle station near Tara, about 200 kilometres west of Brisbane.
In the 1930s, the family lived in a dirt-floor hut "up in the scrub" that his dad had built by a creek.
Carmody said his father had been a member of the red beret parachute commando unit in World War II and "buggered up his back" during training at Mareeba.
He went by the nickname of Bull.
"He was a very, very fair man, but if you wanted to knuckle up to him, you'd want to know what you were doing," Carmody says.
The young boy's entire existence had to be kept under wraps to avoid discovery from authorities, and the whole family was in on it.
"Mum and Dad and the family, and Granny and everybody, they hid us out," Carmody explains.
"They hid us, or me at least, for 10 years — and my brother for six-and-a-half."
Authorities swoop
The cat-and-mouse routine came to a crashing halt when a police sergeant and a Catholic priest turned up at the family's home.
His parents were given two options. They could send him and his brother Laurie to a Christian facility in Toowoomba.
The other alternative was to ship the boys and their mother on a one-way ticket to Palm Island, off Queensland's coast.
They chose the first option.
"They put us in this institution. It was the old army barracks that these nuns had taken over on about 90 hectares," Carmody says.
"They ran a dairy and they ran a big chook run.
Carmody and his classmates would wash up in the dairy every morning then hightail it to the chook run to feed about 300 chickens.
Afternoons were spent collecting eggs, hauling in coal for the kitchen stoves and buttering bread for the nuns.
The bush kids were also tasked with harvesting sorghum for fodder, with the bigger lads up front swinging reaping hooks and the younger ones following behind with lengths of string to tie the stems into bundles.
Those bundles were then thrown into a trailer behind a tractor and taken to feed the cows.
The best of a bad situation
Carmody says he and his brother were fortunate, in a sense, because they were allowed to visit their parents twice a year, including at Christmas.
He also felt grateful that his parents managed to conceal him for so long.
"That's a huge part of your being. If you were taken away as a little baby — who's my mob, or where are my mob?" he says.
"In that sense, we were fortunate.
"We knew Granny and Mum. They were the Bundjalung country, which is Lismore, Ballina, Byron Bay, all that area [in northern NSW], Baryulgil and Kyogle and Casino.
"Grandfather came from Lama Lama country, which was just up at Lakefield National Park.
"So we had a sense of who we were. But it's the ones that were taken away, [who are] in some sense even now trying to find their history."
Carmody's life back on the land
The ARIA Hall of Fame entrant and Golden Guitar winner spent five years at the Toowoomba facility before returning to work with his dad on droving camps at age 15.
The family had a single bank account.
"We did contract mustering. We did contract branding. We did fencing," Carmody says.
"It was hard yakka, but at least we could make a living … you could be working as a wool presser or you could be working as a cane cutter, stick-picking or ringbarking or whatever.
The family's visits to town were limited to when there was a job or for groceries, although for the most part they lived off the land.
In town, the outbursts of derogatory racial slurs hurled by locals at the young Carmody meant he always knew he was different.
"It was about keeping you in a box," he says.
Carmody remembers vividly when the Australian parliament passed an act to give all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the right to enrol and vote in federal elections.
The 1967 referendum, which gave Indigenous Australians the right to citizenship, is also imprinted in his memory.
"I remember Dad saying to Mum, 'Now you can vote' … and Mum saying, 'Well, what does that mean?'"
A musical legend comes to life
An early childhood in hiding, being ripped away from his parents, and a life working the land all helped inspire one of Australia's most beloved and powerful songs.
Carmody and celebrated singer-songwriter Paul Kelly co-wrote From Little Things Big Things Grow while sitting around a campfire at Wivenhoe Dam, east of Toowoomba.
It told the story of the Gurindji strike in 1966, also known as the Wave Hill Walk-off, when 200 Aboriginal stockmen, domestic workers and their families went on strike in the Northern Territory, led by activist Vincent Lingiari.
"After the feed one night with the fire going, I said, 'This is a pretty boring chord progression, but it'd be good to tell a story on'," Carmody says.
"And [Kelly] said, 'Well, what do you think it should be about?'
"He had this idea of a personal relationship, you know between you and me. We've had this little small thing in this relationship that turned into a big love thing.
"The input that Dexter Daniels had, the input that Brian Manning had, the input that the unions had, and then the input of the Australian people — and of course the change of government.
"Within one hour, the basis was there … the actual writing of the thing didn't take very long at all, because the story was already there.
"It was just a matter of putting it into lyrics."
Sharing history through lyrics
Carmody has attained degrees in arts and education, and this year the new Kev Carmody House student accommodation was named in his honour at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.
Not bad for someone who did not learn to read until he was 11.
"I was taught in an oral way of how to put things into people's heads so they stuck," Carmody says.
"That's why lyrics in songs, I find that fairly easy to put the words and the ideas in, because I come from that oral history background.
"They want me to put my stuff into the Queensland university when I die, but the thing is, it's all in my head."
He's not done yet, but Carmody is happy to take a back seat and support a new wave of young Indigenous artists as they fight for rights and recognition, generally under the genre of hip-hop.
He says there is still much more to do before the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians was bridged, and called on Queensland to follow the lead of several other states to implement a redress scheme for the Stolen Generations.
Achieving constitutional recognition for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is also squarely on his hit list.
"It's part of the truth-telling," Carmody says.
"It's got to be something … us here. We're still just on the bloody outside looking in."
