Kev Carmody receives Honorary Doctorate

Australian Aboriginal musician Kev Carmody was conferred an Honorary Degree of Doctor during the University's graduation ceremony in Toowoomba on Saturday 3 May 2008.
Mr Carmody also presented the graduation speech and performed "From Little Things, Big Things Grow" during the ceremony.

USQ Chancellor, Bobbie Brazil, said this rare honour is awarded to those who have provided distinguished service to the community and/or the University.

'The case for the Award was founded on the significant contributions that Kev Carmody, Aboriginal singer, songwriter, and raconteur, has made to the Australian community.'

Born in 1946 on a cattle station near Goranba, some 70kms west of Dalby, Kev lived his early childhood with his Irish father and his mother, a Murri woman with kinship ties to the Bundjalung people of northern New South Wales and the Lamalama people of the Gulf Coast region. At the age of ten years, Kev was taken from his parents under the assimilation policy and sent to a Christian school, after which he returned to his rural roots and worked for seventeen years as a country labourer.

'In his early thirties, Kev was given the opportunity to enrol in tertiary study, and chose to attend the then Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education where he completed a Bachelor of Arts degree, with honours,' Chancellor Brazil said.

'His degree allowed him to further his lifelong passion for music, storytelling, and history – interests which Kev credits to his early years spent listening to his grandparents, parents and extended family of Murri aunts, uncles and cousins. He later undertook postgraduate studies and completed a Diploma of Education from the University of Queensland.'

Mr Carmody is singer-songwriter of national and international reknown, and is highly respected as an advocate of Aboriginal Australia's oral tradition of teaching and learning through storytelling.

The enormous success of his albums Pillars of Society, Eulogy (for a black man) and Bloodlines have confirmed him as one of the most respected singer-songwriters in the country.

With lyrics that reflect on ecology, politics, history, philosophy, theology, ideology, community and cultural development, his music is described by critics as powerful and adventurous.

Mr Carmody has received many awards, including the Country Music Association of Australia Heritage Award for the joint Paul Kelly/Kev Carmody composition "From Little Things, Big Things Grow", awarded in 1994. With two (2) other artists, he received, in 2001, the Australian Film Industry's Open Craft Award in a Non-Feature Film for an Original Score, and at the 2005 Deadly Awards, received the Jimmy Little Lifetime Achievement in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Music Award.