Kev Carmody’s song From Little Things Big Things Grow still resonates in a new era of protest
Jimmy Barnes, Kasey Chambers, Electric Fields, Mo’Ju, Trials, Birdz and more Australian music stars have added their voice to Kev Carmody’s powerful new album.
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If you start singing “From little things” in that familiar folky schoolyard melody, chances are someone will answer with “big things grow”.
The Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody song has made its indelible stamp on the Australian songbook since it was written in 1991, as instantly recognisable as You’re The Voice, Down Under or Beds Are Burning.
A stunning new version of From Little Things Big Things Grow, recorded by Indigenous Australian electronic duo Electric Fields for the 2020 reissue of the Carmody tribute album Cannot Buy My Soul, has thrust the song back into the spotlight.
Carmody wrote the song in a couple of hours with his mate Kelly, sitting around a campfire near Lake Wivenhoe outside of Brisbane, the pair yarning about the historic Gurindji strike when stockman Vincent Lingiari led a walk off from the Wave Hill cattle station in Northern Territory.
The protest folk song’s 11 verses tell the story of Lingiari’s fight for better pay and conditions from the British company Vestey Group, which ultimately became a nine-year battle for land rights.
The strike ended in 1975 when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam brokered legislation to return traditional land back to the Gurindji owners, pouring a handful of dirt through Lingiari’s hands as a symbolic gesture of the historic moment.
Almost three decades after the song was first released on Kelly’s 1991 Comedy album – Carmody would include his version on his 1993 record Bloodlines – the Indigenous poet and musician points to the song’s relevance in the wake of the destruction of the sacred 46,000-years-old Juukan Gorge rock shelters in WA’s Pilbara region by Rio Tinto.
While the company’s executives were stripped of their multimillion-dollar bonuses this week for blowing up the culturally significant caves – among the oldest in Australia – Carmody said From Little Things should soundtrack a new wave of shareholder protests to prevent future desecration of sacred sites.
“It was older than Notre Dame, older than St Peter’s (Basilica), it’s just appalling. And they only made $135 million out of that and it’s totally destroyed a place of spiritual connection with Earth,” Carmody said.
“We’ve got to get onto the damn Rio Tinto board when they have their annual general meeting, sit in the front row with our 10 shares in this organisation and ask them to explain what happened up there that day.
“And you have to make recompense somehow. The last thing you would want is money because that’s the bloody reason they blew it up. Stuff that, we’ve got to have some bended knee business.”
Kelly curated the original Cannot Buy My Soul compilation released in 2007 with The Waifs recording From Little Things alongside Bernard Fanning, Missy Higgins, John Butler and Archie Roach putting their spin on other Carmody songs.
The 2020 reissue, steered by Kelly’s filmmaker partner Sian Darling, adds interpretations by Kasey Chambers and Jimmy Barnes (Black Bess), Courtney Barnett (Just For You), Kate Miller-Heidke (Blood Red Rose) and emerging artists Mo’Ju, Trials, Birdz and Alice Skye.
Electric Fields were joined by Higgins, Butler and Jessica Mauboy to perform From Little Things on pandemic music TV show The Sound last Sunday, on the 50th anniversary of the Gurindji strike.
That performance has prompted a spike in its popularity – Paul Kelly’s version alone has more than 10 million streams and views with other live and recorded versions, including his and Carmody’s stirring version at Gough Whitlam’s memorial service in 2014, also generating millions of plays.
Carmody, who completed his university degrees, including a PHD in history, by playing the acoustic guitar as he presented his research in tutorials, said the generational refresh of his songs mirrored the Indigenous oral traditions of passing on stories and culture.
His songs have featured on high school curriculums in the past two decades and the 73-year-old songwriter said he felt encouraged young people would maintain the momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement advocating for justice for Indigenous deaths in custody.
“It is so positive. The younger generation using their mode of music, rap, hip hop, whatever, put their own words to it and it’s just part of the old oral tradition I was brought up in,” he said.
“I suppose we’ve got to start in kindergarten. There is actually stuff starting to happen now in education. The younger ones are more aware of (Indigenous history) than their parents sometimes.”
EMI Australia managing director John O’Donnell, who has steered the release of Cannot Buy My Soul 2020, said Carmody’s songs about the Indigenous experience are “like the little engine that could.”
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“We want to keep the idea of oral storytelling going. The album wasn’t available on vinyl in 2007, so we have fixed that, and the songs weren’t in the best of shape on streaming and digital services – it was tough to search for them,” he said.
“But the fact the Stolen Generation is something that happened in my lifetime and black deaths in custody are still very present in this country says to us it is never a bad idea to put focus on the songs of Kev Carmody.
“People have grown up with From Little Things now, singing it at festivals, hearing it on television, studying it at school and it has become part of the Australian vernacular.”
Carmody will be in focus at next year’s Bluesfest – which also happens to feature some of his Cannot Buy My Soul collaborators on its lineup – and is quietly chipping away at new songs at his bush studio in Queensland.
“To me, I always found the beauty of sound, especially with the six-string guitar, is food for the spirit,” he said.
“If you’ve had a really bad day and things aren’t going real good, you sit down and go into this other world that is the sound of the solar wind, the sound of the wind in the trees, water on the rocks and the moon rising.
“It’s good for the soul.”
Cannot Buy My Soul 2020 is out now.
Here’s some anthems which shine a spotlight on Indigenous history and culture.
1. Took The Children Away, Archie Roach
2. My Island Home, Christine Anu
3. January 26, A.B. Original
4. Native Tongue, Mo’Ju
5. Treaty, Yothu Yindi
6. Beds Are Burning, Midnight Oil
7. Better in Blak, Thelma Plum
8. Blackfella/Whitefella, Warumpi Band
9. The Children Came Back, Briggs feat. Gurrumul and Dewayne Everettsmith
10. Twisting Words, Miiesha