Singer Kamahl reckons with the racism in his past as he turns 87
On the eve of his 87th birthday beloved singer Kamahl says he has confronted a lifetime of hurts – beyond Hey Hey It’s Saturday humiliation – and moved on.
These have been trying times for many of us and it certainly has not been the easiest year for Kamahl. If it were not enough to watch many of his peers, legends of media, music and light entertainment, grow old and die – most recently Bert Newton but also Ernie Sigley, Jeannie Little, Jimmy Hannan, Carmen Duncan and Helen Reddy – there has been the resurfacing of old hurts, and the expectation that he re-examine them through a modern framework. It has all been cause for reflection for the treasured veteran entertainer, who celebrates his 87th birthday on Saturday.
Since he broke through in 1969 with the chart-topping hit Sounds of Goodbye, Kamahl has gone on to become one of our most acclaimed, best-selling and beloved performers, recording more than 30 albums, selling more than 20 million worldwide and collecting dozens of gold and platinum records.
For me, the son of Indian immigrants, growing up in the 1970s and ’80s when the only people of colour on shows such as Mind Your Language, Love Thy Neighbour, and The Black and White Minstrel Show were grotesque caricatures to be ridiculed and disdained, Kamahl was an inspiration. Somehow, he also felt like a part of the family. After my father left my mother, she would listen to Treat Her Like a Lady over and over.
When I was asked to interview this living legend for Diversity Arts Australia’s Pacesetters Creative Archives, I jumped at the chance. And when I told my 80-year-old mum I was meeting him, she screamed like a teenager.
The Pacesetters Creative Archives chronicle groundbreaking, culturally diverse arts practitioners whose creative journey and artistic practice have made significant contributions to the arts in Australia, and there are few who have achieved as much as Kamahl.
But it has never been easy. He encountered casual racism in his first days in Australia, and even after becoming an Australian superstar he was humiliated more than once on the top-rating Hey Hey It’s Saturday in the ’80s. We were all reminded of it this year when Hey Hey celebrated its 50th anniversary with a reunion, and producer and presenter Daryl Somers lamented in the run-up in March that “you probably could not get away with half the stuff you could on Hey Hey now because of political correctness and cancel culture”.
In response, Twitter user John Patterson posted a clip of every time Kamahl was racially abused on the show. As SBS newsreader Janice Petersen observed, watching that “clip of lowlights … unleashed a visceral body memory. My heart raced, heat rose through my body and there was an almighty throbbing in my head. It’s the exact feeling I felt as a kid watching this rot. If racism had a feeling, this was it.”
I know that feeling. Growing up in the assimilationist, post-White Australia policy ’80s, I was always taunted with two catchphrases that still make me burn with anger and shame.
One was the brown-faced Peter Sellers’s “Birdie Num Num” from Blake Edwards’s 1968 film The Party; the other, Kamahl’s forlorn plea, after being racially abused again in 1985, “why are people so unkind?” – both with a “comical” wobble of the head to remind me that despite being born here and no matter how hard I tried, I’d never be “Aussie” enough.
Kamahl knows that feeling, too. Born Kandiah Kamalesvaran on November 13, 1934, in Kuala Lumpur, he arrived in Adelaide in April 1953, getting his first break as a singer there in 1958.
“I never thought of myself as Sri Lankan or Malaysian or anything like that,” he says in a series of interviews covering his childhood during the World War II, seeing fighters flying overhead and bombs exploding, and watching Japanese troops marching past.
He recalls a Japanese officer approaching him and putting his hand on his hips. “I saw a flash of silver. I thought he was going to take his sword out,” Kamahl says. But “it was a bar of chocolate. I grabbed it and ran all the way home,” he adds, laughing.
His father, Mayilvaganam, was a chief clerk on the Malayan Railways and the principal of Sangeetha Abivirthi Sabha, a classical Hindu fine arts school. “He had a very raspy voice, but he was very emotional when he sang those old hymns,” Kamahl says.
He maintains that, unlike his father and sister, who also achieved renown in Kuala Lumpur writing classical southern Indian Carnatic hymns, he didn’t have any particular musical gifts.
“I don’t think I learned anything,” he says of his time at the school.
After being fostered to his maternal aunt and uncle (a common tradition among extended Indian families), he was given Hobson’s choice – go abroad to the US, Britain or Australia to study.
At the time, he told the ABC’s Talking Heads program in 2005, “I was worried about America because of the way they were treating the negroes. I thought Australia seemed without any form of prejudice at that time. Little did I know when I came here that the Aborigines were regarded as subhuman.”
Arriving with not enough warm clothes, alone and far from home, and one of only a few Asian students at King’s College (now Pembroke College) brought a stark realisation: “I suddenly became aware of my own ‘blackness’, something I’d never felt back in Malaysia. But here, there were instances where I’d shake someone’s hand and they’d surreptitiously wipe it against their trousers, thinking I had dirtied it.”
He recalls children throwing stones at him, and being nicknamed Persil after the white soap powder. “In Adelaide I was quite isolated,” he says. He threw himself into sport – cricket, hockey, badminton – but did “bugger all” study, even being threatened with deportation.
Nonetheless, his life has been marked by great kindness. “I was extremely lucky to be nurtured in this country despite the hostile, racist element. There were enough people who accepted me.”
This included an Immigration officer who kept “misplacing” deportation files, allowing him to stay, and the University of Adelaide’s registrar enrolling him at the prestigious Elder Conservatorium of Music.
One couple, the Markhams, hosted international students for dinner and singalongs, but he’d sit in the corner, wishing he had the courage to get up and sing.
One song spoke to him: Nat King Cole’s 1948 hit Nature Boy. “It took me some months to learn the song and volunteer to sing it for the Markhams,” he says. When he had finished, somebody said, “Wow, that sounded a little bit like Nat King Cole!”
You can’t help but still see that lonely little boy suddenly aware of his alienness, his blackness:
There was a boy
A very strange enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far, very far
Over land and sea
A little shy and sad of eye
But very wise was he …
Kamahl’s parents didn’t have much regard for Western music. When his mother asked him to sing for her, he says, “I sang something, and she screwed her face up and said, ‘Son, doesn’t it hurt your throat to make noises like that?’ ” Gold records eventually turned her around.
In December 1958 he was singing at a club when a beautiful woman invited him to a party in the Adelaide Hills. Her husband asked him to sing and, as he sang the last note, pressed a 10-pound note into his hand. “It’s like $170 in today’s money, and I would have been lucky to get $2 in those days,” he recalls.
That man was publisher Rupert Murdoch, who scheduled Kamahl to appear on NWS-9’s first broadcast and booked him for a six-week season at Sydney’s Hotel Australia, without his knowledge.
“I thought I’d be a failure,” Kamahl says. “At the end of it, when I said goodbye and thanks to Rupert and his then wife, Pat, he said, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ I said, ‘To Adelaide, of course.’ Rupert would have none of it.” He lived with the family for a few years.
It’s hard to believe given his achievements and the incredible fondness with which he is now regarded by the public (when we walk around his neighbourhood, young and old call out “Kamahl!” and ask for selfies with him) that he regularly has been told he has no talent by industry insiders, including his first manager.
He had to market himself to radio and television, and book himself into venues, including Carnegie Hall and the London Palladium. He organised a concert in 1973 soon after the Sydney Opera House opened and arranged for it to be recorded.
In 1975 he scored a hit with the conservation anthem The Elephant Song, which topped charts in The Netherlands and across Europe. Then his eponymous 1978 album hit No.1 in New Zealand, but at the same time he discovered he had a million-dollar tax debt.
“Financially, I’m hopeless,” he says. “I bought a damn Rolls-Royce in 1977 when I couldn’t afford it …”
He saw the Rolls as confirmation that people like him could be a success. But the Hey Hey It’s Saturday humiliations especially stung, particularly the infamous moment when Kamahl was hit with a white powder puff and announcer John Blackman quipped: “You’re a real white man now, Kamahl, you know that?”
As many immigrants and their children will attest, “I didn’t complain about anything. I didn’t want to be seen as though I couldn’t take a punch, and I took a few punches. I didn’t think it would get quite as bad (as) some incidents were.”
Still, even if some might excuse what happened as “being of its time”, as he rightly points out, “it shouldn’t have happened in the first place”.
His feelings about it are complicated and contradictory: he resents what happened, but then says: “In a way, it’s been a blessing in disguise” – allowing him to talk openly of the humiliation and cruelty. He accepted Somers’s “regret” for any hurt or offence but asked him in an open letter after Hey Hey’s recent 50th anniversary special, “If I had been any other Australian artist about to (perform at Carnegie Hall) would I have received such treatment?”
Still, that racism has been deeply internalised. When he stepped on to the stage for his record-breaking Opera House run in 1975, he remarked to the audience: “I may be black, but my soul is white.” It didn’t go down well, he says.
Even at the moment he describes as the pinnacle of his career, being approached by Prince Harry after performing at the 2018 Invictus Games, he suddenly was struck by the thought that “it would not do for the public to see an English prince to embrace a black man. So, I just stuck out my hand for a handshake.”
Why would he think that? “I am what I am, you know, made up of insecurities and an inferiority complex and all that …”
He has never thought of living other than in Australia, where his two children, Rajan and Rani, from his more than 50-year marriage to Sahodra, followed in his footsteps – Rani enjoying some chart success in the 1990s, and Rajan a successful composer and producer, including for his father. Kamahl is proud of both of them, and especially of Rani’s daughter, Isabel, who is now studying in Singapore.
He seems to have done everything to belong, including truncating his name from Kamalesvaran to Kamal, then changing it to Kamahl after repeatedly being introduced as “Camel”.
He continues to perform at Anzac Day ceremonies, and after reciting the poem The Soul of Australia this year, he recalls how “seeing and feeling how the 3000-strong audience responded … it’s almost like being in love”.
Although he sang Carnatic music to himself when he felt homesick at boarding school, Kamahl says that, after almost 70 years, he has forgotten how to speak his mother tongue. But he hopes to record a Tamil song one day, and when he sings it to me – the tragic Tamil superstar MK Thyagaraja Bhagavathar’s 1941 hit Bhoomiyil Maanida – his usually mellifluous voice, now so vulnerably tremulous, brings me to tears.
How did he go from singing in the dark in a suburban Adelaide home to Carnegie Hall? “It’s persistence, ‘the audacity of hope’ and – uh, I don’t know,” Kamahl says.
“Maybe I wanted some sort of recognition that I was worthy of something, but looking back, every little step amounted to something … I kept trying.
“I mean, I did climb mountains that sometimes were too steep to climb, but I got to the peak in the end, and the view was magnificent.”
Kamahl sold his long-held family home and his beloved Rolls last year, and has plans to auction his prized gold records for his favourite charity, Variety this year. Now, despite a few years out of the limelight, he finds himself more revered and respected than ever.
He has plenty of wisdom to dispense. “I don’t know if anybody wants to follow in my footsteps,” he says. “If anybody finds themselves in the situation that I was in like 60 or so years ago – if they feel discriminated against and they can’t succeed … I’d say, first of all, be honest to yourself, and find if you have anything that you believe in so strongly that you would give your life for it.
“If you’re that determined, that feeling will permeate through your soul and it will be evident to anybody, and I’m sure you’ll find a way one way or another.”
Of his legacy, he says “I have no say in it whatsoever! But I think, at the end of the day, my contribution to this country is to the fellow Asians who came here.”
Although he hopes he’ll have “one last curtain call before the curtain finally falls”, ultimately, as this timeless superstar reflects, echoing the song, Nature Boy, that started him on his serendipitous career, “the greatest thing you ever learn is to love and be loved in return”.
This interview is from Diversity Arts Australia’s Pacesetters Creative Archives project, supported by CreateNSW.
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