Rebel child raps a career in music

DETERMINATION and talent have enabled Caleb Vercher to restart his education. A year ago he couldn't play an instrument.

CALEB Vercher's determination is a quality honed during troubled teenage years, and one that proved greatly to his advantage when he auditioned for a place at the University of Adelaide's Centre for Aboriginal Studies of Music. But not first time around.

"I failed the first time I auditioned, if you can believe it," Vercher says during a break from his first-year exams for the three-year associate diploma.

He investigated joining the army, but thought he would give the audition another try. It was just as well that on the big day one of the examiners overheard him rehearsing, because when he began performing, he lost his voice midway through the 3 1/2-minute rap piece.

"I was trying my hardest, in my head I was saying, 'You are not giving up', so I kept going," Vercher says. "One of the teachers said I showed good determination."

Vercher was made a ward of the state government -- known as entering the guardianship of the minister -- when he was 11.

"I was a rebel child and eventually my mother had enough of me and put me in foster care."

He moved around a lot, through foster homes and hotels, was on the streets for a while and then, he says, was "couch surfing" at the houses of friends and acquaintances.

Formal education was also an intermittent, patchy affair and included being expelled from one high school and a stint at a sports training academy.

Eventually, Families SA, through its school retention program, began supporting his musical aspirations and organised recording sessions for him to produce the CDs that helped win him a place in the University of Adelaide program.

"I wasn't a musical genius at all," he says, although he loved rapping. A year ago he couldn't play an instrument, but now he specialises in keyboards.

"I am trying to become a rapper or a teacher of music or something like that, apart from it being something in music I am not entirely sure.

"The main thing is I guess that I have started doing my musical training and I can use all that knowledge."

Vercher plans to go on to a bachelor's course in music when his associate diploma is complete.