Skip to main content
Menu

The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders both past and present.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are warned that this website contains images of deceased persons.

The Gallery’s Acknowledgement of Country, and information on culturally sensitive and restricted content and the use of historic language in the collection can be found here.

Men of High Degree: Kev Carmody (Bundjalung/Lama Lama Peoples)

2023
Brenda L Croft, Prue Hazelgrove (wet plate collodion process technical assistant) and Richard Crampton (printer)

original wet plate collodion process tintype, digital scan to Ultrachrome pigment on paper, edition 1/5 + 3 APs (sheet: 140.0 cm x 111.8 cm)

Acclaimed singer songwriter and activist Kevin Daniel Carmody (Kev Carmody) is a Bundjalung/Lama Lama man born in Cairns in 1946. Growing up on a cattle station on the Darling Downs where his parents worked as drovers, Carmody learnt to ride a horse at four years old. Aged ten, he and his brother were taken from their parents under the assimilation policy as part of the Stolen Generations and sent to a boarding school in Toowoomba. It was after school that Carmody learnt classical guitar, including composition and theory, then enrolling in university at the age of 33 and completing a Bachelor of Arts. Carmody's first album, Pillars of Society (1988), was described as 'arguably the best protest album ever made in Australia'. Another four albums followed, among them Bloodlines (1993), which included Carmody's own rendition of the land rights anthem, 'From Little Things Big Things Grow', which he co-wrote with Paul Kelly and which was added to the National Film and Sound Archive's Sounds of Australia registry in 2010. The song tells the story of the Gurindji community’s Wave Hill Station Walk-Off in 1966 that created history and led to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam handing their land back symbolically. Carmody has received numerous accolades: At the 2005 Deadlys, he received the Jimmy Little Award for his lifetime contribution to music; he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Southern Queensland in 2008, in 2009 he was inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame, in 2019 he received that J.C.Williamson Award (part of the Helpmann Awards) outstanding contribution to the live entertainment and performing Arts Industry. In 2022 a new student accommodation building, Kev Carmody House, was opened at the University of Queensland; he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Queensland in December 2022, the same month and year he was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the Australian National University.

Multidisciplinary Creative Researcher, Brenda L. Croft (born 1964, Boorloo/Perth, WA) is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra Peoples from the Victoria River region in the Northern Territory, and Anglo-Australian/German/Irish/Chinese/Scottish heritage. One of Australia’s most important contemporary artists, her portrait of Kev Carmody is part of an ongoing project to represent and honour important First Nations people begun in the early 1980s. Here the representation begins with the creation of a tintype – a nineteenth century technique for making photographs in which an image appears on thin piece of metal. Croft’s final portrait sees the original tintype enlarged through a digital process in which each sitter is celebrated in a larger-than-life head study. For Croft, size and technique are conceptual, political strategies, in which she and the sitter claim space within a photographic history that has often either marginalised and exploited First Nations sitters or ignored them. Croft has described her portraits as a way of ‘addressing the ongoing invisibility of First Nations People’.

Purchased 2023
© Brenda L Croft/Copyright Agency, 2024

The National Portrait Gallery respects the artistic and intellectual property rights of others. Works of art from the collection are reproduced as per the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). The use of images of works from the collection may be restricted under the Act. Requests for a reproduction of a work of art can be made through a Reproduction request. For further information please contact NPG Copyright.

Artist and subject

Brenda L Croft (age 59 in 2023)

Prue Hazelgrove

Richard Crampton

Kev Carmody (age 77 in 2023)

Subject professions

Performing arts

© National Portrait Gallery 2024
King Edward Terrace, Parkes
Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia

Phone +61 2 6102 7000
ABN: 54 74 277 1196

The National Portrait Gallery acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout Australia and recognises the continuing connection to lands, waters and communities. We pay our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and to Elders past and present. We respectfully advise that this site includes works by, images of, names of, voices of and references to deceased people.

This website comprises and contains copyrighted materials and works. Copyright in all materials and/or works comprising or contained within this website remains with the National Portrait Gallery and other copyright owners as specified.

The National Portrait Gallery respects the artistic and intellectual property rights of others. The use of images of works of art reproduced on this website and all other content may be restricted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). Requests for a reproduction of a work of art or other content can be made through a Reproduction request. For further information please contact NPG Copyright.

The National Portrait Gallery is an Australian Government Agency