Kev Carmody – Pillars of Society (1988).

Kev Carmody didn’t just arrive with Pillars of Society—he kicked down the saloon doors of Australian music and threw a hard glare at the country's collective conscience. Released in 1988, during Australia’s Bicentenary—when the nation was busy patting itself on the back—Carmody delivered a debut album that told a different story. A truer one. One full of guts, grit, poetry, and protest.

If Paul Kelly is the bard of Australian suburbia, Kev Carmody is the bush telegraph—part oral historian, part truth-teller, all heart. Pillars of Society is folk music, yes, but don’t expect any kumbayas around the campfire. This is folk weaponised—Bob Dylan by way of Queensland’s red dirt and razor wire.

The title track, “Pillars of Society,” is a slow-building spoken-word scald that turns up the heat with every verse. Over a sparse acoustic groove, Carmody surgically dismantles the hypocrisy of institutions—government, religion, education—that claim to civilise but, in his experience, colonise. His voice, gravelly and unwavering, is the sound of lived truth. You don't hear this track so much as stand trial for it.

But this isn’t just an angry album. It’s deeply musical, too. “Comrade Jesus Christ” is one of the great forgotten anthems—cheeky, sharp, and subversive. It reimagines Jesus as a socialist revolutionary, sleeping in doorways, preaching love and getting locked up for it. It’s larrikin gospel. Woody Guthrie would’ve grinned.

Carmody draws from a well of styles—folk, reggae, country, blues—all stripped back and barebones, like campfire storytelling with a kick drum heartbeat. Songs like “Elly” and “Thou Shalt Not Steal” (which would later become one of his most enduring tracks) mix narrative and melody so seamlessly you almost miss the weight of the themes: stolen land, cultural erasure, survival.

And survival is the key word here. Carmody, a Murri man who didn’t learn to read or write until his 30s, sings not just from experience, but from resistance. Every lyric is soaked in memory, and every melody feels like it’s been carried in the bones for generations. There’s defiance here, but also beauty. Sorrow, but also sly humour. It’s not didactic—it’s human.

In a musical landscape that often reduces Indigenous voices to tokenistic choruses or symbolic cameos, Pillars of Society stands as a searing, self-made, unapologetic statement. It wasn’t polished for radio. It didn’t chase trends. It didn’t need to. It spoke truth.

Today, the album feels just as relevant—maybe more so. Kev Carmody went on to collaborate with Paul Kelly, Missy Higgins, Dan Sultan, and others on the Cannot Buy My Soul project, but it all started right here. With a guitar, a voice, and the courage to call the empire’s bluff.

A raw, revolutionary masterpiece. Pillars of Society is not just an album—it’s an Australian history lesson most of us never got in school.