The August pick for our Record of the Month Club is really special. Hailing from northwestern Australia, Aboriginal Australian artist, Kankawa Nagarra (Olive Knight) is a beloved Walmatjarri Elder, teacher, environmental activist, and musician. Her record, coming August 23 via Mississippi Records, is full of emotional realness, both tender and sincere. We selected her record without knowing much about her, purely based on the songs, but then it turns out she’s a huge fan of Mississippi Blues. The hill-country stylings of Jessie Mae Hemphill is her favorite! (What a coincidence!)
Club Members will be getting copy of the LP pressed on limited, red vinyl. The record will ship out in late August. Sign up asap to get a copy!
“There’s another ear that’s located within the spirit, in my culture. We hear the real story with this other ear, and what I’m trying to do is get this thing across to a wider audience, and let them know that once upon a time, even the Western culture had this, because they were Indigenous once. So they too, heard the story from their heart.” –Kankawa Nagarra
From Mississippi Records:
Aboriginal Australian blues, country, and gospel by the great Kankawa Nagarra, Queen of the Bandaral Ngadu Delta.
These intimate recordings introduce the world outside Australia to Kankawa Nagarra, a beloved Walmatjarri Elder, teacher, human rights advocate, and environmental activist.
Born in the traditional lands of the Gooniyandi and Walmatjarri peoples of North Western Australia, Kankawa grew up with the tribal songs at cultural ceremonies. When she was taken from her family to the mission, she was taught hymns and Gospel songs with the choir. On the pastoral lease where she was sent to work, Country music was everywhere. She first heard rock and roll on the station gramophone. But it wasn’t until many years later her musical journey truly began, when she stopped to listen to a busker outside a shop in Derby, Western Australia. It was the first time she’d heard the blues, and it awakened something in her. Through it, she found a medium to express all her thoughts and feelings, and it inspired her to turn these into songs. The empathy of her message extends from those she sees struggling around her to the entire planet being ravaged for profit.
These twelve tracks, recorded live near her home of Wangkatjungka, WA, offer a cross-section of Kankawa’s entire musical experience – shifting gracefully between musical styles, languages, and moods, backed by the buzz of night bugs and call of daytime birds. In turns humorous, warm, and real about the hardships of life and the pillage of the land she holds dear, the record is the closest thing you can get to spending time with the great Kankawa herself.
We are extremely grateful to release this record alongside Flippin Yeah Records and in collaboration with Kankawa Nagarra. High-quality vinyl comes with a four-page booklet featuring translations, stories, and track notes by the artist.
Enjoy this interview with Kankawa Nagarra:
Wirlmarni, a co-release with Flippin’ Yeah Records, is Nagarra’s first release in the US. To anticipate and celebrate the album, out on August 23, 2024, Mississippi Records’ own María Barrios talked with Kankawa, who answered some questions about her community, beliefs, and what makes her music special.
Maria Barrios: Hi Olive, how’s your day going? Can you tell me about the place where you are at?
Kankawa Nagarra (Olive Knight): It’s the morning here and I’ve traveled from my desert home, my community. It’s on the edge of the desert, about a five-hour trip to the town of Broome [a beach town in Western Australia]. So I’m near the sea at the moment, doing a couple of gigs with another musician.
MB: Do you like collaborating and playing with other people? Do you improvise, or do you rehearse your songs?
KN: I love playing and collaborating with other people. I love getting crowd participation, more or less singing along with it because I write songs in my traditional language—and a couple of other languages—as well as English.
MB: I did read that that you speak a variety of languages. Where did you pick those languages?
KN: Only my area alone has all these different languages. The language that I was born into was one language, and then another language that I learned through my grandmother, and then I have my grandfather’s language, as well as introduced Creole that the settlers brought in.
MB: When was that?
KN: Well, the settlers came and they were mainly centered around setting up pastoral leases, you know, for their cattle and the parcel beef industry. And they came from the main areas such as Queensland. When they settled in Australia, they settled in the main cities and started these cities, like the eastern states and Perth in our area. But many of them ventured out to the remote parts of the country and wanted to find the areas where they could settle with their parcel leases in fertile land. They found the rivers in the north where I am, and the climate was okay. So they mainly came from elsewhere. Previously, people have come to Australia from way overseas, mainly England, and then settled and created these cities.
MB: Is that how you picked on gospel and blues and rock and roll music?
KN: Well, look, when I was a child, I was removed from my parents by missionaries and placed in a mission where I learned gospel. I sang gospel, and I sang in a choir, mainly all gospel. And then I sort of started venturing out and started thinking, “I’ve got to find myself. I need to find more ways of expressing myself and ‘getting’ music, and exploring the different avenues of it.”
So I started listening to rock and roll on the radio and heard mainly rock and roll like your American Buddy Holly and all of those sorts of people. I started mimicking Buddy Holly [laughs] and a few other rock and roll greats, then listened. Then, afterward, I thought, “No, this is not me. I think I’ve got a different taste.” So I went into the blues and started listening to, my first inspiration was Jessie Mae Hemphill. You know about these artists, they were great in their time, and then Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Big Bill Broonzy and all of those. So I thought “These are me!” So I need to explore more of them. You know?
MB: Why did you feel a connection with them?
KN: Within my tribal existence, I’m a cultural person. I’m an Indigenous Australian and my culture and my cultural existence have been ingrained in me from when I was a child. And the music that was ingrained in me was the type of music that the blues, more or less related to. It was consistent and repetitive. The continual repetitiveness of the beats of whatever instruments we used—like a wooden thing calling another—these instruments were consistent, you know, they had the same beat. And when I heard the blues, well, that consistency follows the same line as my indigenous culture.
MB: It’s hard to think about you being removed from your parents. How and when did that end? When were you able to go back to your family?
KN: It ended in the late 50s. I was then returned to my parents because the policies of the country had changed towards Indigenous people. They couldn’t keep us or remove us anymore, although it happened from the 1930s to the 40s and right up until the 50s when people were then released back to their own people and their own culture and family.
MB: Aside from being returned, was there ever any justice, or does that still need to happen, an actual acknowledgment of those crimes?
KN: Acknowledgment in this country hasn’t been so thought of. It’s not been seriously thought of because there are still discrepancies within this country where people are listening to our stories. There have been attempts made where the older generations were acknowledged, just recently, and that’s including me. There was a report made by the government to expose what happened, to expose what happened to us during that time.
There has been an apology from one government group, and that was the Labor Party. At the moment, we are run by a sympathetic government here, which acknowledges a lot of Indigenous issues. But then there’s the group on the right who practically condemns all of those moves, and says “Why? Why should these people remember the past, or do anything with the past? Let’s move on.” But a lot of the past hasn’t been exposed properly, and had the stories have been told properly, then we wouldn’t have had the problem with the recent referendum that occurred here. [Nagarra is referring to the “Voice to Parliament,” a proposed law to alter the Constitution to recognize the First Peoples of Australia. This referendum was turned down by 61% of Australians, who voted against it]
MB: Do you think your music preserves the stories of your people?
KN: A lot of the songs that I write have to do with our present problems, where we’ve been marginalized by the wider society. There’s a song called “Prison Walls” and that’s talking about going to be imprisoned and then marginalized. So the prison in “Prison Walls” speaks about being imprisoned within society, physically as well as mentally. So it sort of has that hidden story that hasn’t been told. And the first line goes “Try to break these prison walls / Try to break those chains.” It’s more or less trying to break the chains, saying “How I’m so crippled with these chains,” you know? And I need to tell the world that these chains still exist.
MB: What about “Canning Basin Blues”?
KN: I’m an environmentalist. There are the wealthy who are coming to mine the country and “Canning Basin Blues” is an ode to the area where I live, the Canning Basin. When the mining comes in it’s gonna disrupt the land and disrupt our cultural stories and cultural beings.
MB: Browsing for photos and seeing more of the place where you live, I marveled at the natural beauty of the place. I felt very ignorant! I had no idea how beautiful it was, it looked otherworldly. I was wondering how that natural beauty influences your songs, if at all.
KN: Yes, the natural beauty influences a lot of my songs. I sing about all sorts of things around me. In my Indigenous culture, we have two components, and I want to try and teach the wider world about these two components. There’s one called “listening from the head,” and then there’s another one, which we call “the ears of the heart.”
There’s another ear that’s located within the spirit, in my culture. We hear the real story with this other ear, and what I’m trying to do is get this thing across to a wider audience, and let them know that once upon a time, even the Western culture had this, because they were Indigenous once. So they too, heard the story from their heart.
They heard the environment. The wind, for instance, told them a story. The birds out there, the insects and all that. So my inspiration comes from those things. By hearing the wind, and the birds singing, and knowing my connection with them—there was a cultural connection for me from the beginning. I’m living in the environment where my songs are inspired, you know? I listen to the wind, the rain, and the seasons.
MB: What teaching do you think is important for people to know now?
KN: The only thing I can suggest to the world, is find yourself. Find who you are, find your spirit being. Where did you exist once upon a time? Did you exist in the knowledge of who you were when you were connected with the environment around you? Before the clutter came, before all these other things came in and started to drown you out and bring you to a place of mental, physical, and spiritual overload? So try to offload the overload, and begin to find yourself within the spiritual you once were before the overload. Before the so-called economy, the media, and all of this stuff that is overloading us right now and making us sick in the world. We are dying from mental overload, because it’s influencing our body.
MB: What do you do to remove yourself from mental overload?
KN: At night, I sit around in the stars and tell stories around the campfire. I listen to people in my community. I live out in a remote community of Indigenous people, so we have all these benefits—in the campfire, you don’t have to worry about the cities or the noise and everything. All you do is sit out amongst the stars and the campfire and listen to everyone’s story, and you relax. That’s it.
MB: We have these wonderful photos of you surrounded by your family and many children. Can you tell me more about them?
KN: Those little ones are all my greats. They are my grandchildren’s children. Because my culture is a circular culture, it revolves around, from grandmother to mother and then comes back to the children. Those little ones you saw there are now my bosses. My parents, in my culture. I respect them and call them my future ancestors. It’s important that they are being taught and respected because they will lead the people who will follow after them. So I must live according to how I want to see my future ancestors live. They don’t say my name or anything like that. They say “daughter” to me because I’m their child. It’s quite strange [laughs], going through that process with the babies, it’s funny.
MB: Your music speaks to us, it’s very special. Do you only play acoustic guitar? Did you ever play electric guitar?
KN: Well, the guitar was a bit of a controversy during my teenage years because, in my culture, men were the only users of instruments of wood. So I was forbidden to use an instrument that was made of wood until I just decided very much I wanted. I wanted to play this beautiful instrument. And so one glorious night out, in the community I was living in, there was this person who owned a guitar and had given it to another person, and he was drumming some country riffs on it. And I went over to him and said, “Look, please teach me a few chords there, and just give me the instrument. Let me just hold it, because I love it.” As soon as I held it, I thought, “This is for me.” So it took me many years afterward to truly own a guitar myself. So I now have an acoustic guitar that I use in most of the shows wherever I travel. And it feels good.
MB: How do you feel when you’re on stage? Do you enjoy playing live shows?
KN: I always say I’m not a big stage person. I have a spirit that’s giving, and all I want to do is give, even just playing small stages or just doing little gigs, for only a few people being out there. At the moment, I’m working at my community school, where three days a week I write lyrics with the children, and that gives me joy because these children are learning songs in their language and singing it, and being joyful, being happy whilst doing it, you know? My love is to give to children, to give to the world.
I hope that the audience is feeling me through my songs, and I hope they identify their selves within those songs. When I was on a big stage [touring Broadway with the cast of actor Hugh Jackman’s concert “The Man, The Music, The Show”] I had the chance to say the land is crying for its people. The people are crying for the land. Do not be silent. Speak up for her. Speak up further. So, hopefully, wherever I’ve traveled, I instilled in the people the true essence of my nature, of who I am: I am of the land. I speak for the land. I speak for the environment, the Earth is dying. I speak for the Earth. The Earth is crying. There’s a pulsating earth under our feet at the moment that wants to impart the energy, the wisdom, everything. And so if we walk barefoot on the earth, we can feel it. Listen. Listen to who you are. Don’t listen to me, you know? Listen to what the story is telling you.