NEWCASTLE four-piece Local Knowledge seemed to be pretty much everywhere last summer. I was temping at a local paper and got asked to write a pretty patronising piece about Aboriginal culture in the city. The cool thing about it was that I got to go and speak to Hetti Perkins at the AGNSW, composer David Page, and the guys from Local Knowledge.

Musically their sound wasn’t mature – the sharp programmed drums, grinding Miami bass style bass, jagged scratches and sometimes way too enthusiastic rhymes were a lot to take in on a first visit, but there was something great about them. Despite the serious material they deal with, I found it tough to leave one of LK’s gigs not beaming. Lots of other people took to it too, they got loads of high profile shows (including Homebake and supporting the Herd at the Metro), as well as high rotation on Triple J and Channel V. Their music is hugely engaging, the constant energy driven by JT’s incessant scratching and the three MC’s intensely choreographed show (at times a little too ‘boy band’, but pretty charming nonetheless).

Before a gig at the Hopetoun in January I sat around a table upstairs with the band. I stopped freelancing and this story got killed, so boomp, here it is.

You’ve been together three years, how’d you get together?

Joel: We started as a, you know a record label put us together as a boy band… nah (cracks up laughing at his own joke) you’re going to write that down too, Joel sucks arse. I was doing a lot of music stuff and doing lots of work with young fellas in schools and different programs like that. Adi and Wok were doing more traditional cultural youth work as well.

Adi: At different camps the young Aboriginal kids were in trouble and that, they weren’t listening to us, not to the extent that we wanted to impact on them. You know, their identity and utilising music to get into their heads, because they were just going to the old stereotypical black person of trying to be black American gangsters and that wasn’t cutting it for us. So we thought we’ll go and have a yarn with Joel ‘cause he produced music, let’s start something, let’s start our own hip hop group.

Was it as clear as that?

JT: Pretty much.

Were you all doing involved, like JT, were you DJing?

JT: I didn’t come in until early this year, I hooked up with Joel a few times.

Adi: Bit of a DJ, huh, bit of a DJ (teasing JT)

JT: I was DJing and he said ‘I’m putting on events for young kids and that’, he gave me the first opportunity to play in front of an audience and I was producing as well, a lot of dance music as well, so just the chance to play in front of an audience was unreal, and then I moved on to clubs from that, the boys went and did Local Knowledge and after a while they called me up.

Were you all MCing before the band started?

Adi: Nope.

Joel: I was and Wok was singing country.

Adi: I sort of dabbled in singing, but it got to the point where, you know, we liked hip hop music, we thought man, to make an impact on our community, where it’s needed we need to utilise hip hop music to get our own message and we thought let’s make it cool to be Aboriginal.

Was it always going to be hip hop?

Adi: I think everyone grew up with it, like as young black, your cousins were always into hip hop. My brother was a traditional dancer and Joel was doing producing for other stuff and a couple of other mates were doing music and we’d done traditional performances and we just thought let’s combine the traditional culture with hip hop music.

Joel: I still remember when I was like five, going to weddings and all my cousins would be break-dancing, getting up, beat-boxing and rapping. That’s the way I got into it, with all the rellos in Cairns. Playing basketball and volleyball – volleyball’s huge up there – that’s how I got into it, that and reggae was pretty much what I was brought up on.

What sort of hip hop?

Joel: Back then it was more those weird breakbeats, weird breakdancing music. I’ve forgotten some of the artists though.

Adi: 2 Live

Joel: Nah, 2 Live Crew came later when I went through puberty.

There’s definitely some 2 Live in your show now.

Joel: Definitely, back then you couldn’t get a 2 Live Crew tape in Australia. I was in Cairns when I was 10 and my older cousin said ‘Have a listen to this’ - Banned in the USA - and it was all just porn music, so I was into it. There was just this one tape and everyone just taped it. NWA, Public Enemy, they were probably the main ones that were in your face, but I was more into some of the other stuff. I got into one group called COD, I don’t even know what it stands for, but that was the first, Fu Schnickens, yeah, that real fast almost raggamuffin kind of raps, so that was that reggae influence as well. I was into Geto Boys, heaps, just because they were so ghetto. You look at G-Unit and all them mob and they’re all buffed up and all that, but y’know the little midget [in Geto Boys] was a messed up lad and Scarface, it was just a crazy group, the best fun, like real proper.

You can tell that DJs are behind the group (as well as JT, Joel’s a long time DJ), it’s in the huge momentum of your shows.

Joel: Yeah we only got 30 to 45 minutes, you know? And you want to go hard, as hard as you can, we’ll leave the slowing it down for all R&B singers. I guess the thought I have in the back of my head all the time is…putting my kids to sleep, you get them going hard for 30 minutes then they’ll go to sleep for a lot longer. When you have kids that don’t sleep, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

How important is being a Koori hip hop group to the way you approach song writing?

Adi: We know there’s not much of a voice for our people at the moment, we’ve got a few role models out there doing their best and we’ve got to try and do what we can to get a messages out of what is needed in our community and represent our people to the fullest in a positive way where we can make a difference. Not just in our community, but also wider, changing stereotypes and attitudes, just to make it cool to be an Aboriginal man, ey.

Joel: It kinda sucks that we have to go to that kind of marketing level to sell it, but that’s where it is today, which sucks arse, but I think once people start getting a feel for the real, content of what Aboriginal identity and Aboriginal culture is about - so in our lyrics we always talk about respect, and the land.

Adi: Respecting your self as well.

How much is that linked to the land?

Joel: I grew up in Cairns mainly, but then in Newcastle. It’s always important, just because I guess the sense of belonging somewhere, of really belonging somewhere and knowing that you have those connections, so my traditional ties are with around Bundaberg, Maroochydoore, Kabi Kabi mob there and just knowing that my people, my mobs have lived there and are part of the land for 80,000 plus years, you know, it gives you a sense of pride saying I actually belong here, this is where I’m from. Like totems and animals from that area, frilled-neck lizards are our tribe totem. Having that connection with the land is pretty important and I pretty much got that from my grandma, she’s always travelled the land, you know when she turned 60 – she’s the same age as Vegemite, so that’s how we keep up with her age – she bought a campervan and travelled around Australia by herself and everyone thought she was pretty crazy, but she just has that respect for the land and travelling over different places and just feeling it and being recharged by it. You can probably say that the reason why Aboriginal people have got such poor health is just because, well look at the land, it’s just so torn to pieces and wrecked. Not just with uranium mining, cotton is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. You go out to Tamworth and Moree and they’ve got these cotton farms that take so much water to grow, it’s just like what’s going on here?

What’s it like moving around Australia, can you explain what it’s like to go to different areas? Does it make you feel disconnected from where you grew up?

Joel: It’s all different. We always pay respects to the traditional mob and doing that protocol, you know where you are and once you know where you are, it’s no big deal, because you’ve paid respect to them traditional ancestor spirits on the land and all the people there acknowledge it. So it is different, different landscapes and different feeling and that, but if you’re going on someone else’s land and you always pay respect then you’re always going to be part of it still.

What’s it like coming to the city?

Adi: There’s always that protocol, even though there are many people here, we still pay respects to the old people here and the Aboriginal community that’s here. Just because other people are here doesn’t stop our protocols happening

Wok: It doesn’t mean we’re not on Eora land or Gadigal land or whatever, it doesn’t make any difference to us, when we go we pay respect. And we still feel the spirits wherever you are regardless of whether you’re in the city or you’re out in the areas where everyone stereotypically says ‘oh that’s where the Aboriginal spirits would be.’ You know, out in the desert, no different whatsoever man, whether you’re in the city, bush, on the coast, we pay respects and we, we feel the spirits wherever we go.

Joel: A good example is Newcastle Mall. Newcastle’s the fifth largest city and yet the town mall is never ever packed, businesses go broke in that place and one of the stories says there’s a sacred site built underneath it, that’s why people feel wrong going there.

What about Sydney?

Wok: You’ve got people here who have no respect for other people, so they obviously have no respect for themselves, they come here practicing things on other people’s land when they haven’t even got permission to do it and I see it as they’re praying to different gods, but the gods of this land, where they’re on, are Aboriginal gods, and I say man they’re praying to our gods really, their gods are somewhere else. But the ancestor spirits are on this land, man we’re going to continue to practice our protocols and do what needs to be done, because at the end of the day we’re Aboriginal people first and musicians next, because when we’re not musicians any more, we’ll still be Aboriginals. Even though music and dancing is such an important part of who we are, at the end of the day first and foremost we’re Aboriginal men.

Adi: We’re just Local Knowledge and we know where we’re going as far as our music is concerned but we’re being guided by our old people and we’ll continue to be guided and we don’t have musical aims so much.

Joel: When we got together it wasn’t about getting fame or making money, it was about an ideal and making things better for your mob. One of our goals is starting up our own black schools, Aboriginal-taught schools, not just for Aboriginal kids, for all kids. But just how we teach, you know the Aboriginal perspectives in teaching and learning, is what’s going to be put in the schools and it works, it’s been proven it works so much better than the western school system, which hasn’t really changed in the last 500 years.

With Aboriginal perspectives you have men’s and women’s business and when I was doing lots of work in conduct disorder classes and kids with special needs, you know behaviour difficulties, as soon as you take the girls out the boys is fine. Just understanding those differences and even having stage-based classes rather than age-based, because age is just a number, it’s what you know that makes you a better person. People learn at different ages, you can’t put everyone well they’re the same age, well they’re all gonna be the same.

Adi: I suppose we’ve got life goals, not music goals, music goals are just goals along the way. And what we started out as, which is young Aboriginal men trying to make a difference in our community.

Music’s been a big part of Aboriginal culture for a long long time and in the past fifty years it’s been coming out as country or even hip hop.

Wok: I mean you look at the uncle Vic Sims and uncle Reggie Nox, Rory Mcleod, No Fixed Address (all of them are throwing in names), Warumpi Band, we do look at those people as musos, but more so we look at them as warriors. When we say warriors they don’t necessarily have to be out there with spears or guns, they’re just kind of like ambassadors, they’re out there representing us, good role models, doing it, giving you something to strive for.

Adi: They’ve been role models to us

Is that your role?

Adi: We just keep chipping away at it and hopefully it’ll be easier for the next generation of musos, whether they’re Aboriginal, Anglo or young Asians. I mean it goes a lot deeper than just the Aboriginal thing, we always say it’s a basic human rights thing.

Joel: we just want to be a part of something that’s more than BBQs and VB, Australia’s got the oldest forms of human artwork, people spend too much time trying to explain instead of just accepting that’s how it is. That’s a big difference with the way I was brought up and western culture.

Joel: Australia’s got the worst suicide rates in the world, especially of Aboriginal people, and it comes back to that, a feeling like you don’t belong. In Newcastle, at one of the high schools, a few weeks ago, a 15 year old kid hung himself at school. It sucks to know that kids don’t want to live at all.

Adi: It’s that feeling you don’t belong and I think that’s the biggest lie that, I suppose, government in Australia has put out through the school system. The one thing is what’s going on at the moment, with the racial wars, and the leader of the country is denying that it’s racially motivated. And you’ve got people standing up there saying ‘go back to your own country, this is our country’ and all that, they have no connection to the land and they don’t respect the land, they came here as visitors in the first place and the thing is they’re standing up there making fools of themselves.

What are we, bloody mirages? Aboriginal people in this country.

We decided we weren’t going to market negative things, we were really going to work on positive images of who we are and that’s where the song Blackfellas came from, it’s a really positive, uniting thing. And probably our next single will be ‘Aussie Hip Hop’, we’re going to get all the local groups, whether Aboriginal or not, we’ll just get our friends. Which will be a true representation of Australia, we’ve got heaps of white friends, black friends, they’re all people. There’s good and bad in everyone, how hard is it to respect other people?

Joel: We wanted that to be our foundation, personally, we had all these frustrations and music’s a good release. Let’s get it out there and say what we need to say instead of running amok. There’s a lot of people that say ‘here they go, the Aboriginals are sooking again’ well, we noone would have to sook if you fucking listened in the first place, because nothing’s been done.

Adi: People say, ‘You make us feel proud to be Aboriginal when we see your film clip on TV’ now that makes me feel good as a person, when I see another Aboriginal person saying yeah there is light at the other end of the tunnel. The negative thing is what a lot of our listeners go through every day, the last thing they want to hear about is all this sort of stuff when they’re living it, it’s like you want to get away from it. So instead of focussing on the bad things, we give them, not even an escape from reality, it’s an eye-opener.

Hang on a bit, there’s a lot of bad things going on with yourself, but you are part of the oldest race in the world brother, get your head up, get on track, get an education, do what you need to do.

Local Knowledge used to have a website at www.localknowledge.org, but it’s lapsed. They now have a myspace. There’s a great article at The Age, Triple J has a live and transcript interview from Ausmusic month last year and some great pics, plus several interviews at Vibe.