When Uncle Kevin Smith died of a heart attack in his sleep Australia lost one of its finest and most original actors.
A big man, strong and handsome, Kevin never lost the look of a fighter. Indeed, he'd been a boxer in his teens; he'd fought on TV Ringside in the late 1960s, and won the NSW Golden Glove title.
They thought he was headed for the Olympics, but the need to earn a crust took him in other directions. Yet Kevin was always a fighter. Once he was asked by a stage manager why he kept arriving after the half hour call and he exploded: "You try being a blackfella getting a taxi in Redfern." He had been running to the theatre every night.
Kevin was the eldest of seven children of Keith and Patricia Smith. His mum was a Murramarang woman, his dad a Walbunga man from the south coast of NSW.
They fought hard to keep their kids, always trying to stay one step ahead of the government, which, in the '50s and '60s, was intent on taking half-caste children away from their parents. So Kevin and his brothers and sisters spent their childhood moving house or on the hop, from Ulladulla to Narooma, Batemans Bay to Cann River, always down south, while his dad picked up work in the local timber mills that dotted the coast and his mum and the kids worked seasonally picking peas and beans in nearby farms.
The Smith children learnt to be self-sufficient. Kevin was a natural hunter: he learnt to hunt wild pigs on Clyde Mountain - no guns, just bayonets and dogs. He learnt to dive for abalone and lobster. (When we were on tour with Cloudstreet in Perth in 1998, Kev would wander off along the bank of the Swan River and come back with a sugar bag full of mudcrabs to feed us. When we took The Tempest to Tasmania in 1995 Kev collected mussels for us all.)
But there wasn't much on offer for an ambitious young blackfella down south at the end of the '60s, and Kevin moved to Sydney. He trained as a boxer and did an apprenticeship as a mould maker.
At that time, the call for Aboriginal land rights was echoing around the nation and the young Kevin Smith added his voice to the chorus. He was involved in the setting up of the Aboriginal tent embassy in Canberra in 1972 and in Redfern he attended a workshop held by the newly formed National Aboriginal Black Theatre. The stage grabbed his interest and he remained on it for the rest of his life.
Kevin was in the first NAB production of Here Comes the Nigger by Lester Bostock. At age 21, Kevin had his career in motion: he spent the next 30 years as a performing artist.
Apart from his powerful physical presence on stage, Kevin's voice was unforgettable; warm and dark, like a sweet rich loam, and with a laugh that could blow the tiles off a roof. After seeing Kevin as Poppy, the lead character of Nick Parson's Dead Heart in John Clarke's production at NIDA in 1993, director Jim Sharman said to me: "All that's waiting for him now is to play King Lear."
King Lear never happened, but Kevin did go on to create a series of memorable Shakespearean roles; Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (directed by Noel Tovey) for the Festival of the Dreaming in 1997, and his extraordinary grave digger in Company B's Hamlet (of all his talents perhaps his greatest was that of the clown), and perhaps his greatest role, Caliban to Barry Otto's Prospero, Cate Blanchett's Miranda and Gillian Jones's Ariel in The Tempest at Belvoir St and around Australia in 1995.
Kevin carried the fire around the world as the Black Man in Company B's Cloudstreet. In 2002 he was an extraordinary Uncle Worru in Jack Davis's The Dreamers, directed by Wesley Enoch for Company B, and he travelled to Germany's Weimar Festival in Tovey's production of Mudrooroo's The Aboriginal Protestors.
His film and television work has spanned three decades: Blackout, Heartlands, Naked, Wildside, All Saints, and the films Last Wave, Deadly, Two Hands, and most recently, Ray Lawrence's yet to be released Jindabyne.
Kevin Smith was father to eight children and grandfather to eight grandchildren. He is also survived by four of his six siblings, Sharon, Eric (Banja), Basil and Wendy.
He was always concerned with the passing on of knowledge, and had established a program for young Aboriginal theatre artists at the Redfern Community Centre. He was also a member of the NSW Ministry for the Arts Theatre Committee. In 1994 he was named Aboriginal Performer of the Year.
Like his father before him, Kevin was an elder of the Walbunga clan and was a founding member of the Walbunga Native Title land claim - a claim that is still going on. Everyone who met him was struck by his deep spiritual connection to the land - you could feel the energy of spirit that rested in his body. It was part of his power as a performer and his formidable personal strength. The Walbunga call it "nuyrama" - the ability to understand culture, to read the land, and to connect with totems and Dreaming.
Australia should give thanks for the life of Kevin Smith.
Neil Armfield
Neil Armfield is the artistic director of Company B. Company B will hold a memorial service for Kevin Smith tomorrow at 3pm at the Seymour Centre's York Theatre. All are welcome.