Keith McKenry

A slightly crazy lapsed engineer, Dr Keith McKenry has been a consultant to both the United Nations and the OECD Environment Directorate, chaired UNESCO’s Committee of Technical and Legal Experts on the Safeguarding of Folklore, served on a Commonwealth Committee of Inquiry, headed the Australian Government’s Arts Branch and been General Manager of Canberra’s $100 million Asbestos Removal Program.

For 13 years, Keith was an Assistant Commissioner of Taxation. He designed Australia’s largest oral history project. His doctorate is in wilderness management.  

For eight years, he was president of Australia’s National Folk Festival. 

He is now a semi-skilled farmhand, a leading member of Australia’s small band of folklorists and one of Australia’s finest performance poets. 

Keith has presented many workshops on Australian folklore and social history and has appeared at all major Australian folk music venues and at festivals overseas.  In concert, he interweaves his original verse with bush poetry producing an amalgam of humour, satire and social comment which doesn’t fit readily into any familiar stereotype.

He remains the only person to have recited “McArthur’s Fart” at a reception on the 30th floor of the United Nations Building in New York; “The Spirit of the People” in the foyer of the Australian High Court and “A Study in Linguistics” in the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House. 

In the 1990s, Keith combined with Australia’s finest traditional singer, Alan Scott, to release two highly acclaimed albums of bush songs and poems, 'Battler’s Ballad' and 'Travelling Through the Storm'.  His solo album Bugger the Music, Give Us a Poem! won the prestigious Golden Gumleaf Bush Laureate Award at Tamworth for Album of the Year. 

A second solo album, The Lies That Made Australia, addresses the myths Australians embrace as part of their national self-image. It was recorded live at the National and Maldon Folk Festivals and released on CD in 2018. 

Keith’s scripted concert White on Black: In the Spirit of Reconciliation, has also been released on CD. This recording, upon which Keith is joined by some of Australia’s leading folk artists, examines the development among white Australians of stereotypes about Aboriginal people. Despite its confronting content, the recording has received wide praise and strong support from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders of Australia’s Reconciliation movement.

In 2003 Keith released The Folklore of Terrorism: Songs, Poems and Sketches from a Crazy World, in which he addresses such matters as the Bosnian war, Australia’s treatment of refugees, the 11 September atrocities and the horrific situation in the Middle East. The book brings into focus the tragic symbiosis between terrorism and the policies and actions of major world powers.

Keith has written biographies of John Meredith and Ron Edwards — two giants of Australian folklore.  

Keith’s satirical dictionary, Lingua Bureaucratica: A guide to the language of Australian bureaucracy, was serialised in the Canberra Times and has been quoted before committees of the Australian Parliament.  

Keith lives with his wife Jenny in Central Victoria, where they breed alpacas and Wiltshire Horn sheep. He may be contacted by email at FangedWombat@bigpond.com.