After an unforgettable career, Kate Ceberano has few regrets – but there is one big one

After more than four decades on stage and screen, singer Kate Ceberano has few regrets. She’s crafted 31 albums (11 platinum, eight gold), won five ARIA awards and been inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame for her performances, which span rock, soul, jazz, pop and classical.

In the 1980s, she won three Countdown awards, in the 1990s she played Mary in a record-breaking run of Jesus Christ Superstar and won a Logie for the video clip for the song Everything’s Alright. She was the first woman inducted into the Australian Songwriters Association Hall of Fame in 2014. On top of that, in 2007 she won Dancing with the Stars, and portraits of her have been chosen as finalists in the Archibald three times, with two winning the Packing Room Prize (in 1994 and 2021).

From fronting the band I’m Talking in 1984 to her successful solo career, for which she was made a member of the Order of Australia in 2016, Ceberano is one of the best-known voices and faces of the Australian entertainment industry.

“I’ve come to an age where I can’t be ‘un-Kate Ceberano’,” she says. “Like Chrissy [Amphlett], Renee [Geyer], Kylie [Minogue] and Delta [Goodrem], we’re all on a one-name basis with our audiences. That’s quite a rare and privileged place to get to in Australia and you only get there by being yourself.”

But there is one missed opportunity that hounds her still. It was during her serious flamenco phase, a dance form she took up at the age of 12 to understand more of her Filipina/Spanish origins. Her Filipino/Hawaiian father Tino was known as “the father of Australian karate” after his 1970s morning-TV appearances teaching self-defence. “My dad is the highest-ranked of his style in the world. He’s not just a karate master, he’s like Kung Fu Panda,” she jokes.“I first found out about fame and being in the public eye thanks to my dad.”

Her mother Cherie, whose ethnicity is Swedish and Welsh, was also one of the first women to hold a black belt in karate in Australia.

“At our house, at any given time, there was anywhere between 50 to 100 black belts. The only reason I didn’t do it was because I didn’t love the sound of women sparring. I found it very unfeminine.”

Instead of karate, the youngest of three, and only girl in her family, took up singing and dancing. At about the age of 12 she joined a dance group with the Filipino Association – “flamenco without the frilly dresses” as she calls it – and became obsessed. So much so that a young filmmaker called Baz Luhrmann approached her in the early 1990s to become involved in a film he was making about ballroom dancing.

“To my absolute shame, I declined the offer to be part of Strictly Ballroom because I didn’t know what the film was about. I didn’t understand that it was actually going to be exactly about the very thing that I was being a purist about,” she says.

“I found ballroom’s version of flamenco to be kind of like an aberrant version of flamenco because it wasn’t the true ethnic flamenco that I was into. But as it turns out, that was a lost opportunity of the highest degree. When the film came out I just wanted to bite my arm off.”

So since then she’s said ‘yes’ to everything, which is one of the main reasons she’s headed back on tour for the Australian Made encore tour. It began in London on August 8 and will end in Shepparton, Victoria, on November 20. It will take her to venues throughout regional Australia, as well as the Sydney Opera House (October 11) and Melbourne’s Hamer Hall (October 23), on the back of her 2025 21-date Australian Made tour, 2024’s Superstars Live with Jon Stevens, and the 2023 orchestral collaboration with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, My Life Is a Symphony. All three tours were sell-outs.

The Australian Made tour of 1986-87 was a watershed moment in Australian music, showcasing local talent in major stadiums and acting as a precursor to festivals like the Big Day Out. Ceberano was barely 20 that summer when, as lead singer of I’m Talking, she joined the stellar line-up of INXS, Jimmy Barnes, Divinyls, Models, The Saints and The Triffids.

The idea for a 2025 tour and live album came after a discussion with her husband and manager Lee Rogers after the 2016 re-release of Richard Lowenstein’s film Australian Made: The Movie.

“We bemoaned the fact that almost all of the performers are now dead,” she says, listing the tally of fallen fellow musos, from INXS’ Michael Hutchence to Divinyls’ Chrissy Amphlett, The Saints’ Chris Bailey, Models’ James Freud and now James Valentine. “I was kind of like the last of the Mohicans, along with Jimmy Barnes and Sean Kelly from Models.”

She felt it was time to tell her old friends’ stories to new audiences (or old ones keen for a dose of nostalgia).

Looking back, she remembers she was slightly terrified by the Australian Made cohort, especially Amphlett.

“What she taught me was you need to be bold enough to be yourself,” Ceberano says. “I wasn’t sidling up to any of my peers, like Renee Geyer or Chrissy Amphlett, for any badge of approval. But what they did teach me is that if you come too close to imitating or trying to become your idol, you have to pay the price … No one wants a poor imitation of another person.”

For a girl who left school at 15, whose band won the Victorian Battle of the Bands at 16 and who not long after opened for Vince Jones, jazz was a focus of her early career – thanks in part to Melbourne restaurateur Mietta O’Donnell. “She saw me as a sort of Josephine Baker singer and put me on her menu at [the restaurant] Mietta’s as a dessert – a warm chocolate tart.”

Ceberano credits her love of singing back to a childhood illness. “I got a very severe case of glandular fever around 13 and I sat and watched midday movies for about three months, and mostly they were musicals. And then I reckon I just started sort of hallucinating with fever and imagining I was singing in musicals.”

Like it or not, she is best known as a rock singer whose name will be eternally linked to those giddy days of Oz-rock in the 1980s.

“I always really loved the entourage of the bands that were on the Australian Made stage,” she recalls. “Michael Hutchence was going out with [model] Helena Christensen. Backstage there were a lot of his beautiful acolytes who were beautiful spirits as well. Among them was Jane Barnes, who had baby Mahalia on her hip through most of Jimmy Barnes’ wild gigs.”

That baby, Mahalia Barnes, has since gone on to play Mary Magdalene in Jesus Christ Superstar, the same role Ceberano played next to John Farnham in the 1990s, and Ceberano’s own daughter, Gypsy, has also gone into a career in music, as next-gen Australian Made offspring. Ceberano welcomes the fact there are more professional female musicians than when she began.

“Barbara Hogarth, who was the first woman that I’d ever worked with or had known of in the music business, was on bass in I’m Talking, When you consider that of all of the bands on that tour, there were only two bands with women in them, you can see how far we’ve come in the music industry.”

Despite early warnings that “girls don’t play the drums” (“The Go-Betweens’ Lindy Morrison was the first woman I’d ever seen on drums”), for this tour, like the last one, she plays the drums.

“The reason why I drum on this particular tour was because we wanted to travel light in two cars with [support acts] Kathleen Halloran and Dusty Lee and our crew as well, and we wanted to be able to be very nimble when coming into regional gigs,” she said.

“I also wanted the sounds to be big and I wanted that to be rock, so it has the same visceral impact. The body has to feel like you’re shaking, and the roof is shaking, and you need to be able to make it big.”

Ceberano developed a passion for sewing during the COVID lockdowns and has a clothing line she sells online, including flamenco-like frilly skirts that she embroiders with song lyrics.

In between songs in the show she will tell anecdotes about her former 1980s muso friends, but insists it is not a tribute show; just an old friend singing songs to remember an amazing time in Australian rock history. As a prelude to the show she uses the same music INXS used to come on stage to every night during the original Australian Made tour.

“It’s fantastic warm-up music,” said the singer, who will turn 60 in the final month of this tour. “The minute it starts I feel like the child that I was at 20, watching at the side of the wings for Michael and the boys to launch into their first hits. I hope my own enthusiasm and nostalgia for this era can bring the audiences along with us.”

Kate Ceberano’s Australian Made encore tour reaches Canberra’s Playhouse on October 10, the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall on October 11 and Hamer Hall in Melbourne on October 23. kateceberano.com/home#tours

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