What punk icon Malcolm McLaren told Kate Ceberano in just four brutal words

After a 40-year career, singer Kate Ceberano is about to be inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame. There is, however, one thing she’d like to tell her younger self.

Kate Ceberano is sitting at home in Melbourne’s Elsternwick, bubbly and vivacious, wearing an army-green Husk coat and a bright, elated smile. Any wonder, given the news that arrived earlier this year, which she’s still processing: namely, her ascension to the ARIA Hall of Fame. Her induction takes place next week, and will place her in a once-unfathomable pantheon, alongside everyone from AC/DC, You Am I and Crowded House, to Olivia Newton-John, Archie Roach and Jimmy Barnes.

Big names, heady company – yes – so it would be easy to imagine she views the honour as a lofty dream come true. But talk to Kate Ceberano for any length of time – as I’ve done over the years – and you understand that self-confidence is rarely in short supply. I can’t help but notice right now, for instance, that she’s sitting in front of an acrylic Melbourne streetscape painted by Peter Robertson, while also knowing there’s another Robertson canvas she’s quite fond of, too: the full-body nude the artist did of Ceberano to win the Packing Room Prize at the 1994 Archibalds, a statuesque portrait with almost defiant nakedness.

She isn’t shy, either as a model or in analysing her career, which is what we’re here to talk about.

“I am the pure definition of what an artist is,” Ceberano says, looking me straight in the eye. “I’m universally flawed. I write from places where I’ve needed to self-heal. If I listen to any of my albums, I’m saying pretty much the same thing, which is, ‘Yes, it’s all f---ed up, but we have to keep up to stay in the game.’ ”

Staying in the game is what she’s done for more than four decades now, an unbroken stretch of working and striving that flashed before her eyes when she learnt it was about to be recognised on a national stage alongside Gurrumul, Jenny Morris, Spiderbait, The Living End, and Vika and Linda Bull.

Where did her mind go? It went back to rehearsing in a Nunawading garage with Expozay at 15. It went to winning Melbourne’s Battle of the Bands with them at 16. To joining the post-modern, genre-defying band I’m Talking in 1984. To every stop on the solo career she chased all over the world since then, in a discography traversing pop, jazz, soul and rock.

She’s still at it, too. Still indefatigable. Even now, at 59, Ceberano remains one of the hardest-working women in music, touring her Australian Made show in which she belts out a 50/50 mix of her own hits and various Oz classics,