Youth, Education and Family
Cave was born in the small town of Warracknabeal in the state of Victoria, Australia, to Dawn Cave (née Treadwell) and Colin Frank Cave. He has two brothers: Tim (born 1952) and Peter (born 1954), and a sister, Julie (born 1959). As a child, he lived in Warracknabeal and then Wangaratta in rural Victoria. His father was an English teacher and administrator, with a love of literature, and his mother was a librarian. Cave's paternal grandfather's surname was originally Landvoigt, he later in his life became known as Frank Jason Cave.
Raised as an Anglican, Cave sang in the boys choir at Wangaratta Cathedral. He grew to detest the attitudes of small-town Australia, and he was often in trouble with the local school authorities, so his parents sent him to boarding school at Melbourne's Caulfield Grammar School in 1970. Cave joined the school choir under choirmaster Norman Kaye, and also benefited from having a piano in his home. The following year he became a "day boy" when his family moved to Murrumbeena, a suburb of Melbourne. Cave was 19 when his father was killed in a car accident; at the moment he was informed of this, his mother Dawn Cave was bailing him out of a St Kilda police station for a charge of burglary. Cave would later recall that his father "died at a point in my life when I was most confused", and "the loss of my father created in my life a vacuum, a space in which my words began to float and collect and find their purpose".
After his secondary schooling, Cave studied painting (Fine Art) at the Caulfield Institute of Technology (now Monash University, Caulfield campus) in 1976, but dropped out in 1977 to pursue music. He also began using heroin around this time. On 28 March 2008, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws from this university. In 2010 Cave also received an Honorary Degree from the University of Dundee and in 2012 he was honored with a Doctor of Letters from Faculty of Arts at the University of Brighton, in recognition of his international standing in the arts and his patronage of Brighton’s annual film festival Cine-City.
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