Kevin Palmer was of Aboriginal, English and Swedish ancestry but did not discover his Indigenous heritage until well into his teenage years. Born in Brisbane in 1934, he spent much of his childhood in a Salvation Army Boys' Home after his father went to war and his mother died.

Palmer worked as a clerk in the Queensland railways, a cadet in the Queensland police force and a laboratory technician on uranium mines in the Northern Territory and Canada before embarking on a 45-year theatrical career that took him around the world. In 1973 he returned to Australia to work in theatre before starting his own theatrical agency.