Marc 'Monkey' Peckham feels out of place in the family home at Berowra. It's a grand, three-storey polished floorboard house perched on a hill overlooking a dense, idyllic patch of bushland, and it's decked out with all the homely touches and comforts a man could ask for. Still, Marc cannot relax.

Sitting around the kitchen table while his mother dotes and plies him and his closest friend / band mate / co-conspirator Izzy Brown with smoked salmon and other gourmet finger foods, Marc explains why he feels like an interloper here.

"It's just very different to what we're used to," he says. "We spend so much time moving around and living hand-to-mouth, it's hard to settle down and it's weird to have all this food on hand.

And it "doesn't help that Phillip Ruddock is the Federal Member, either..." he later adds, only half-jokingly.

So where does Marc feel comfortable? Behind the wheel of his veggie oil-powered van with Izzy at his side, hurtling 'Mad Max-style' through the Australian outback, perhaps? Yep. At the various isolated, forgotten backwater (or no water) Aboriginal communities he and Izzy stop at along the way, bringing discos, hip hop shows and docos? Yes, there too. In the gloomily named Westside Asylum, a warehouse come rent-free squat house in Melbourne, where he spends much of his non-travelling time, eating food dived from dumpsters and writing music? Check. In front of a crowd, as one quarter of up-and-coming Australian hip hop group, Combat Wombat. Definitely.

It is the last of these places, on stage, that Marc and Izzy will soon be spending a lot more of their time. Having just released their second LP (their first on label Elefanttraks, owned by fellow hip hoppers and political comrades, The Herd), Combat Wombat's touring schedule is about to get hectic. So back into the veggie oil-van (the fuel for which the duo get from fish and chip shops they pass) they'll be off, solar-powered sound system in the back, wind-powered caravan in tow.

The album, Unsound System, recorded entirely in

a shipping container in Brunswick, is an unrelentingly political 16-track polemic, the lyrics of which focus on everything from police brutality and immigration detention centres (hence the Ruddock remark) to Aboriginal land rights and the Israel-Palestine conflict. It is a rallying cry and a strident statement of principle, designed to challenge, educate, stir, inflame and aggravate, making it an album guaranteed to be ignored by all but the bravest radio stations.

"I'm sure some people won't agree with it," Izzy says. "And a lot of people won't know how to take it."

"Hip hop has always been a political voice," Marc says. "But it's been hijacked by the commercial world of booty, and I guess we're trying to recapture the roots. [Our album] is more Public Enemy than Puff Daddy, definitely."

The band's beginnings lie in activism. Marc and Izzy (Isabella to her family) first met almost seven years ago at the Jabiluka Uranium Mine protests. They've been travelling, protesting and making music and films together ever since. Combat Wombat is the latest stage of their relationship.

Marc, who has a degree in geology, says their adventures largely stem from two desires: the battle to eradicate political apathy - "apathy is the most dangerous thing there is" - and to learn as much about the world as they can.

"I have an inquiring mind," Marc says. "There are so many things to be inspired by, so many things to be angry about and interested in."

"It's all good fun too. It never get stale. My biggest fear is boredom."