It makes perfect sense that Paul Kelly’s quintessentially Australian song How to Make Gravy is going to be adapted into a film.
Kelly’s ballad about a prisoner, Joe, writing home to his brother, Dan, on 21 December lamenting his emotional angst about missing “all the treasure and the trash” of family Christmas, is beautifully sparse. Its brilliance, like so many of Kelly’s lyrics, lies in its fusion of the present with an evocative untold back story that provokes imaginative possibilities.
While the song has become a national ode to the Australian Christmas for all its British imperial weirdness of pressing ahead with a hot roast and gravy on a 100- degree day, it is about so very much more. It’s about the push-pull of sibling rivalry and affection, the terror of losing a fragile love, the tinderbox dangers of festively mixing extended family and friends, of parental imperfection and, not least perhaps, the bitter taste of regret.
It is freighted throughout with human imperfection. Alternately and, always subtly, sunny and languorous, it is also alive with the qualities essential to great filmic drama: mystery and personal tensions.
Since its release in 1996, whenever I’ve been captured by the song’s superb musicianship and hooks (they make me shiver in the same way another great Kelly ballad about human foible and regret, To Her Door – that might also be about Joe – does), I’ve come away pondering about all that has happened to this point – and what’s going to happen next.
It’s the mark of great art that this song has long lingered in the back of my consciousness. So much so that every time I heard it, I would develop the untold back- and forward-stories a little more.
In 2020 Radio National Fictions asked me to co-write, for Gravy Day, a short radio play riffing off the Kelly song. It was one of the most pleasurable (is it OK if I say “easy”?) writing jobs I’ve undertaken. That is because the song, and all the imaginative wanderings it inspired in me, were so perpetually vivid.
In that, I’m not unique; so many people who know the song will tell you about their emotional reactions to it.
I had years earlier left Melbourne, where I grew up and had many extended – sometimes tense – family Christmases. No wonder, then, that the song for me unfolds between Barwon prison near Geelong and urban Melbourne (I don’t know why, but I imagined a modest weatherboard house in suburban Reservoir, Thornbury or Preston with a deep backyard, the lawn punctuated with cricket stumps, card tables covered with food, a few eskies and a fire smouldering in a 44 gallon drum as day turned to evening). But it’s a national song. This could be Darwin. It could be suburban Adelaide. Toowoomba. Fremantle.
Like all great writing, How to Make Gravy ceased to be Kelly’s once he launched it into the world. He licensed us to live with – to claim – his characters. And, so, here was (little hippy sister?) Stella, flying in from the coast. The brothers “driving down from Queensland” are definitely older, though this is nowhere enunciated. Ambiguity is nothing if not muse to imaginative and creative potential. And How to Make Gravy has it in spades.
Mary has got to be the older somewhat harried, unlucky-in-love but formidable big sister to Joe and Dan and the brothers – she who’s at once feared and the subject of their gentle teasing. What on earth did they do to that former boyfriend who wore “too much cologne”?
Roger? He’s always been trouble. The family’s informally adopted son. He’s always clashed with Joe since their days at the tech. You can trust him to get lippy - and maybe punchy – after a few too many on Christmas night.
And here comes the real fraternal (read dramatic) tension: Rita. Little brother Danny has been in love with her since worldly wise Joe brought her home for Mum’s 50th in the backyard at Reservoir a few years back. Rita, “classy”, young Danny reckons, like Kylie or that chick from the Cranberries, but also natural and understated in her white T-shirt, Levi’s and RMs, long raven hair tossed over her shoulder. Not his usual thick blue eyeliner and boob-tube type!
Joe put a ring on her finger soon as he could. They wasted no time having kids.
Christmas Day a few years later: ruined when Joe goes the knuckle on Roger who’s had it coming for bloody years.
Danny somehow finds himself slow dancing with Rita in the yard after Dad pulls Joe into the kitchen for a talking-to. Next day, Joe’s arrested. Gets three and a half with good behaviour for that bank job. And, so, everything changes for everyone.
Then, just ahead of his last Christmas inside, Joe calls Danny from the big house.
“Who’s gonna make the gravy?” he asks.
But that’s not why he’s calling.
And he can’t help blurting it out: “Oh, brother, please don’t stab me in the back.”
What’s going on? The dramatic possibilities are endless.
