It makes good sense that Paul Kelly’s quintessentially Australian music Easy methods to Make Gravy goes to be tailored into a movie.
Kelly’s ballad a few prisoner, Joe, writing dwelling to his brother, Dan, on 21 December lamenting his emotional angst about lacking “all of the treasure and the trash” of household Christmas, is superbly sparse. Its brilliance, like so a lot of Kelly’s lyrics, lies in its fusion of the current with an evocative untold again story that provokes imaginative prospects.
Whereas the music has grow to be a nationwide ode to the Australian Christmas for all its British imperial weirdness of urgent forward with a scorching roast and gravy on a 100- diploma day, it's about so very way more. It’s concerning the push-pull of sibling rivalry and affection, the phobia of shedding a fragile love, the tinderbox risks of festively mixing prolonged household and associates, of parental imperfection and, not least maybe, the bitter style of remorse.
It's freighted all through with human imperfection. Alternately and, all the time subtly, sunny and languorous, additionally it is alive with the qualities important to nice filmic drama: thriller and private tensions.
Since its launch in 1996, every time I’ve been captured by the music’s very good musicianship and hooks (they make me shiver in the identical manner one other nice Kelly ballad about human foible and remorse, To Her Door – that may even be about Joe – does), I’ve come away pondering about all that has occurred so far – and what’s going to occur subsequent.
It’s the mark of nice artwork that this music has lengthy lingered at the back of my consciousness. A lot so that each time I heard it, I'd develop the untold back- and forward-stories a little bit extra.
In 2020 Radio Nationwide Fictions requested me to co-write, for Gravy Day, a brief radio play riffing off the Kelly music. It was one of the vital pleasurable (is it OK if I say “straightforward”?) writing jobs I’ve undertaken. That's as a result of the music, and all of the imaginative wanderings it impressed in me, had been so perpetually vivid.
In that, I’m not distinctive; so many individuals who know the music will inform you about their emotional reactions to it.
I had years earlier left Melbourne, the place I grew up and had many prolonged – typically tense – household Christmases. No marvel, then, that the music for me unfolds between Barwon jail close to Geelong and concrete Melbourne (I don’t know why, however I imagined a modest weatherboard home in suburban Reservoir, Thornbury or Preston with a deep yard, the garden punctuated with cricket stumps, card tables lined with meals, a couple of eskies and a fireplace smouldering in a 44 gallon drum as day turned to night). But it surely’s a nationwide music. This may very well be Darwin. It may very well be suburban Adelaide. Toowoomba. Fremantle.
Like all nice writing, Easy methods to Make Gravy ceased to be Kelly’s as soon as he launched it into the world. He licensed us to reside with – to say – his characters. And, so, right here was (little hippy sister?) Stella, flying in from the coast. The brothers “driving down from Queensland” are positively older, although that is nowhere enunciated. Ambiguity is nothing if not muse to imaginative and artistic potential. And Easy methods to Make Gravy has it in spades.
Mary has obtained to be the older considerably harried, unlucky-in-love however formidable massive sister to Joe and Dan and the brothers – she who’s without delay feared and the topic of their light teasing. What on earth did they do to that former boyfriend who wore “an excessive amount of cologne”?
Roger? He’s all the time been bother. The household’s informally adopted son. He’s all the time clashed with Joe since their days on the tech. You possibly can belief him to get lippy - and possibly punchy – after a couple of too many on Christmas night time.
And right here comes the true fraternal (learn dramatic) stress: Rita. Little brother Danny has been in love together with her since worldly sensible Joe introduced her dwelling for Mum’s fiftieth within the yard at Reservoir a couple of years again. Rita, “elegant”, younger Danny reckons, like Kylie or that chick from the Cranberries, but additionally pure and understated in her white T-shirt, Levi’s and RMs, lengthy raven hair tossed over her shoulder. Not his common thick blue eyeliner and boob-tube kind!
Joe put a hoop on her finger quickly as he may. They wasted no time having youngsters.
Christmas Day a couple of years later: ruined when Joe goes the knuckle on Roger who’s had it coming for bloody years.
Danny someway finds himself sluggish dancing with Rita within the yard after Dad pulls Joe into the kitchen for a talking-to. Subsequent day, Joe’s arrested. Will get three and a half with good behaviour for that financial institution job. And, so, the whole lot modifications for everybody.
Then, simply forward of his final Christmas inside, Joe calls Danny from the large home.
“Who’s gonna make the gravy?” he asks.
However that’s not why he’s calling.
And he can’t assist blurting it out: “Oh, brother, please don’t stab me within the again.”
What’s occurring? The dramatic prospects are infinite.
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