Gravy, a phone call from jail, and asking your brother not to seduce your wife: these may not sound like the makings of a Christmas song. But Christmas in Australia is different. It is usually hot, for starters: something the country’s most-loved festive song acknowledges.
“They say it’s gonna be a hundred degrees, even more maybe, but that won’t stop the roast,” Paul Kelly, one of the country’s most beloved musicians, sings on How to Make Gravy, a song that plays as a phone call from Joe, who is in prison, to his brother Dan. “Who’s gonna make the gravy now? I bet it won’t taste the same.”
Somewhere between being spoken and sung, it is a fittingly Australian Christmas anthem – a little sad, a little sentimental, and played in a country that is famous, after all, for having once been a penal colony. Plus there’s no mention of snow, or holly, or reindeer. It has been streamed 45m times on Spotify and this year the song was turned into a film.
Joe apologises, sends love to his kids and other family, and asks that Dan not hold his wife, Rita, too close when they dance after lunch. The song even includes a recipe – one based on that of a relative of Kelly’s, which includes tomato sauce “for sweetness and that extra tang”. The date of the call, the 21st of December, is celebrated by some as the unofficial holiday, “Gravy Day”.
How to Make Gravy was released in 1996, but it is only in the last 10 years or so that it has become really popular, says Timothy Byron, an expert in the psychology of music and a lecturer at the University of Wollongong. It only made it into Australia’s music charts, the Arias, in 2019.
He credits its appearance partly with a “best of” album released that year, on which the song was one of the final tracks, and the popularity of Gravy Day partly thanks to a now defunct X parody account called @itsthegravyman. Its first tweet was simply the word “gravy”.
“There’s an element of Australia embracing its own culture,” says Byron. “The Christmas of legend is not quite how it is here.”
“It’s this idea of making this boiling hot gravy on a boiling hot Christmas Day, I think a lot of people can relate to that,” says Toby Martin, who lectures in contemporary music at the University of Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music. “Transplanting of northern hemisphere winter traditions into a boiling hot southern hemisphere summer.”
A tradition of prison songs
But also, says Byron, “Australia has the whole ‘prison colony’ thing – as the English would like to call us when they’re playing cricket.”
The song forms part of a tradition of Australian prison songs, says Martin, particularly from First Nations Australians – “Roger Knox and Vic Simms and the Warumpi band … just to name a few, all have songs that deal with this,” he says.
Incarceration isn’t just a part of the country’s history. Indigenous Australians are imprisoned at far higher rates than non-Indigenous Australians, and the rate is increasing. Indigenous men are 17 times more likely and Indigenous women are 25 times more likely to be incarcerated than non-Indigenous men and women respectively, according to the Australia Institute.
It is a great song because it touches on so many different family dynamics, says musician Luke Daniel Peacock, a descendant of the Meriam people of the eastern Torres Strait Islands. It speaks not just to the rituals around Christmas, “but having that family member that’s either absent for whatever reason, or imprisoned”.
Peacock has a role in the How to Make Gravy film, playing a prisoner in a choir; his dad is in it too.
“My dad loves films and one way he connects with his sons is watching movies together and talking about movies,” he said. “You know, for a chance to be able to be in one with him was really, really special.”
His dad really connects to the song, said Peacock. “His brother was in prison for a period of time, a few periods of time during the 90s, around when the song came out.”
“During the filming on set, it was really bringing back memories of him visiting his brother.”
It also simply captures the feeling of missing someone at Christmas, or of wanting to be with family despite complicated relationships, says Martin.
“If someone would ask what Christmas is like in Australia, I think that would be the perfect song to play them,” said Peacock.
When Kelly first played the song for his family he “almost didn’t get through it,” because he found himself suddenly very emotional, he told Vice Magazine in 2017. It happens to him with songs sometimes when his brothers and sisters are at a show, he said. “It always takes me by surprise.”
