How to Make Gravy is already a movie that plays in our heads. That’s its brilliance

‘Ambiguity is nothing if not muse to imaginative and creative potential. And How to Make Gravy has it in spades.’ Photograph: Daniel Smith/Getty Images

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.