1998 – Under the Sun in Kelly Country – By Vin Maskell

For classic depictions of the Australian summer, you can’t beat the songs of Paul Kelly

By Vin Maskell

HERE are many great images of the Australian summer. Call them cliches or call them icons, they are images that have become part of the national consciousness.

Max Dupain’s photographs of swimmers at Newport and Bondi beaches are etched in our memories, coming to life every time we go to the beach. The best known is his 1937 photograph, Sunbaker.

Russell Drysdale’s 1948 panting The Cricketers depicts three thin men having a game in an outback setting, the lone fielder leaning against a veranda post.

Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll became a turning point in local drama. Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip exposed and explored love and addiction under the hot Melbourne sun.

Paul Kelly, recently inducted into the Australian Record Industry Association Hall of Fame, has said that he mainly writes about love, sex and death. When you include summer within those topics you find a series of songs that are as important as the works of Dupain, Drysdale, Lawler, Garner and others.

Throughout his long solo career Kelly has sung about summer, telling stories about cricket, bushfires, ice-creams, Christmas, jail, lust, parenthood and childhood sweethearts. Sometimes the reason is a backdrop, sometimes it is the main image that propels the song.

Post, Kelly’s first solo album (1985) included Standing on the Street of Early Sorrows, a bitter-sweet memory of feelings for a childhood sweetheart during an Adelaide summer when it was always 35C.

Reminiscence – and lost friendship – is also the theme of Under tire Sun (1987). The narrator stands on a shoreline and remembers: “Leaving South Fremantle in a Falcon panel van, We were smoking Marlboro, always singing Barbara Ann … All day long under the sun.”

Melting, a 1995 song co-written with Monique Brumby, is a haunting story made powerful by the lack of detail. Kelly delivers his lyrics in spoken word, while Brumby’s vocals remind one of Rickie Lee Jones. They recall family gatherings, melting ice-creams, youthful pranks and, perhaps, arson:

There was a hill
Black and smoky at the end of the day
We watched the fire trucks go back on down the road
We heard them calling out our names
We were standing in the shadows
melting, melting.

Kelly uses bushfire as a simile in Don’t Stand So Clone to the Window, a 1987 tune about an affair where “the word on the wire would be just like Ash Wednesday bush fire”.