by Jeff Glorfeld

Christmas 2024 in the Glorfeld home was a subdued affair. My father, Bill, a room-filling character in life, died the previous February and this was our first Christmas without him, and my mother had recently moved into an assisted-living facility – what we in our young ignorance used to call an old folks home – and wasn’t adjusting well.  

Nevertheless, Carol and I tried to have some fun with the holiday spirit – I put up strings of coloured lights outside, and we decorated a tree, a little potted pine.

We cooked a turkey and all the necessary side dishes, and made merry with my mum and brother, and Carol’s younger sister.  

Another change this Christmas was in our gift giving. Apart from hanging stockings on the fireplace mantle, stuffed with geegaws and gimcracks and chocolates, we didn’t go overboard with presents. I must’ve been very good last year, though, because Santa (it was really Carol but I don’t want her to know I know it wasn’t really from Santa) surprised me with a copy of Paul Kelly’s book How to Make Gravy.  

Published in 2010, I could’ve used it on my daily Kyneton to Melbourne round trip on the Bendigo V-Line – as entertainment and for the physical workout – my paperback edition weighs in at 568 pages, including photographs and the index.  

Carol and I are Paul Kelly fans and not embarrassed to say so. In 1986 we’d settled into a flat in St Kilda and had discovered the thriving music scene in the pubs and clubs along the Esplanade and Fitzroy Street.  

One of the first shows that really captured our hearts was Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls, at The Venue, the old Earls Court, showing every one of its decades as a bayside pleasure palace.

Kelly and his band had recently released their  breakthrough album, Gossip, four vinyl sides, 24 songs, each one a well-polished gem. It was a band with the wind in its sails, a future so bright, they needed to wear sunglasses.  

After that show we became a Paul Kelly version of Deadheads, travelling around Victoria to hear the magic.

It seemed unfortunate when the Coloured Girls became the Messengers, reportedly because non-Australians (Americans?) would not see the connection between the band’s name and lyrics in the Lou Reed song Walk On the Wild Side, but we were truly disappointed when Kelly broke up the band in the early 1990s.

We went to hear his new groups a few times but his legend outgrew pubs and clubs and we didn’t feel the love in the big theatres and stadiums.  

In the book he talks about touring in the US, trying to become established in that massive, lucrative market. He describes having a day off in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2002, and taking a guided tour of the Stephen Foster Memorial, a museum devoted to the early American songwriter, author of such standards as Oh! Susanna, Camptown Races, Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair and Beautiful Dreamer.  

“Touring is often a grind,” Kelly writes, “touring in America in particular – the absence of family, the endless interstates, the queues at airports, the  incomprehensibility of the sports pages in the newspapers, the indifference of sound checks. But every once in a while, unbidden and unforeseen, a golden day or hour bowls up to you.”

Turns out, the Stephen Foster Memorial in Pittsburgh provided just such a golden day.  When I unwrapped the book on Christmas day I declared that I wouldn’t sit down and read it from start to finish – it was too massive.

It seemed like a book that you’d open at random, or search out a time or place or person or song from the index and read what Kelly had to say.  

A few days ago I looked up Steve Connolly, the older brother of one of my  friends at The Age, Rohan Connolly, one of Australia’s foremost AFL journalists. Steve Connolly was the guitarist in Coloured Girls and Messengers and was one of the chief architects of their sound.

He went on to produce records for Archie Roach, Kev Carmody, and others, before his tragic death in 1995, from a heart infection.  

Scattered among Kelly’s stories and reminiscences are lyrics to some of his songs.  As a fan of his music, I’ve known that he’s as much a storyteller as a musician, and these lyrical interludes help the stories flow from one to the next.

It’s February now and, true to my prediction, the book has become a treasured companion in troubled and trying times. It sits on the corner of my desk, from where I can open it at random, and disappear into a world that’s real but somehow, from far away northern California, slightly magical.

I reckon I’ve still only read about half of it. On my weekly radio program, The Down Under Hour, on tiny community station 88.5FM, broadcasting from a studio in Round Mountain, with a tower on Hatchet Mountain, I often find myself reaching for Paul Kelly records.

They can be from the 1980s all the way into the 2000s, and I can always find something to fit the mood.  My listeners think so too – I’ve had more good feedback about Paul Kelly’s music than any other artist.

I’ve just flipped open the book and found these lyrics to the song, Gathering Storm, from his 1995 album Deeper Water.  

I rise up and turn on the light  

Now it’s shining in my window  

My walls are strong  

My chimney’s smoking  

God speed you in the gathering storm  

After many happy years living in Victoria and working at The Age, journalist and former Wheatsheaf resident Jeff Glorfeld, and his wife Carol, went back  to California, the land of his birth, where in the past seven years he has survived bushfires, snowstorms and drought. And Trump. And Covid. And Trump again. The cicadas and locusts didn’t arrive. Well, not yet.   

By Journalist Kevin Childs: Image: Kyle Barnes

If Tony Kelly didn’t exist, someone possibly would invent him.

From being a park ranger in the Northern Territory, he has worked with young people at risk (including at the notorious Malmsbury centre), retrained as a lawyer, and is a CEO, writer and author.

All this sounds remarkable, but considering his background it may have been almost expected. He is the grandson of opera singer Count Ercole Tonti Filippini. Born in Argentina in 1885 to Italian parents, Filippini was signed to the renowned La Scala opera house in Milan but when theatres shut in Europe during WWI he joined an opera company to tour India, China and the Philippines, and then for 14 months in Australia and New Zealand.

Filippini stayed in Australia, opening a school of opera in Sydney in 1918. One of his students was a young music graduate, Anne McParland (later known as Nancy). They married. He performed on stage while she produced and directed, becoming Australia’s first female conductor of symphony orchestras. Ercole Filippini died at the age of 48 in 1934, while Nancy went on singing, broadcasting, and leading choirs and orchestras, until her death in 1987 at 91.

Little wonder, then, as Tony says, there has been a lot of talk regarding a film about his grandparents. The musical tradition is being carried on by his brother, Australian rock singer/songwriter and guitarist Paul Kelly.

Tony was in his mid-40s when he decided to study law. His father, who died when Tony was young, was a lawyer, so when Tony saw that he could do a two-year degree at Melbourne University he and his wife Rebecca Lister moved to the city with their two daughters.

“I had been involved with the Greens and came to realise the importance of law in all aspects of society and how change can be effected through law.” Once in Melbourne they stayed for 15 years, returning to Daylesford when Covid hit.

Now his focus is on native title as head of the First Nations Legal and Research Services. To an outsider, native title seems complex, and Tony does say that identifying the right people for country is difficult, but once that has been established, it is easy to bring on a claim.

Lawyers methodically work through the claims. “The preference is to do it all by mediation, leading to a good result, eliminating conflicts and building strength,” he says. Some matters, however, can be drawn out. The claim by the Eastern Maar people of Warrnambool, for instance, took 10 years to settle and includes the coastline of the Great Ocean Road up to Ararat.

Sometimes many groups are involved in arguments over boundaries. In the Eastern Maar case most were resolved by agreement, with only one going to trial, with a judge to make a call next year.

Out all of this, millions of dollars flow to the successful claimants to set up a corporation. For example, the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation employs 200 people and, Tony says, is one of the biggest forces in the Bendigo economy. The money received is mainly spent on land management, economic development and language and cultural recovery.

After 13 years involved in native title work, he has just signed on for another three years. Curiously enough, it was swimming that brought him to writing. He began with articles on swimming for The Big Issue magazine, focusing on how it keeps you healthy.

His writing took on another focus when he and Rebecca moved to Mt Isa for two years to care for Rebecca’s witty, crossword-loving 92-year-old mother. Out of this came Growing Pineapples in the Outback, Tony and Rebecca’s book reflecting, from two perspectives, on the town’s isolation and heat, and the richness of caring for someone at life’s end.

Next he (perhaps again with Rebecca) plans to write an anthology on swimming, researching it by plunging in at different places across the country and chatting to locals about why they swim. One chapter will be on the “ice mile”, which international rules say must be done in 5 degrees Celsius or less, wearing a standard costume, googles and one cap (“You have to be alive half an hour later to qualify,” quips 62-year-old Tony).