Incident on South Dowling

Everygoodboydeservesfruita on Paul Kelly’s Post 1985 : Incident on South Dowling

On the morning of August 16, 1977 my grandmother awoke me to some bad news. This is how she described it, at least. She told me that Elvis Presley was dead. I was 11 years old, and Elvis meant very little to me. My grandmother was not an Elvis fan or follower, cared little for his music, and yet she recognised this as a significant day. Later that night, I watched the Elvis films that were showing to honour him. It was a few years later that I recognised the irony of lamenting his passing by showing the films that had so little to do with what made him the king of rock’n’roll.

For a few years, the anniversary of Elvis’s death was observed in a similar way. Now, nearly 50 years later, it is a historical footnote of less significance than the release of a new Taylor Swift recording. Death, as is commonly observed, is the great equaliser.

These musings on death’s dominion emerge from listening to Incident on South Dowling — the second song on Post, later re-recorded for the 1986 album Gossip in a considerably more rocked-up, revved-up way. The song has a grim, prosaic opening:
“My baby lay dying, turning so blue / four feet from me dying / my hands felt like glue.”

There is nothing especially remarkable about this couplet, with its awkward simile for helplessness in the face of death’s arrival. An echo on the vocal of ‘dying’, a simple bass, guitar and harmonica arrangement — and that seems to be the song. The cause of death is not stated, only the fact of it. There’s no comment on its meaning, other than the generic use of ‘my baby’ as a trope, rather than a term of genuine endearment.
Other lines obscure more than they clarify:

“I was watching a movie / where someone looked dead / now people they whisper / now people they stare / they say I couldn’t save her / although I was right there.”
Of course, it sounds like a drug death, an impression enhanced by what may or may not be a hint of autobiography. Post is dedicated to Paul Hewson, a close friend of Kelly’s, with whom he had journeyed to the very bottom of heroin addiction. Drug use and addiction were everywhere around Kelly — in both Melbourne and Sydney. Hewson died of an overdose in January 1985, just as the recordings for Post were beginning.

I’m not suggesting Incident on South Dowling is specifically about Hewson. It could be about any number of people. But what matters is Kelly’s reflection on the significance of the death — or more precisely, the lack of it — that marks the song.
Because what frightens the singer isn’t death itself — it’s the insignificance of it. That’s what the “la la la” refrain at the end of the song conveys. Paul Simon once remarked that he hated the “lie/la/lie” chorus of The Boxer — he saw it as a weakness and a failure. But the “la la la” of Incident on South Dowling isn’t a flaw — it’s the point.

Listening now, I hear echoes of two poems that Kelly would have known. One is Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress, in which the narrator urges his beloved to part with her “long-preserved virginity” because eventually, they will both die and she will be consumed by worms. It’s the 17th century: the woman is young and beautiful, but her death is assured.

The other is Robert Frost’s Out, Out— (itself a reference to Macbeth), in which a young boy’s life is taken in a farming accident. He bleeds out, and then the “watcher took fright” as the life drains from the boy’s body. But the denouement of the poem is not that this was a tragedy. Instead,
“And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”
The accident becomes merely an incident — another life, another death.

And so it is that Kelly remarks that while a “head full of rocks is a heavy, heavy head,”in the end, life continues somehow unchanged. And that is what is truly bothersome. We might stop for a moment, or a day. But eventually — and all too quickly — we return to our affairs.
La la la.

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