Showing results by author "Richard Glover" in All Categories

There’s plenty of nostalgia right now for the Australia of the past, but what was it really like? In The Land Before Avocado, Richard Glover takes a journey to an almost unrecognisable Australia. It’s a vivid portrait of a quite peculiar land: a place that is scary and weird, dangerous and incomprehensible, and now and then surprisingly appealing. It’s the Australia of his childhood. The Australia of the late '60s and early '70s. Let’s break the news now: they didn’t have avocado. 

A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family...Richard Glover's favourite dinner-party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?' It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed toy collector.

Four friends. One block of land. No power tools. 'One day,' Philip said, 'I'd like to build something bigger.... Like a house. We could just buy a block of land, you know, the four of us, and have a go.' It was just an idea. Then it started to take shape. In this frank, funny and thought-provoking memoir, Richard Glover describes how he and his friend, Philip, and their partners built a house in the bush on weekends.