Glover - Flesh Wounds

The leaping-off point for this story was a piece I wrote for Good Weekend, so thanks to the editor, Ben Naparstek. Odd hints of the story have also appeared in some of my other books: the Vegemite story, from In Bed with Jocasta, was too germane not to include.

The events are as I remember them, although others may recall them differently. Ive tried to capture the rhythm and meaning of the conversations, although the exact words are my best effort. Like most people, I didnt take contemporaneous shorthand notes, although some lines The natives did it burn themselves into the mind with an intensity that allows me to claim them as word-for-word accurate.

Thanks to my friends who battled through an early version of the manuscript and helped me fashion the tale: Kate Holden, Philip Clark, Jenny McAsey and Michael Robotham. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the British writer Jeanette Winterson who kindly read an early draft proof that loyalty runs deep in people with a link to Accrington.

In terms of researching the background history, thanks to both Dr Robert Lyneham and Professor Kara Swanson for helping me understand what birth via artificial insemination might have meant in 1958. Professor Swansons spiky journal article, from which Ive quoted, is titled Adultery by Doctor: Artificial Insemination, 18901945.

The detail about life in 1950s Port Moresby largely comes from Ian Stuarts history Port Moresby Yesterday and Today and from Jim Huxleys memoir New Guinea Experience. For Florence Broadhurst, I relied on Helen ONeills much-lauded biography.

Amruta Slee from HarperCollins provided the best possible notes: demanding and insistent when things could be better; warm and encouraging when something happened to work. Any shortcomings in the manuscript are surely her fault, since I did nearly everything she suggested. My gratitude also to Amanda OConnell for her copy editing.

Thanks most of all to my partner, Debra Oswald, for encouraging me, over many years, to write this. Id been so fierce about limiting my mother and fathers sway over my life that I felt reluctant about spending a couple of years writing a book about a relationship which Id so assiduously tried to slough aside. Then again, as Debra strenuously argued, the story is intriguing and, I hope, useful to other contestants in that world-wide game Whos Got the Weirdest Parents?. She helped create this book. And she rescued me.

I should also thank her for a lifetime of correcting my spelling. Mind you, if my mother hadnt run off with my English teacher...

Grin and Bear It

The P-Plate Parent
(with Angela Webber)

Laughing Stock

The Joy of Blokes
(with Angela Webber)

In Bed with Jocasta

The Dags Dictionary

Desperate Husbands

The Mud House

Why Men Are Necessary and More News from Nowhere

George Clooneys Haircut and Other Cries for Help

For children

The Dirt Experiment

The Joke Trap

The No-Minute Noodler

George Clooneys Haircut

Richard Glovers skewed stories of everyday life depict a world both weird and wry in which Henry VIII provides marriage advice, JD Salinger celebrates tap water and naked French women bring forth a medical miracle. Its also a world in which shampoo is eschewed, the second-rate is praised and George Clooneys haircut can help save a relationship.

Bizarre yet commonplace, absurd yet warm-hearted, these stories will expose the true strangeness of the life you are living right now.

Why Men Are Necessary

Wickedly funny stories of everyday life, as heard on ABC Radios Thank God Its Friday. Salute the sexy and feisty Jocasta; confront teenage rebellion in the form of a fish called Wanda; do battle with magpies the size of small fighter jets; try to work out which font you use when speaking the language of love; and find out what men really have to offer.

In Richard Glovers stories, the day-to-day becomes vivid, magical and laugh-out-loud funny.

Desperate Husbands

Revisit Richard, the original desperate husband, and his partner, the fabulous but formidable Jocasta. And say hello to their teenage offspring the Teutonic Batboy and his irrepressible younger brother, The Space Cadet. Desperate Husbands lifts the lid on so-called normal family life, and reveals its soulful, hilarious absurdity. Welcome to a world where household appliances conspire against their owners, fathers practise ballet in the hallway, and dead insects spell out an SOS on the kitchen floor.

This is where my memory starts: me as a self-sufficient child, distant from my parents. It was the early 1960s; my parents had just returned to Australia from New Guinea, where theyd spent twelve years helping establish a daily newspaper, the South Pacific Post. Both had good jobs in Sydney. My father, Ted, worked for a local publishing company and then later for the Readers Digest. He was handsome, with jet-black hair swept into place with Brylcreem, rather like the Don Draper character in Mad Men. My mother, who called herself Bunty, worked as an arts publicist, mainly for The Australian Opera and The Australian Ballet. She was blonde, vivacious and would dress stylishly in bright designer clothes. My mother and father didnt really behave like parents to me or as partners to each other. It was more a case of two self-involved individuals who happened to rent a room to a boarder of mystifyingly modest height.

They or rather we lived in a two-storey house of normal size, with a circular drive squeezed into the front yard as a nod to feudal grandeur. It had a pool out the back and a long, bright sunroom for entertaining. The sunroom had a bar at one end, decorated to an Hawaiian theme. A pair of over-sized salad servers, embellished with frangipanis, was mounted on the wall behind the bar, presumably to celebrate Hawaiis famous love of salad. A glass bowl held packets of motel matches Stay at the Sea-Breeze on Queenslands Gold Coast and there were several large lighters, embedded in lumps of marble, which Id occasionally be required to carry around, igniting the cigarettes of guests. In this household, thered be no problems if a visitor craved either a drink or a smoke.

My parents worked hard and enjoyed a busy social life. Theyd arrive home just before dinner and then, quite often, would head to a party or the theatre, clambering their way up the social ladder, leaving me with a teenage babysitter. Or theyd host elaborate dinner parties a clatter of music and conversation floating up the stairs towards my bedroom.

At such events, my mother spoke loudly in a posh, strangulated accent. She sounded like the Queen Mum if the Queen Mum had been required to instruct a group of slightly deaf workmen standing on the other side of a noisy road. It wasnt only the manner of speaking, it was the words themselves words, I now realise, which were chosen to prove her aristocratic standing. It was never a toilet but always a lavatory. Im just off to the lavatory, shed announce at high volume, almost constantly, to whole roomfuls of people, so frequently that her guests must have worried about the state of her bladder. In the same spirit, it was napkin, not serviette; sofa, not couch; pudding, not sweet; spectacles, not glasses; and drawing room, not lounge. My childhood was a blizzard of these terms, my mother never more pleased than when she could work several into a single sentence: