The Land Before Avocado – Journeys in a lost Australia by Richard Glover: book review

The Land Before Avocado: Journeys in a lost Australia (2018) is a comic review of Australia in the 1970s.

Glover begins in 1970 in Canberra, Australia, when Gus decided to put chairs outside his café so that his customers could enjoy pavement dining. It was illegal at the time, and the police were called. The public debate became known as The Battle of the Chairs, and Gus won. Gus’s café still exists today.

This book has a million stories of 50 years ago in Australia, when life was different – Glover takes a look back at what used to be. Some things were serious then: women couldn’t get a bank loan, school canings were regular punishments, no-fault divorce did not exist, women had to resign from their job after marriage, human rights didn’t respect the rights of all humans, sewerage stank, and the life expectancy was 12 years lower.

But there was a lot of joy too: kids could play all day – just ‘be back by dusk’ – children played ten different sporting games all in one day, the ice-cream van arrived regularly, films were shown outdoors on large screens, and packing twenty people into a Volkswagon car was not illegal.

Glover even has a chapter on 15 things to bring back from the 1970s. There are examples of ‘good advice’ from the pages of magazines, and fashion, idioms, television programs, and food. Interspersed throughout the book are interesting black-and-white photographs.

The book is nostalgic and often hilarious, and sometimes embarrassing, but mostly mildy amusing – was it really like that? Well, yes, it was. Thank goodness for cultural revolutions and progress. This is a good book for a laugh, and to see how much has progressed, but also to see how much further we need to progress.

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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