EVERYDAY PEOPLE:
Challenging childhoods made Debra Oswald and Richard Glover cherish ordinary life. As they cuddle their first grandchild the couple talks to Juliet Rieden about love, parenthood and Debra’s heart-stopping new work.
broadcaster Richard Glover and writer Debra Oswald
Richard Glover is stroking the leaves of his prodigious basil plant expounding the secret to its fragrant glossiness.
“It’s the worm poo,” he announces as he leads me to a boxy structure at the back of the garden distilling murky liquid into a plastic bucket. The newspaper columnist, author and ABC radio host proudly lifts the lid of his worm farm to reveal the rotting kitchen scraps on which the Glover 1000-plus worm colony feeds, ultimately resulting in the perfect fertiliser for his basil, which I understand is used in significant quantities for home-made pesto.
Inside the house Richard’s partner of 40 years, creator of hit TV series Offspring, award-winning playwright and best-selling novelist Debra
Oswald is busy with The Weekly’s
styling team, while sleeping soundly in his mother (daughter-in-law) Shelley’s arms on the sofa is the couple’s brand new and first grandchild, Cassian. Wandering between the family throng making sure everything’s in order is the prince of this suburban idyll, Clancy. The handsome five-year-old kelpie needs no introduction, he’s just as famous as his owners thanks to his regular newspaper column and recent book of letters Love, Clancy. All in all, it’s a pretty regular family scene, which I later realise is the glue at the heart of Richard and Debra’s rather special relationship.
I’m here to talk about Deb’s latest novel, a psychological thriller about guilt, responsibility, friendship and yes, family. It’s a roller-coaster ride, expertly crafted with a teasing moral dilemma at its heart – is murder ever justifiable? You may think the answer is obvious, but The Family Doctor
offers genuine pause for thought.
The story opens with a grisly scene as GP Paula discovers her best friend Stacey lying in a pool of blood at her house with Stacey’s two children curled up together against the dining room skirting board. Paula rushes to save 10-year-old Cameron and eight-year-old Poppy, but they have already been shot in the head. As she struggles to find any sign of life, their father Matt lurches into view, lifts his rifle and blasts his head off.
This chilling first chapter crackles with the dramatic skills Debra has honed over decades and could equally be a scene from a TV series or play. But next it shifts into a thoughtprovoking thriller, leaving philosophical hot potatoes smouldering in the reader’s mind as the twisting plot unfolds.
“I was thinking about one of the [real-life] cases where the children were killed and about if you were the doctor for that family and you’d spent your whole professional life caring for little children. I feel quite emotional just talking about it,” says Debra who, I later discover, always becomes deeply enmeshed with her characters.
“I thought about afterwards and if you were there looking after the next little children who might be in danger, what might start turning over in your mind. That was the imaginative switch that got me thinking.”
As she talks Debra’s eyes roll back and I can feel her creative cogs spinning, she’s right there in the midst of her tale, living her fiction. In much of her work the seed comes from real life and in this case it was the horrific epidemic of domestic violence cutting a swathe through Australian households. “I would sit in bed in the morning reading the paper, watching the news – another one, another one – feeling this helpless rage. I didn’t know how I could write about it because I didn’t want to write as a victim – because I’m not – and I didn’t want it to be some titillating story about a psychopathic murderer. So I started from the position that I was in, which was as an anguished observer and how that rage might tip you over into doing something about it, however unwise that might be.”
Debra works alone in her home office tapping away at her computer, conjuring up characters and plots using Richard as a sounding board all the way through. “I think when you look at those cases, particularly where there’s been an inquest so you know that the woman had been desperately trying to seek help from everybody in the system and the system totally failed her, I think everyone’s mad as hell about that,” says Richard. And as we launch into a discussion of legal stuff-ups and flawed patriarchal systems, I can see exactly how these two work – bouncing around ideas.
Culture vulture
Debra has been thinking up stories since she was a little girl. “I loved going to the Parramatta Library once a week. My dad used to take us in our pyjamas and I’d settle in. My parents would take me to the theatre as well. I thought it was so thrilling and the idea that I would get to make up stories seemed exciting but also very possible because I was so little I didn’t understand that that was quite a difficult thing.” Debra poured her story ideas into her Olivetti Lettera
32. The typewriter was recently put out for the council clean-up – “I regret that now,” she adds.
Debra’s mum was a ‘ten-pound Pom’ from South London; her father from a working-class Melbourne family and both supported their daughter’s endeavours. “They were both smart, ambitious people who didn’t get an education so were quite ambitious that their daughters [Debra and sister Kate, who is now a GP] would and also that we would have quite a culturally rich life even though we lived in deepest Carlingford [Sydney].”
Whether Debra’s highly-tuned imagination was the result of her cultural deep dives or innate, it certainly helped with her increasingly impressive playwriting – she wrote radio plays to help fund her through university. It also fed a vivid and growing hypochondria. “When I was eight, I was convinced I had stomach cancer and my mother had to take me to the doctor to be reassured that I didn’t,” she says.
It’s a condition that stretched into adult life. “I worked on it for a lot of years. I would battle hard and I’ve probably been free of it for 15 years,” she explains. When I ask if she ever managed to pinpoint the cause for her anxiety she suggests, “It’s probably connected with some idea that I felt
there was something fundamentally wrong with me, that I was wrong inside, therefore cancer cells were taking over. Years ago, I would have said my mother didn’t love me very much, but I think she probably did, but she did it badly. She tried. It meant that whenever things were going well in my life, if everyone seemed really happy or I suddenly I got some great opportunity in my career, I would then become terrified that I had a terminal illness, so I could never be happy, I would have to be punished.”
Richard is nodding. “She would imagine herself into those scenes totally and play out all the terrors of
that right up to our children coming and visiting her at the bedside. But I think it connects with Debra’s writing. Sometimes when I come home she’ll be pacing up and down the hallway in tears and she’ll have worked herself into being one of the characters from the play or the TV show she’s writing and suddenly she’ll be talking like Kat Stewart in Offspring.”
The funny side
The dysfunctions of Richard’s own traumatic childhood were revealed in comic depth in his 2015 memoir Flesh Wounds with its subtitle “for anyone whose family was not what they ordered”. The book is at once heartbreaking and hilarious as we learn of how Richard managed his distant and alcoholic father and his self-deluded mother’s neglect and narcissism. Tales of the disgraceful parenting of only-child Richard tumble out like a stand-up comedian’s confessional but even with his wry delivery it’s hard to comprehend how Richard emerged so calm and well-rounded.
“I do think it’s funny sometimes, we go to the theatre and there’ll be some scarifying play about how absolutely terrible life is; all is poison and everyone’s full of evil. When I see those plays I always think, ‘gee whiz, that author, they must have had a really good childhood. Their parents must have really loved them’,” Richard says by way of explanation.
“One of the interesting things about my work is that a lot of it is about normal family life. The book about the dog is about day-to-day life. All the newspaper columns are like that, and I think it grows out of the fact that I respect ordinary, day-to-day life, ordinary parenting, ordinary childhood. It’s incredibly valuable. If you missed it you value it. You understand how rare it is and how much it should be celebrated.”
I suggest that the shared lack of love in their childhoods drew Richard and Debra together. “Yes,” Richard replies without hesitation. Debra is inclined to agree, but explains it wasn’t that simple. “I’m very unromantic, despite being known for having written a rom-com, and so I don’t believe in ‘the one’. I think that’s nonsense. But I don’t think I would have survived as a writer without Richard because I would have given up. It’s too hard. Most people don’t have careers that last 30, 40, 50 years because it’s too emotionally draining. I think I’ve stuck with it because of him.”
“That’s a lovely thing to say,” says Richard smiling. “It’s interesting people say ‘opposites attract’ because I’m sure that’s true for some people but for us we’re spookily similar.”
Partners in life
Richard and Debra met at the Australian National University. “I was in third year when Richard came back to Canberra. He’d been off travelling the world and was strutting his stuff, carrying on like he thought he was God’s gift – ‘I’ve been living in London’,” explains Deb. “I was trying to put on plays at ANU, not my own plays – Joe Orton and stuff. Richard offered to paint my sets. That’s not a euphemism – he did paint my sets.”
Richard interjects. “I saw the poster, I adored Orton [a British playwright known for his raucous farces] and I think it’s funny that we met over a sex farce. I went in and there was this young woman in bib and brace overalls; she was producing the plays and I offered to paint her sets …”
They were both dating other people
at the time and a friendship developed which later came with “benefits” and developed into an exclusive partnership.
In his memoir Richard recalls the moment he knew Debra was the one. She was 20 and he was 21. It was as if Cupid’s arrow had suddenly lanced him. They were at a dinner party in Canberra. “Debra was standing in front of the fireplace, her head haloed in the candlelight and I thought, ‘my God, that is it’,” he says grinning.
Debra had decided long before and was constantly hearing “I don’t know” from Richard. “There was a moment when I finished my honours thesis and I was going to come to Sydney and he was going to have made his decision. I remember I missed the train and I couldn’t get a seat on the bus and I finally used my last student dollars to get a standby flight. I left a message on his answering machine saying, ‘I’ll be at the Ansett-Pioneer terminal on Oxford Street if you want me’. I arrived and he was there waiting for me. We count that – because we’re not married – as our anniversary.”
“We fell back on the black vinyl couches,” quips Richard.
Their relationship has never wavered but marriage was never a consideration. “For both of us, that had bad connotations. Debra less so, but my parents had a very difficult marriage which continued after they’d got divorced. They spent every waking second badmouthing each other to me, so the word ‘husband’ and the word ‘wife’ and the word ‘marriage’, to me they’re always full of bad connotations,” says Richard.
Debra knew early on about the shortcomings of Richard’s childhood but meeting his father for the first time was still a shock. “He was drunk, in his underpants, on all fours, with blood streaming from his forehead, trying to reach the door handle,” recalls Debra. “I said, ‘Hello, Mr Glover, lovely to meet you.’ … I was never under any illusions of the gene pool into which I was diving,” she adds with a chuckle.
While they both have an ability to make light of the very dark, I wonder if the encounter made her want to scoop Richard up. “Yes, I guess so,” she muses. “We scooped each other up. Being a writer is a hard life and I have problems with depression and anxiety as well. It felt as if we were rescuing each other.”
“I’ve certainly always felt saved by Debra,” Richard adds. “People talk about parental love as if it’s this automatic and inexorable thing, so much so that you should feel quite aggrieved if you don’t get it, but the truth is that a lot of people don’t get it – not half but close to half don’t get the love they would want to give a child themselves. Yet most people survive; not everybody, sometimes it’s so terrible you can’t survive, but most people survive because they find the love elsewhere, and I found it with Debra. She instantly made up for whatever I’d missed out on.”
Despite their childhoods Richard and Debra always knew they wanted children of their own. “The world is full of great parents who had difficult childhoods,” says Richard. It took a few years to get pregnant, then eldest, Daniel, was born by caesarean with Richard waiting in the corridor outside in the old Royal Hospital for Women in Paddington, Sydney. “I can remember feeling the excitement and the trepidation and the hugeness of it. Then moments later being called in by the doctor and this little thing, this person being lifted out.”
“It was brilliant … Here’s a sooky story,” Debra grins. “Dan had come early and I’d planned to set up my home office in those last weeks and
I’d run out of time, so when I was in hospital after the caesarean, Richard was coming into the hospital and falling asleep on the bed as if he was unwell. He had all these brown marks all over his arms and I remember thinking, oh no, he’s ill, he’s dying. But the marks were paint, he was getting up before dawn every day and working on this office so that when I came home from hospital there was a big ribbon across the door. Even though I wasn’t going to be using the office that week it was this thing that my professional life, my creative life
was still safe in that room. It was very romantic.”
Five years later Joe was born. Debra’s parents turned out to be wonderful grandparents. And Richard says he found the father he never had in Debra’s dad, who died in 2006. But Richard’s folks continued in their own uniquely eccentric way. His mother, who readers of his memoir will recall ran off with his English teacher when Richard was 14, was germ-phobic and visits to her home with the boys proved memorable. “It was hilarious when we took Joe and Dan there when they were young. She had them sitting on the middle of a vinyl pouffe in the middle of a sheet that she’d put out so they couldn’t shed their germs.
“But one of my fondest memories of Dan was from one visit when she did at least turn on the television for them, but the seat was so small that they couldn’t sit side by side. So, the older brother, Dan – he is still like this, very thoughtful – he arranged it so the little brother could see the TV set and he sat the other way so that Joe could lean on his back and he just stared at the wall for an hour, quite tense because he didn’t want to move.”
Such adventures have become family jokes retold by each in turn with comic embellishments. But beneath Richard’s ability to see the funny side there must be childhood scars. “Yes,” concedes Debra. “But I think everyone’s damaged and a bit messed up in the head. Richard can have problems with self-esteem, problems hearing what he sees as terrible criticism when you’re just saying something fairly normal; he can react with an emotional temperature that’s greater than the moment warrants.
“But I think both of us have this bottomless pit that requires validation. That’s one of the reasons we’ve both been so prolific in our work lives. There’s a sense in which you’re desperately trying to win the approval of your parents that you will never get. Some of the things I see in
Richard I know are in me as well.”
In each other Debra and Richard have found something special, something they both were looking for though possibly without realising it. “One of the great gifts is being loved and then ending up with this very deep feeling that you’re innately loveable and you’re worth loving just for yourself,” says Richard. “People can be born in very grim circumstances in other ways but if they have that it’s such a gift.”
Another gift for the couple has been parenthood and they are super-proud of their two sons. “Dan [33] is the advisor to the Federal Industry Minister. And Joe [28] is a high school design and tech teacher and also a musician,” says Debra.
On Christmas day their first grandson, Cassian James, was born to
son Joe and his partner, Shelley Eves. Richard jokes that they have a very nice couple who they allow to take care of their grandson. Grandpa Glover is in raptures.
Today he is walking around the house cradling the baby crooning ‘Cassian is sleeping’. “I used to love singing Road to Gundagai to the boys,” he recalls fondly.
For Debra the wonder is in seeing her son as a father. “People talk about the joy of being grandparents and that’s definitely there. The thing I hadn’t really thought about was the joy in seeing your child be a parent. To see how much he’s loving it and how absolutely dedicated and focused he is.
It’s magic.”