Sixty years ago, Penguin published a small paperback – Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties. Its cover was adorned by a commissioned painting – Albert Tucker’s profile of the archetypal Australian – male (of course), probably a returned soldier, his shirt open, beer mug in-hand, the ace of spades in his top pocket. Fronting a familiar, ocean-blue backdrop, Tucker’s granite-faced Aussie filled the frame, soaking up the sunshine. Like Horne’s depiction of Australia, he seemed to have no idea how he’d come to have it so good.
But visible above the waves, behind the back of Tucker’s Australian bloke, there are four yachts with menacing, shark-like sails. If this is a paradise, it is stalked by danger, haunted by the prospect that the country’s luck was about to run out.
Horne’s book captured an uncertainty about Australia’s future that was beginning to trouble thoughtful people as they contemplated rising consumption at home, war in Australia’s “near north”, and a world in which Australians could no longer simply regard themselves as transplanted Brits. His pithy diagnoses condemned the complacency of the past at the same time as some of his chapter headings – “What is an Australian?”, “Men in Power”, and “Living with Asia” – reflected the anticipation of a society on the brink of enormous change.
Six decades on, at a time when Australians are preoccupied with the cost of living, interest rates, and a housing crisis, it’s easy to lose sight of the scale of Horne’s ambition. He was a journalist and academic who moved from right to left, one who dared to distil the state of the nation, probe its future possibilities and critique its ruling class in prose of vivid, salty irony. Horne was a great generaliser in a era of great generalisers: Robin Boyd on The Australian Ugliness, Geoffrey Blainey on The Tyranny of Distance and with more to come as Australia’s “new nationalism” took shape.
Whatever you make of Horne’s oft-quoted argument that Australia was “a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck”, it’s impossible to deny his gumption. While he would never again write a book with the popularity or effect of his first, Horne was always trying to catch the zeitgeist and give it shape and form in a way that his readers recognised instantly as a fair likeness of themselves.
Can we still contemplate “Australia” with the kind of boldness that Horne did in 1964? Probably not.
We are a more diverse and complex country in a world that seems to move at a pace that mocks the more leisurely mid-1960s. No one today would call Australia The Land of the Long Weekend, as one of those generalisers, Ronald Conway, would in the title of a book published in the late 1970s. Nor would anyone dare, as Horne did in the pages of The Lucky Country, to claim: “The image of Australia is of a man in an open-necked shirt solemnly enjoying an ice-cream. His kiddy is beside him.”
So much has changed since the publication of Horne’s book: an immigration policy that attracts people from every inhabited continent in the world and the increasingly multicultural nature of society; the prominence of Indigenous Australians in the nation’s day-to-day culture; the country’s geopolitical orientation and trading networks; the deregulation of the Australian economy and globalisation; the decline of the two-party system and rise of minor political parties and independents; the culture wars; the digital revolution; changes wrought by feminism; Australia’s involvement in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan; and burning issues such as decolonisation, environmental protection, human rights and settler Australia’s ongoing difficulty in listening to Indigenous voices.
Horne died in 2005 – without the offer of a state funeral from the Howard government that many thought he deserved – and The Lucky Country today is still much quoted, if less frequently read. An award-winning biography by Ryan Cropp has recently revived interest in Horne’s life and ideas. And it would be easy to imagine that a book written on the eve of great transformations in Australian society by a journalist, author and academic born shortly after the first world war no longer has very much to teach us.
Yet perhaps it was the ambition, purpose and method of The Lucky Country, more than its actual content, that should matter to us today. Horne was an opinionated man but his mind was not a closed one. If he had a “tribe” of his own it was the intellectuals – especially from Sydney, his home town – the people who thought, conversed and wrote for a living.
It was not a political tribe of the modern kind with its insistent pull on our loyalties, its demand that we display one way of understanding the world and reject all others. His was a society in which there was still a shared sense of a public sphere – one still dominated by white Anglo men but beginning to open to more diverse influences.
That old, pre-digital public culture had many faults and frailties, but it was a world away from the guerrilla warfare of our media and cultural landscape today. It did not involve parsing every phrase uttered by an adversary to find grounds for casting them out into the darkness. Even in an era of ideological conflict generated by the cold war – and Horne wore his anti-communism on his sleeve – serious debate meant exploring differences not merely accentuating them, as routinely happens today for clicks or likes.
There are some pungent criticisms of academics and universities in The Lucky Country, with the humanities coming in for rough handling. Universities were decaying. Academics treated their duties as a job and they were more interested in money than ideas. And there was surely an implied contrast here with the author of The Lucky Country, who had never completed a university degree but worried deeply over ideas and did not expect to find them in only one place, or as the closely guarded property of one particular media outlet or news “feed”.
That remains a pretty good model for us all today. The humanities – conceived as an open, exploratory and systematic form of inquiry into what it is that makes us human – can provide one source of inspiration and expertise. Taking them seriously might make for a more civil discourse, an openness to ideas that can be shared across different kinds of political commitment and an expanded sense of the national political possibility. After the failure of last year’s voice to parliament referendum, the humanities might also play an important role in truth-telling and in the daunting task of charting a direction for the nation in a post-voice era.
Frank Bongiorno is a professor of history at the Australian National University. Mark McKenna is emeritus professor in history at the University of Sydney and an honorary professor at the National Centre of Biography at the ANU
The Australian Academy of the Humanities will convene a three-day symposium at the Australian National University from 13 to 15 November called “The Ideas and Ideals of Australia: The Lucky Country turns sixty”
