Let’s rethink The Lucky Country. Australia’s fortune was never dumb luck

Sixty summers ago, thousands of Australians were devouring a book published in the lead-up to Christmas which became an instant Aussie classic. Unveiled in December 1964, Donald Horne’s masterwork, The Lucky Country, soon became postwar Australia’s most intellectually influential book. When I first came to live here almost 20 years ago, I consumed it in one gulp, flying, fittingly enough, from Sydney to Perth. Nothing I had ever read so brilliantly encapsulated the vast and confounding continent down below.

Illustration: Simon Letch

Not only did his polemic meet the moment – its first print run sold out in less than a fortnight – in many ways it stood the test of time. Just consider the opening riff, which finds Horne, whisky in hand, on the terrace of a hotel in Hong Kong, considering the regional implications of China: “Australia’s problem is that it now exists in a new and dangerous power situation and its people and policies are not properly re-oriented towards the fact.” He could be describing this very instant.

If Horne had received royalties for every time his most quotable line was re-quoted – “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck” – his bank balance would have rivalled his analytical clout. But other Horneian bon mots were also worthy of repetition. “Many of the nation’s affairs are conducted by racketeers of the mediocre,” he wrote, in another skewering putdown. No wonder the book remains such a literary landmark.

Yet while the prose was scintillating and the thinking of the highest order, Horne had not produced a biblical text: sacred words by which we should continue to live our national intellectual life, a work that was doctrinal and everlasting.

Just as the title has been misappropriated – The Lucky Country was meant sardonically, of course – its subtitle has been mislaid: Australia in the Sixties. Though many insights proved prescient and perennial, Horne was describing a different land. Just consider that superlative line about second-rate politicians, by which Horne meant the then-prime minister Robert Menzies and the then-Labor leader Arthur Calwell. Though it continued to resonate strongly in the ’60s, as Menzies was followed by a succession of unremarkable prime ministers – Harold Holt, John McEwen, John Gorton and William McMahon – this blanket condemnation did not apply to the ’70s, ‘80s or ’90s. Whatever you think of their politics, Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard were not second-rate leaders.

The history of Australia’s democracy … subverts Horne’s overarching thesis that the country was lazily derivative.

Like his long-forgotten subtitle, the words Horne penned after his famous political sledge also need rescuing from obscurity. Not only were politicians second-rate, he said, but the country “lives on other people’s ideas”. In other words, it was second-hand. As he explained in the mid-1970s, “I had in my mind the idea of Australia as a derived society … In the lucky style, we have never ‘earned’ our democracy. We simply went along with some British habits”.

At first glance, Canberra seemed to prove this aphorism. The chambers of the old Parliament House looked like a loving recreation of the Palace of Westminster. But study more closely the history of Australian democracy, and a different story emerges. Rather than being slavishly imitative, Australia has a long history of democratic innovation. It pioneered the secret ballot, female enfranchisement, preferential voting and another essential safeguard against modern-day polarisation: compulsory voting. The history of Australia’s democracy is as much singular as derivative. It speaks of Australian exceptionalism and subverts Horne’s overarching thesis that the country was lazily derivative.

Even more problematic than Horne’s original thesis is the bastardised version of his thesis, which sees Australia as being unusually lucky because it was essentially a mine and paddock with glorious views. “I didn’t mean that it had a lot of material resources,” Horne was at pains to point out in the mid-70s. Yet, it’s precisely this interpretation that continues to exert such a vice-like grip on national thinking. What makes this false rendition so crippling and self-belittling is that it underestimates the extent to which Australia has made its own luck.

Australia is looked upon globally as a laboratory of reform.

For much of the past half-century, however, that is precisely what has happened. The reform era of the Hawke, Keating and Howard years created an Australian model, blending government regulation, free enterprise and social welfare provisions such as Medicare, which underpinned decades of uninterpreted economic growth. Australia survived both the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the dot com recession at the turn of the century before the resources boom kicked in. Other countries have tried to decipher the success of the “wonder Down Under” economy, which is based as much on smart policy settings, such as the Four Pillar banking structure, as coal and iron ore.

The Lucky Country by Donald Horne was published in 1964.Credit:

In a complete upending of Horne’s thesis, Britain has regularly pilfered Australian ideas – from Tony Blair mimicking Hawke and Keating’s “Third Way” to the Conservatives replicating Howard’s “Pacific Solution”. The Albanese government’s social media ban for children below the age of 16 is being closely monitored by other countries. Whether it’s bans on cigarette advertising or forcing tech giants to pay news organisations for access to their journalism, Australia is looked upon globally as a laboratory of reform. The historian Geoffrey Blainey was onto something when he described Australia as “one of the most experimental, and one of the most exceptionalist, countries in the history of the modern world”.

For sure, Australia can too easily succumb to the influence of others. The Trumpification of Australian conservative politics offers a timely case in point. But this is not a country, as Horne put it 60 years ago, that simply “lives off other people’s ideas”. Far from it. Indeed, as well as the 60th anniversary of Horne’s opus, this month marks the 50th anniversary of the groundbreaking work that made solar a viable source of renewable energy. It was pioneered at the University of NSW by one of Australia’s unsung heroes, Professor Martin Green.

The Lucky Country is not the only book from that era that has shaped Australia’s modern-day sense of itself. Published two years later, Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance reinforced the sense of geographic remoteness and geopolitical irrelevance. These two precepts have become increasingly obsolete, as the locus of the world has shifted from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific, but also proven surprisingly obdurate.

Cultural-cringe thinking, that “disease of the Australian mind” identified by A. A. Phillips in his 1950 Meanjin essay, also feels redundant. Far more significant a force is Australia’s cultural clout, as demonstrated this year by the First Nations artist Archie Moore, who became the first Australian to win the coveted Golden Lion award at the Venice Biennale.

Another overly influential work, Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness, which was published in 1960, also feels outdated at a time when local architects are winning such global acclaim with their emphatically Australian aesthetic. The 2024 World Building of the Year, for example, is a public school in Sydney’s inner city designed by the local firm FJC Studio.

Too much of Australia’s postwar intellectual architecture relies on design work from a bygone age. The problem, moreover, is compounded by mutual reinforcement. Lucky Country thinking, Tyranny of Distance thinking and Cultural Cringe thinking have created a superstructure of national self-deprecation.

The good news is that applying a wrecking ball to this kind of antique thinking creates a knock-on effect. Pillars start collapsing on each other. Edifices crumble. Consider this passage penned 20 years ago by Clive James: “When my generation of expatriates went sailing to adventure, most of us believed that what we were leaving behind was a political backwater. In fact, it was one of the most highly developed liberal democracies on Earth, a fitting framework for the cultural expansion that has since made it the envy of nations many times its size.”

Donald Horne, centre, with union leader John Halfpenny, left, and authors Patrick White (right) and Frank Hardy in the background, leading the singing of Advance Australia Fair at Sydney Town Hall in 1976. They were “maintaining the rage” over the dismissal of prime minister Gough Whitlam one year earlier.Credit: Kevin Berry

As James shows here, when you demolish one shibboleth – the idea that the polity is second rate – others come tumbling down.

Australia’s self-belittling streak has its uses. It requires a leap of imagination to see a Trump-like demagogue ever emerging here, given the enduring power of the tall-poppy syndrome and the scything down of puffed-up poseurs who take themselves too seriously.

The problem is that tall-poppy thinking is too often applied to the country as a whole. That, I would suggest, is a product of how Horne’s The Lucky Country still dominates the intellectual landscape. It is a brilliant book, but 60 years after its publication, it’s one that Australia mistakenly takes too seriously.

Nick Bryant, a former BBC Washington correspondent, is the author of The Forever War: America’s Unending Conflict with Itself.