Joe Hildebrand: Why Australia really is The Lucky Country

Australia’s certainly not perfect – neither is anywhere else in the world. ‘But, God I feel lucky to live here’, writes Joe Hildebrand.

The historian Donald Horne famously called Australia The Lucky Country but he didn’t mean it in a good way.

Instead, he saw it as a place run by “second rate people” who somehow fluked their way to national success.

A yellowed copy of his book was one of many stacked for years in the outside dunny of my childhood home in Dandenong. I stared at the title a lot as a kid and thankfully never opened it to find the irony.

Like most of us, I simply assumed that we were indeed the lucky country and figured that was a good thing.

We are certainly luckier than most. Our nation was born of reform, not revolution. We have never had to suffer a civil war or foreign invasion.

And despite the many hard times and inevitable outbreaks of division, our standard of living and social cohesion has long been a wonder to the rest of the world.

Our standard of living and social cohesion has long been a wonder to the rest of the world.

The very notion of a nation where most people had a backyard big enough to play cricket in was unthinkable to those who invented the game, and they once ran the biggest empire on Earth.

Likewise the peaceful transition from a bunch of colonies to an independent sovereign state is a precious rare phenomenon in human history. Just ask America or India or Africa.

And that’s just the British ones. French and Spanish and Dutch possessions fared infinitely worse. And let’s not even talk about the Belgians.

From the brave freedom-loving slaves in tiny Haiti to the independence fighters of Mexico to the fierce nationalists who stitched together the vast Indonesian archipelago, all these nations were forged in grotesque quantities of blood and death.

Instead, we held a conference.

Critics might point to the difference between native people rising up against their colonial oppressors and European Australians devolving from the empire. Yes, we are Canada with better weather, and New Zealand with better beaches.

But that doesn’t explain pretty much all of South and Latin America, where Spanish and Portuguese descendants became the most ardent nationalists and which ended up oscillating between socialism and fascism almost ever since.

The first British settlers did not come here with malevolent genocidal intent. Picture: Nikki Short

Were we just lucky? Certainly most Indigenous Australians probably don’t feel so.

And the gap between non-Indigenous and Aboriginal standards of living – and life itself – is our most profound national challenge.

But it is also one that can never be addressed if it is not understood that, despite some hysterical activist rhetoric, the first British settlers did not come here with malevolent genocidal intent.

On the contrary, the instructions from mad old King George, and the actions of the far more competent Arthur Phillip, were determinedly of goodwill.

The horrors of disease, alcohol, and black-on-white conflict soon evaporated those lofty hopes, and the actions of many settlers were abominable.

But that awful fact should not be retrofitted to the noble – albeit entirely naive – intentions of the First Fleet. They genuinely thought they were endowed with a mission to found a bold new world in which even criminal Irish papists might be redeemed.

As a member of that last cohort, I can confirm that dream has not yet been realised.

But you’ve got to admire their optimism.

Is Australia perfect? No, and neither is anywhere else in the world.

But God I feel lucky to live here.

Joe Hildebrand is a News Corp columnist.

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Why Australia really is The Lucky Country