By Phillip Deery
BIOGRAPHY
Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country
Ryan Cropp
La Trobe University Press, $37.99
This is an impressive biography, impeccably researched and beautifully crafted. In its scope, detail, and fluency, it is comparable to the best biographies of George Orwell. The comparison is apt: numerous reviewers likened Horne’s God is an Englishman (1969) to the plain-speaking prose of Orwell, and the publisher’s blurb claims this biography positions Horne as an “antipodean Orwell”.
But all of Orwell’s biographers, as Anna Funder emphasised in Wifedom, denied agency to Orwell’s first wife. Thankfully, Ryan Cropp does not similarly airbrush the women from Donald Horne’s crowded life.
Donald Horne, pictured at the launch of his book Into the Open in 2000.Credit: Brendan Esposito
Politically Horne was no Orwell. Until the 1970s, he was a committed and active cold warrior, a self-styled radical conservative. In the late 1940s, in a torrent of articles and opinion pieces, he relentlessly denounced the “totalitarianism” of the Chifley government’s postwar planning and its mild socialism, and advocated libertarian individualism and laissez-faire economics.
In the early 1950s he joined the Conservative Party in England and campaigned against the Attlee Labour government, even contemplating becoming a Tory MP. By the mid-1950s he had embraced the fiercely anti-communist Australian Association for Cultural Freedom (AACF), later edited its publication, Quadrant, and became increasingly apocalyptic in his Cold War attitudes.
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Hired by Frank Packer, Horne became editor of The Bulletin in 1960. He stripped the magazine of its old racist shibboleths, but steered it in a more strident anti-communist direction. Where others discarded their global bipolar spectacles in light of changing geostrategic realities, Horne became more paranoid about the communist threat at home and abroad. Assisted by the AACF and the “hyper-conspiratorial” Frank Knopfelmacher, he used The Bulletin to mount a crusade against communist treachery in universities.
It was later revealed that ASIO, as part of its “spoiling operations”, played a hidden role in this campaign. Packer unceremoniously sacked him in 1962. In this period, Horne was regarded by the liberal left, as Cropp notes, as an “unapologetic red-baiter, Packer stooge and all-round intellectual gadfly of the political right”.
But then came The Lucky Country, published in 1964. It was his first book and became an instant hit. Within two years it sold a remarkable 80,000 copies and, regularly revised by Horne, it has never been out of print.
Few readers would fail to recall its most memorable line: “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.” Mediocre leadership, old ways of thinking and stunted intellectual vision were embodied, Horne argued, by prime minister Robert Menzies, with political inertia and cultural pessimism the result.
His judgment was confirmed when the irony of the book’s title was missed, taken at face value, and used to self-congratulate, reinforcing the same cushioned complacency the book had sought to challenge. But longer term, The Lucky Country helped provide a framework for political change and a sharper sense of an Australian identity.
From left: Union leader John Halfpenny, writer and academic Donald Horne and author Patrick White, with Frank Hardy in the background, lead the singing of Advance Australia Fair at Sydney Town Hall in 1976. They were “maintaining the rage” over the dismissal of the prime minister, Gough Whitlam one year earlier.Credit: Kevin Berry
The Lucky Country was a significant benchmark in Horne’s bumpy intellectual journey towards the moderate left. It was also the catalyst for launching his career as a citizen-intellectual, a republican activist and an engaged academic. Unlike his AACF friends, embroiled in the scandal over CIA funding of Quadrant, Horne could adapt to shifting circumstances, revise his earlier doomsday predictions and see the ’60s as a time of hope, not threat.
He went from reporting to an ASIO contact in the 1950s to ASIO reporting on him in the 1970s. He was devastated by John Kerr’s 1975 dismissal of Gough Whitlam, whom he regarded as a political visionary, a man “born to be a king” (a strange comment from an ardent republican).
His outrage fundamentally transformed his political outlook and his public role. He spoke at innumerable meetings and wrote countless columns and essays supporting many causes, while continuing to interrogate the myths and values of Australia itself. His notoriety, thanks to The Lucky Country, meant he was listened to. He made a difference. As Humphrey McQueen once commented, Horne helped remove “intellectual” from the list of Australian swear words.
A central preoccupation of the book is Horne’s long march: from right to left, from embittered pessimist to tolerant pluralist, from an outlier writing for trashy tabloids to an insider advising political leaders. But it is also a book about Horne’s ideas and what shaped them.
They evolved not only from prolific reading but also from conversation. Horne brought his ideas, and many bottles of wine, to his legendary long lunches, where they were tested and reformulated before they made it onto paper. Then, Horne was able to make “complicated things comprehensible” and ready for wider consumption.
Cropp concludes that we are unlikely to have another Donald Horne. But this compelling biography reminds us of the need, today, to retrieve those values Horne championed in The Lucky Country: raise the standard of public debate, replace mediocrity with vision, and reinvigorate the political culture with ethically charged arguments about Australia’s future.
Phillip Deery’s latest book, Spies and Sparrows: ASIO and the Cold War, is published by Melbourne University Press.
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