The Lucky Country Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  The Lucky Country

  Donald Horne was born in 1921. He was a diplomatic cadet, journalist, magazine editor and academic. In 1973 he joined the staff of the University of New South Wales and in 1987 was appointed professor emeritus. He was Chancellor of the University of Canberra, Chair of the Australia Council, and also held office in other cultural, educational and social organisations. He wrote twenty-eight books and was a frequent contributor to Australian and international newspapers, magazines and journals. He died in 2005.

  ALSO BY DONALD HORNE

  The Permit

  The Education of Young Donald

  Southern Exposure

  God is an Englishman

  The Next Australia

  But What if There Are No Pelicans?

  The Story of the Australian People

  Money Made Us

  Death of the Lucky Country

  His Excellency’s Pleasure

  Right Way, Don’t Go Back

  In Search of Billy Hughes

  Time of Hope

  Winner Take All

  The Great Museum

  Confessions of a New Boy

  The Public Culture

  The Lucky Country Revisited

  Portrait of an Optimist

  Ideas for a Nation

  The Intelligent Tourist

  The Avenue of the Fair Go

  An Interrupted Life

  Into the Open: Memoirs 1958–99

  Looking for Leadership

  10 Steps to a More Tolerant Australia

  Dying: A Memoir (with Myfanwy Horne)

  Donald

  Horne

  The Lucky

  Country

  With an Introduction by

  Hugh Mackay

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London, WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 1964

  This sixth edition published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2008

  Copyright © Myfanwy Horne 1964, 1965, 1967, 1971, 1998, 2005

  Introduction to the Sixth Edition © Hugh Mackay

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  penguin.com.au

  ISBN: 978-1-74253-157-1

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION BY HUGH MACKAY

  INTRODUCTION TO THE THE FIFTH EDITION

  NOTES TO THE FOURTH EDITION

  PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

  PROLOGUE

  Peopled from all over Asia

  Chapter 1 THE AUSTRALIAN DREAM

  Innocent happiness

  Nation without a mind

  Chapter 2 WHAT IS AN AUSTRALIAN?

  The first suburban nation

  Fair go, mate

  Having a good time

  Give it a go

  Racketeers of the mediocre

  Chapter 3 SENSES OF DIFFERENCE

  Eleven cities

  The bush

  The wowsers

  Catholics

  Snobs

  Cultural breakthrough

  Women

  Migrants – how assimilated?

  The underprivileged

  Chapter 4 BETWEEN BRITAIN AND AMERICA

  Lost bearings

  Looking to Britain

  Looking to America

  Provincial Australia

  A republic?

  Chapter 5 LIVING WITH ASIA

  What is Asia?

  The power situation

  Images of Asia

  Racism in Australia: White Australia

  Racism in Australia: Aborigines

  Attitudes to Oceania

  Chapter 6 MEN AT WORK

  Men of business

  Open spaces

  The unions

  Chapter 7 MEN IN POWER

  Who runs Australia?

  From America – federalism

  From Britain – Parliaments

  Australia’s four-party system: the struggle for the Labour Movement

  The four-party system: ‘tensions’ of the Coalition

  The bureaucracy

  The pressure groups

  What’s in it for him?

  Chapter 8 THE AGE OF MENZIES

  The great survivor

  The Age of Menzies

  After Menzies

  Chapter 9 FORMING OPINIONS

  Censors

  Schools

  Images of life

  The ‘academics’

  The Press

  The intellectuals

  Chapter 10 THE LUCKY COUNTRY

  Living on our luck

  Will the luck last?

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION TO THE SIXTH EDITION BY HUGH MACKAY

  The ABC broadcaster Peter Thompson once shared a taxi with Donald Horne and found him in an exasperated state. Horne was voicing, yet again, his frustration at having to listen to people misinterpreting his phrase ‘the lucky country’. It had become an albatross around his neck.

  ‘I wish I’d never used it,’ he said to Thompson, perhaps rather disingenuously.

  Never has a book title passed so rapidly into the language as this one. We embraced it from the beginning and incorporated it into our view of ourselves in a way that generally missed Horne’s point. He was being ironic and critical, warning us of the serious danger of relying on luck. Yet those who had never read the book thought he was giving the nation a reason to celebrate.

  Here’s what he actually said, back in 1964:

  Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise. A nation more concerned with styles of life than with achievement has managed to achieve what may be the most evenly prosperous society in the world. It has done this in a social climate largely inimical to originality and the desire for excellence (except in sport) and in which there is less and less acclamation of hard work. According to the rules Australia has not deserved its good fortune.

  That quote, from Chapter 10 of The Lucky Country, was under the sub-heading ‘Living on our luck’. So ‘lucky’, to Horne
, meant we were lucky to get away with it. We’d succeeded more by good luck than good management. We didn’t deserve our luck – it just came to us, the way luck does.

  But we preferred our own version of the story implied by the title of the book. People just back from a holiday at the beach or in the mountains, struck by Australia’s natural beauty, would exclaim: ‘We truly live in the lucky country!’ Journalists and subeditors frequently incorporated the phrase into their headlines and copy. Politicians routinely grafted ‘lucky’ onto ‘country’ (the way some of them later did with ‘Muslim’ and ‘extremist’) as if it were a compound noun: ‘luckycountry’. Even preachers adopted it: ‘We praise you, O Lord, that we live in the lucky country!’

  In his Introduction to the fifth edition of the book, Horne alluded to ‘the long misuse of the phrase … as if it were praise for Australia rather than a warning’ and attributed this distortion to ‘the empty-mindedness of a mob of assorted public wafflers’.

  Some newcomers, perhaps responding to the sentiments of those ‘public wafflers’ and unaware of Horne’s excoriating analysis, took up the refrain: ‘We’re so happy to be in the lucky country.’ Perhaps, for them, ‘lucky’ meant ‘bright prospects’ or ‘health and happiness’, or perhaps, in their cultures, ‘luck’ is a virtue or a blessing rather than an accident.

  Come to think of it, such ideas are well entrenched in the Australian psyche, too. We applaud winners of school raffles as if their luck is an achievement. Perhaps the inner meaning of Horne’s phrase was doomed, from the start, to be interpreted in ways that made us feel more comfortable with it than he intended.

  *

  Donald Horne – born 1921, died 2005 – variously described as an academic, journalist, political scientist, philosopher and historian – was actually Australia’s pioneering social researcher, though he himself would have rejected such a mantle. He despised the public opinion research industry, especially for its stultifying effect on politics, based on his early years in the advertizing business where he had seen at first hand how easily market research could kill a good idea – and, it must be said, promote a mediocre one. (Though a researcher myself, I share his dismay at the dispiriting effect of research on our public and commercial life – especially via those ubiquitous and often ill-conceived ‘focus groups’ that are treated with far too much reverence by everyone from politicians to marketing executives.)

  Yet research was what Horne was best at. His method was both inductive and intuitive, based on piercingly astute observation and a capacity for rational analysis developed under the influence of one of his academic heroes: Professor John Anderson at Sydney University. The Lucky Country still stands as the benchmark for anyone trying to make sense of Australia in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and even into these early years of the twenty-first. Obviously, Australia has changed, again and again, since 1964 and Horne himself has written about many of the changes in his subsequent books. But listen to some of the fruits of his early research:

  What is sometimes not realized by those who attack ‘suburbanism’ is that the entire gentility–vulgarity confrontation is out of date. The gentility is going, too. The existence of a substantial body of people who valued sobriety and hard work was long suppressed by the myth-makers; now it is overstated … New generations are denying the old proprieties and stuffiness … A new style of life is developing that is less rigid … The mass of young Australians (about half the population is under 25) seems to be becoming more the same – in some new way that is still mysterious (p.19).

  That was Horne sensing the beginnings of a culture shift wrought by the Baby Boomers’ journey to early adulthood. Here he is again, acknowledging the growing significance of our relations with countries to our north, and chastising us for the dangerous Australian (and European) tendency to talk of ‘Asians’ – a tendency that persists today.

  Asia is too big, too diverse to consider itself as an entity. It is a collection of sub-continents, themselves divided.

  The physical racial differences of Asians are greater than those of Europeans. Religious differences are greater (Buddhism in several varieties, Hinduism, Confucianism, Communism, Mahommedanism, Christianity). Stages of economic development are considerably greater. And while there is some sense of a common civilization in Europe, there is none in Asia (p.111).

  Horne recommended that we look to what he called ‘the South Seas’ to throw some illumination on life in Australia, rather than relying on almost exclusive comparisons with the UK and the US:

  The place to send migrants so they can feel they belong is to the beach, one of the strongest centres of gregariousness in the ocean cities. Australians do not sit at pavement cafes to watch the promenade. They go to the beach, sun themselves and surf, and watch the promenade there … A man likes to sit in the sun and say nothing, do nothing and think very little. On holidays, Australians like to retreat to shacks or even tents beside the water, and enjoy the primitive (p.32).

  Although those observations still hold true for large chunks of the population, Horne had not yet discerned the beginnings of the powerful influence of European immigrants (especially Greeks and Italians) on our way of life – ultimately leading to our own eagerness to ‘sit at pavement cafes to watch the promenade’. Nor could he have anticipated the coming explosion of wealth at the top of the economic heap that would draw many Australians right away from ‘primitive’ holidays. Still, his analysis of the origins of our pleasure-seeking and ‘she’ll-be-right’ attitudes casts useful light on contemporary trends. Our recent long period of disengagement from politics and social issues in favour of a retreat to backyard issues, for instance, suggests the ‘South Seas’ mentality identified by Horne persists as a bulwark against too much seriousness.

  Fast forward to 2001, and Horne is still at it – observing, sifting, analyzing and assessing. In Looking for Leadership, he is as bleak on the subject of political leadership as he was in 1964, describing the ‘tatty speeches’ of the Howard era ‘that wouldn’t make it in a theme park’. But he also puts his finger on a piece of contemporary foolishness that had escaped many other observers:

  In the Howard era … another view of Australia emerged. It became one of the characteristic expressions of the era – ‘the community’. Not community as in a small group, but as if twenty million of us were all living in one village joined in the same belief and habits. (As anyone who has lived in a village knows, this is not a definitive description of village life.) If it’s used (absurdly) as a term for a whole complex modern society, community almost always means conformity. (I have an idea that community came into political discourse some decades ago in ‘community standards’, a phrase used to justify censorship and other kinds of banning.) In any case, community is not necessarily good in itself, and more than diversity is necessarily good in itself. Much of the appeal of Nazism as a life experience was based on the craving for one Reich that, after some ethnic cleansing, could appear to be one big Volk (2001, p.250–51).

  Horne was an observer and analyst, rather than a forecaster: he explicitly resisted the urge to predict. One of the pleasures of a return to The Lucky Country (or, indeed, a first look at it) forty-four years after it was written, is to be able to identify the early signs of a number of quite radical changes in Australia – demographic, cultural, economic, social – and to identify issues that would soon need to be addressed.

  Noting that organized religion was on the wane, he sensed the persistence of a ‘wowser’ effect in Australian society that was a carryover from the days of morality being dictated from the pulpit. But he had no way of knowing that Catholicism would become the dominant Christian denomination, that Anglicanism would fade (he called it ‘Church of England’ of course: the Anglican label wasn’t adopted until 1981) or that religious fundamentalism, especially of the Pentecostalist variety, would surge at the turn of the century with its ‘prosperity theology’ perfectly tuned to the rampant materialism of the times.


  He also identified Catholicism as having been one of the most bitterly divisive factors in Australia, though he noted the bitterness was waning by the time he wrote The Lucky Country. He observed that newcomers could not always discern the lingering effects of this bitterness, though perhaps he missed the truth that has since become more apparent, that Catholicism and anti-Catholicism were more tribal than spiritual, often having more to with identity than faith. The same became true, in a later era, in relation to Islamic and anti-Islamic attitudes: prejudice against Muslims often seemed to be based on anxiety about whether they might have a stronger attachment to Islam than to Australia – just as Protestants used to wonder whether Catholics took their orders from Rome.

  The odd thing about all that, of course, is that most devout Christians, of any denomination, would probably claim that their faith gives them a sense of identity that transcends nationalism or even patriotism, so such prejudices are almost always more about ‘otherness’ than any serious objection to people’s beliefs.

  Horne had discerned a new set of emerging attitudes to marriage and correctly surmised that the continuing high incidence of marriages in churches (then over 90 per cent, compared with only 40 per cent today) was a cultural habit left over from the nineteenth century rather than a sign of religious attachment. Subsequent changes – acknowledged by him in Looking for Leadership – confirm that the Sixties marked the beginning of a sexual revolution that inevitably altered attitudes to marriage and, most especially, to cohabitation before, or permanently outside of, marriage.

  Horne’s analysis was based on the demography of his day: Australia was a ‘young’ country. Today, we’re rapidly becoming an ‘old’ country: The proportion of the population aged under fifteen years old is projected to decrease from 20 per cent in 2004 to about 15 per cent by the middle of this century. By then, about 25 per cent of the population will be over the age of sixty-five. In 1964, the birthrate was falling, but there was no way of knowing that the downward trend would continue to the point we’ve now reached – 1.8 babies per woman (down from 3.5 in 1961) – way below replacement levels, and likely to fall even further.