The Lucky Country Read online

  Horne wouldn’t have predicted that because he had not realized, in 1964, that the embryonic women’s liberation movement was actually building into a revolutionary force that would rewrite our marriage, divorce, birthrate and household statistics. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique was published the year before The Lucky Country, but it wasn’t until 1970 that Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics added their fuel to the revolutionary fire.

  No aspect of the Australian way of life has been left untouched by the gender revolution, so The Lucky Country is a sobering reminder that, a mere forty-four years ago, it was possible to give a comprehensive account of Australian culture and customs without even acknowledging the issue of sexual inequality. In a chapter un-ironically titled ‘Men in Power’, Horne doesn’t even nod towards the question.

  And why should he have? In 1964 it was men, and only men, who held the reins of political and commercial power. Even today, there are only a handful of women in the federal parliament, though their numbers are gradually increasing. Among the Australian Stock Exchange’s top 200 companies, women account for only 10 per cent of executive managers, 8 per cent of board directors, and only 2 per cent of CEOs.

  In 1964, it hadn’t occurred to most Australian men – not even to Horne – that women might hanker after a particular meaning of ‘liberation’ that included the kind of financial independence that would unlock their sense of emotional independence as well. In a brief sub-section of Chapter 3 (‘Senses of Difference’) Horne concedes that, in many ways, Australia is ‘a man’s country’ and he acknowledges the ‘stiffness in relations between the sexes’. But he adheres to the view, fashionable at the time, that women often ‘rule the roost’ and even seems to imply that they should be content with this.

  *

  In an interview recorded in 1992 as part of Film Australia’s ‘Australian Biography’ series, Horne acknowledged that, politically, The Lucky Country was completely out of date, and he spoke of his deep satisfaction at having seen so many of the problems he had identified being addressed (while repeating his frustration at being endlessly quizzed about whether we are still the lucky country, as if that would be a good thing). Yet he maintained that Australian business was an area of disappointment, because of the continuing lack of innovation and imagination and the hangover from colonialism that others have since described as the ‘branch office’ mentality. In that interview, he also clung to the view, first articulated in The Lucky Country, that Australia’s problems were largely a function of poor leadership rather than any inherent inadequacy in the population.

  In his chapter on ‘What is an Australian?’ Horne had written this:

  There is more concern with gaining and holding power – more conspiracies and private bastardries – than ever appears in assessments of Australia. It is here that one of the real divisions in Australia occurs – between the mass of people who pursue innocent happiness and those who attempt to gain the multiple satisfactions of power and ambition (p.37).

  Perhaps that was one reason why he wrote so savagely of ‘a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck’.

  Still, Horne freely admitted then, and many times later, that most Australians seemed remarkably content with their lot. He quoted Bertrand Russell, after Russell’s 1950 visit to Australia: ‘I leave your shores with more hope for mankind than I had when I came among you.’ Russell had also said that Australia pointed the way to a happier destiny for man throughout the centuries to come.

  ‘Why write a book about such a happy country?’ Horne asked. One reason he offered was that it was perhaps not quite as happy as it appeared, given the lingering influences of puritanism, ‘the frustrations and resentments of a triumphant mediocrity and the sheer dullness of its life for many of its ordinary people’. But he also wanted to raise the deeper question of whether Australia would be able to maintain its happiness; whether the very conditions that led to so much success also weakened adaptability and slowed down the reflexes of survival. In other words, were we becoming too relaxed and comfortable for our own good? This is precisely the question again being raised by many commentators in this first decade of the new century.

  But, more daringly, Horne claimed he also wrote his seminal book because ‘Australia does not have a mind. Intellectual life exists but it is still fugitive. Emergent and uncomfortable, it has no established relation to practical life’. (Perhaps he spent too much time in Sydney, and not enough in Melbourne!)

  Warming to his theme, Horne claimed that ‘the upper levels of society give an impression of mindlessness triumphant. Whatever intellectual excitement there may be down below, at the top the tone is so banal that to a sophisticated observer the flavour of democratic life in Australia might seem depraved, a victory of the anti-mind.’

  Strong stuff, to be sure. Though Horne made much of Australia’s anti-intellectualism, he persisted in his view that Australia is not necessarily inimical to ideas, but that ‘there has been something wrong with the ideas presented to it’.

  Horne himself was never short of ideas, and never tired of presenting them to us – in journalism, in books of social analysis, fiction and autobiography, and in his beloved Ideas for Australia project. But his greatest legacy remains The Lucky Country. Horne was, quite simply, the first Australian who successfully explained us to ourselves.

  Sydney, 2007

  INTRODUCTION TO THE FIFTH EDITION

  When I wrote The Lucky Country in the summer of 1963–64, who could have imagined that more than three decades later it would have become a ‘classic’? Certainly not the pundits of the time: one reviewer said it wouldn’t outlast the season. Indeed when the book came out no one (and certainly not me) forecast its unparalleled immediate success. Yet, looking back, it is obvious enough why that success occurred. The book was a kind of community phenomenon: it expressed many things that were already in the minds, one way or the other, of tens of thousands of Australians – but that scarcely anyone was talking about, at least not all at once. It was written at a time – near the end of the regime of R.G. Menzies – when Australia seemed to be rusting up. Changes and challenges were everywhere, yet nothing much was moving. The Lucky Country touched on almost all of those challenges and changes – and by doing this it helped move some of the changes along. But why should anyone read it, or reread it, now?

  As well as curiosity about revisiting a ‘classic’ (which can be interesting in itself) there are three immediate reasons. The first has to do with a game many younger people may be able to play better than I can. It is: how much of The Lucky Country is as true now as it was then? To what extent are some of the things it said about Australia then still true of Australia today? ‘Sport to many Australians is life and the rest a shadow’, for example. Or ‘Australians don’t want to be taken in by words … they are likely to sniff around a florid phrase like a dog sniffing a bait.’ Or ‘A deeply ingrained scepticism is a genuine philosophy of life … Australians take pleasure in looking gift horses in the mouth.’ Or ‘Impelled to action, Australians cheerfully “give it a go”.’ Or ‘Men stand around bars asserting their masculinity with such intensity that you half expect them to unzip their flies.’ If this were an exam paper I would ask: Are these statements still useful in thinking about Australia? Discuss.

  The second reason for going back to the book is that it provides a useful series of snapshots of how things seemed at the time – including a reminder of what I really meant when I invented the phrase ‘the lucky country’ to draw attention to some aspects of Australia. But it’s not a nostalgia trip.

  True, it does begin with suggestions of ‘Innocent Happiness’ – ‘Life assumes meaning in the weekends and on holidays’ and ‘The general Australian belief is that it is the government’s job to see that everyone gets a fair go’ and ‘There is little public glorification of success.’ That means it was written in the more confident and predictable period before, in the early 1970s, the
prosperous world’s long post-war boom went bung. Those were the years when in all of the prosperous industrial societies high growth and high employment had come together in a miraculous combination and, in Australia, ‘Jobs and Growth’ seemed part of a divine order. In retrospect, for some Australians, this was also the self-assured period of the white picket fence; but that self-assurance was possible because it was also the period when people could look forward to jobs that would last a lifetime.

  The section after ‘Innocent Happiness’ was called ‘Nation Without a Mind’. As well as offering what may be the most succinct chronicle of the lost opportunities of the Menzies years, The Lucky Country also provided one of the most scathing assaults ever written (from a non-Left viewpoint) on Australia’s elites – businessmen, politicians, unionists in particular – culminating in the paragraph where I invented the phrase itself: ‘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.’

  Another lesson from the book is that bits once described as ‘radical’ can now seem moderate, even conservative. Having two sections on ‘Racism in Australia’ was, for those days, ‘radical’, but if you read those sections now they seem restrained. The White Australia immigration policy, then still in full force, was exposed in the book as based on the passions of race prejudice, not on rational desires for social coherence, but what I said should be done to change the policy was conservatively experimental: enter into quota agreements with certain countries in Asia that had ‘clear public standards of assimilability in language, education and working capacity’. (Though perhaps it was radical to say that racial change was, one way or other, ‘Australia’s destiny’?) With hindsight, the remedy for the historical treatment of the Aborigines would now be seen by many as reactionary. The book was radical in saying that the ‘savage’ dispossession of the Aborigines ‘should remain on the conscience of present Australians’ – regrettably and unexpectedly, professing a conscience can still seem radical. But the only remedy offered, in accordance with progressive standards of the times, was an ‘assimilation’ in which Aborigines were ‘to attain the same manner of living as other Australians and to live as members of a single Australian community’. There was no suggestion of maintaining Aboriginal differences where Aborigines wanted difference. That idea had not come into the public culture as a practical possibility.

  The word ‘assimilation’ also floated around in the section in the book on non-British white immigrants but it was used favourably only when I said, somewhat idiosyncratically, that ordinary Australians were themselves assimilating to European immigrants and that ‘assimilation is best made in bed’. ‘Multiculturalism’ wasn’t mentioned. Nor had the word ‘ethnic’ yet migrated to Australia. This is an example of how one way of finding the historical relevance of The Lucky Country is to look for absences. (For some people those very absences might make it a nostalgia trip back to the relaxing days before all those new words arrived!) In the mood of ideological exhaustion prevailing back then, economic class doesn’t get any specific mention, although it is instructive to remember that a ‘fair share’ still had some real meaning: economic inequalities had not become as gross as they are now, with the accompanying resentments on one side and indifference on the other. Poverty got its section in the book, but since poverty studies hadn’t been reinvented, the treatment might now seem skimpy. ‘Women’ are there in a section – and even being there under a separate heading was unusual – and that section did say that Australia was a country where opportunities for careers and access to leisure pursuits were still very largely men’s business. (‘When the men stood up in their bars and fantasized about the women they would like to get into bed with, their wives gathered at home over afternoon tea and fantasized about new bedspreads.’) But the treatment was sketchy and the language and the images were not, as we would now say, gender-neutral. For example, when I wanted to convey the idea that Australian men might be more domesticated than they preferred to appear, I said: ‘The image of Australia is of a man in an open-necked shirt solemnly enjoying an ice cream. His kiddy is beside him.’ At the time it was usual to depict an Australian as a man: it was only when the second-wave-of-feminism books began to come out ten years later that the passage was reinterpreted, correctly, if retrospectively, as sexist.

  But there’s a third and larger reason for turning to The Lucky Country besides its value as a source of continuing truth and as a set of revealing snapshots of the past. It is that in the 1990s we again moved into a period of anxieties and discontents, and to these, if you use it properly, The Lucky Country can give the key.

  *

  What do I mean?

  I’ll bring out some pleasing, and very important, social changes first – but pleasing with qualifications. (The time when things start going right is the very time when a wise person should wonder how they might start going wrong.) Between the early 1960s and the 1990s Australia became, for the first time in its existence, a declaredly tolerant and diverse society, and it also became in practice a much more liberal society. Just consider the evidence for intolerance and illiberalism offered in The Lucky Country (I’ve touched on some of it already but here is the full round-up).

  The country was only just ceasing to be divided by the ethnic–sectarian hatred between Catholics and Protestants, with its conspiracies and secret societies.

  Aborigines, still at best second-class citizens, were never asked what they wanted: being Aboriginal was seen as a problem that disturbed white people and it could be overcome only by Aborigines ceasing to be Aboriginal.

  The White Australia immigration policy, based on skin colour, had permeated almost all parts of Australian life. At the time of The Lucky Country, keeping Australia white was still near the top of the Labor Party’s platform: only three years before, when I had taken over as editor of the Bulletin, the first thing I did in pulling it out of a swamp of reaction was to remove its slogan ‘Australia for the White Man’.

  As part of the same set of attitudes of racial superiority, it was ‘radical’ when it was suggested in The Lucky Country that Australia’s colonies in Papua New Guinea would inevitably become independent.

  There was still a narrow policy of forcing continental European immigrants into ‘becoming Australians’ quick smart, no questions allowed. At the top, Australia’s greatest public pride was in being British – on big occasions the British flag still flew beside the Australian flag, giving it more credibility; we maintained national self-importance by singing ‘God Save the Queen’; and, as prime minister, Menzies had tried to name the new Australian unit of currency not ‘the dollar’ but ‘the royal’.

  And, very largely, ‘wowsers’ had been the definers of what was proper in social, cultural and private life: hundreds of books and movies were banned, drinking in pubs after six o’clock and serving alcohol in restaurants had only just stopped being illegal; abortion and homosexual acts were criminal offences; divorce was restricted; Sunday sport and off-course betting were illegal; apart from pubs (mainly for men) there had been few places in the suburbs where ordinary people could actually meet. (That was why I began The Lucky Country with jolly scenes from one of Sydney’s new poker machine clubs: these clubs provided one of the first suburban breakouts into gregariousness.) ‘Permissiveness’, ‘protest’, and the second wave of feminism were still to come.

  Now what kind of key is all that to the present? First we should acknowledge that, most of the time, the changes in the direction of tolerance and liberalism were largely peaceful. They confirmed the confidence expressed in The Lucky Country that ‘the ordinary Australian people seem adaptable’, especially when you consider the shaking-up Australians began to get with the catastrophes of the labour market, the challenges by ‘environmentalism’ to the solid faith in ‘national devel
opment’, and the disintegration of any remaining faith in ‘The Bush’ as the repository of Australian prosperity and virtue. (One of the ‘radical’ facts demonstrated by the The Lucky Country was that Australia was, very largely, a ‘suburban nation’.) But, despite this display of pragmatic adaptability, an entirely unpragmatic backwash against tolerance was to break onto the public scene in the mid-1990s that could seem frightening – especially in its replay of racism.

  There are two revealing Australian things about that.

  The first is that Australians are newcomers to tolerance and they haven’t had much experience of talking about it in public. In this period of quick change perhaps too many Australians with progressive inclinations opened their mouths a bit too generously: The Lucky Country had warned time and again of the hard-headed pragmatism and scepticism of Australians. It might have been better if progressives had used more of the language of pragmatism: by expecting too much of tolerance, did they put other people off? For Australian progressives the first lesson in tolerance might be to learn that it doesn’t mean we have to love everybody: all it means is that we are ready to coexist with people we don’t like, but whom we accept as civic equals. Nothing more than that. (What could be more pragmatic and sceptical?) At the same time as progressives were talking too generously, too many conservative people became too meanly tight-lipped: if you want to understand why, read the section in The Lucky Country called ‘Nation Without a Mind’. Then you can see why the nostalgia felt by some of our present fogeys, old and young, for what seem the certainties of the 1950s and early 1960s is not just mean-spirited. It also shows ignorance of what things were really like in those days. These certainties only seemed to be there because there was an imposed outward conformity and we don’t have imposed conformities like that any more. The first lesson in tolerance for conservatives is that maintaining social coherence doesn’t mean imposing the kind of social conformity that was beginning to disintegrate at the time The Lucky Country was written. It means acknowledging differences – not trying to suppress them – and looking for ways in which people can live together despite those differences.