A reply.

Carl Reinecke’s ‘The Vanishing Point: The story of the publication of The Lucky Country’, Meanjin Winter 2016, is a little unfair to (my father) Donald Horne. This piece is an attempt to set the record straight. There are some good things in the article about Max Harris and Geoff Dutton, but this piece only deals with the parts of the article which deal with Horne. How The Lucky Country came into existence is obviously a legitimate question, but you won’t get satisfactory answers without a proper respect for the material.

Reinecke says that Horne might have engaged in some perhaps questionable behaviour, behaviour which played a part in establishing the ‘dominant’ view that he single-handedly changed the nation by writing his famous book. As part of this claim, Reinecke suggests that Horne failed to include a document that he had written about the genesis of The Lucky Country, in his own Mitchell Library Papers, and this failure might have been an attempt by Horne to unfairly claim too much credit for the book: this document, this ‘agreed history’, would be the record of the publication of The Lucky Country, but because it wasn’t in Horne’s own papers, the author of the history, with his own agenda, would be anonymous. I would like to point out that: