In his memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, Robert Hughes tells the story of leaving Australia. The veteran journalist Alan Moorehead sat him down and told him to go. ‘If you stay here another ten years,’ Hughes reports Moorehead telling him, ‘Australia will still be a very interesting place. But you will have become a bore, a village explainer.’

Hughes left in 1962. It was a good decade to leave. George Johnston and Charmian Clift, Peter Conrad, Germaine Greer, Clive James, Barry Humphries, Peter Porter, Jenny Kee: some of Australia’s best exports of the ’50s and ’60s were artists. Provincial and conformist, devoted to the suburban good life, a nation of leisure- seekers that Donald Horne memorably described enjoying the pokies at the South Sydney Leagues Club, Australia was fallow ground for artists and writers. A culture of sun-drenched consumption and material plenty—in Horne’s words, ‘a house, a car, oysters, suntans, cans of asparagus, lobsters, seaside holidays, golf, tennis, fishing, surfing, gardening’—was not much inclined to ponder the deeper aspects of literature, feminism or old master painting. The cliché of lotus-eating suburbanites was readily apparent to Australians themselves, who lapped it up in the satirical form of Sandy Stone and Edna Everage.