The story of the publication of The Lucky Country

Reviewers of The Lucky Country, split as they were on most other matters, reached at least one point of consensus—Donald Horne’s new book wouldn’t last the summer. ‘Over-compression, leading to over-simplification’ was its first sin, the second, more awful, ‘no man can write with authority on every aspect of even his own society’¹. This ‘headlong mixture of opinions and sheer prejudices’ was a type of polemical con job by a ‘clean sweeper’.² John Pringle, the long-standing editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, was critical of the ‘scorn’ Horne poured on ‘Australian politicians, trade unionists, schoolteachers, dons, intellectuals, journalists and business’.³ The book’s ‘exasperating bias’ made matters ‘too easy’ and on some matters it was ‘wrong-headed and ill-informed’.⁴ The source of such ‘exasperating bias’ was a trickier matter.⁵

One reviewer argued these were the typical opinions of ‘an extreme right-winger’, while another thought them suited to a ‘republican, pro-American, working-class, left-of-centre journalist’.⁶ Beyond these disagreements came consensus: Australian life was a knottier problem than Horne’s critical rhetoric suggested.