Nick Horne

When Donald wrote his famous book he didn’t have the title in mind. Yes, he wanted to give things a good shake up; he thought Australia would have to do things differently to maintain its standard of living; he thought political leadership could be better; he wanted to take out an atlas and show us where we were in the world; he wanted us to be smarter.

He gave the last chapter the eponymous phrase, vaguely thinking that it might be a good name for the book, although when asked to provide a list of possible titles it didn’t make the cut.

When the book came out, Donald monitored the reaction to its arguments, talked over lunches, argued over drinks, wrote think pieces in the Bulletin, shouted at the TV, and then developed what he described as his ‘Lucky Country thesis’: that with the end of the post-war boom there needed to be an adjustment to the economic faith of the industrial nations with a new kind of political idealism and social morality.

But the lucky country name wasn’t a perfect fit. The lucky country ‘brand’ was born and had its own dynamic. Advertisers were never shy to extol the virtues of the ‘lucky country.’ The paradox was on display when Donald wrote a pamphlet about the dismissal of the Whitlam government: the publisher, wanting to reach a wide audience, insisted on calling it ‘Death of the Lucky Country’ (where by implication ‘lucky’ was a positive, and Kerr was a killer) which prompted Donald, guarding the integrity of his thesis, to include a chapter by the same name which suggested Whitlam’s reforms had killed off the old derivative lucky country (Lucky Country dead – hooray!) The juggling was always difficult; when he gave some papers to the Mitchell Library in ‘89, he mock-solemnly swore: ‘I will never again discuss with any person whatsoever whether Australia is still the lucky country.’

If people want to praise Australia as a lucky country that’s no crime. As Donald himself said, if we are to compare Australia with Afghanistan or Sudan then Australia is clearly in a good position. Indeed, it is helpful to take stock – as Donald had in 1964 – and acknowledge that Australia is, in many ways, an un-ironically lucky country. Not lucky for all no doubt, but it scores well on quality of life surveys; it hasn’t fallen into recession for nearly 25 years; it’s a popular tourist destination; it has stunning beaches; beautiful moon-like desert landscapes; cosmopolitan cities; a culture of tolerance; an expectation that everyone should get a fair go. In the book, Donald suggested that there were no guarantees for Australia that the luck would last. We had to be smart. At the time he criticised tariffs that protected inefficient industry but as time went on he became more sceptical of what he called ‘economic fundamentalism’ and didn’t embrace the post-Fraser economic reforms (even though they might arguably have been supported by the 1964 Donald). History suggests he may have got that one wrong.

Michael Baume

Sir Frank Packer should get some of the credit for Donald Horne becoming Australia’s favourite public intellectual. And not only because he gave Horne the Observer in 1958 to try out his intellectual magazine pretensions as a reward for making a financial success of the trashy Weekend. More to the point, Packer’s subsequent sacking of Horne as editor of the Bulletin provided the time and incentive to write the book that earned him the fame he craved.

Horne’s deal with Packer was part of what Horne conceded was ‘a very strange relationship…’ At Weekend, Horne had earned a fearsome reputation as the Packer group’s next biggest sacker after Frank himself. It was one of these sackings towards the end of the ‘50s that led to the cathartic moment when Donald began to fall out of ‘veneration’ of Packer. Horne had sacked an old-style journeyman journalist on whatever was that day’s pretext, and that evening Horne, with his two Observer staff members, Peter Coleman and me, went to have a beer at the nearest pub. The sacked journalist’s brother, who also worked for another arm of the Packer empire, expressed his distress at the day’s events (and fraternal solidarity) by slowly and deliberately pouring a glass of beer over Horne. It all took place in that strange slow-motion that invariably accompanies onlookers’ stunned mullet looks of disbelief. Awful. Humiliating. Demeaning.

Later that night, dapper Daily Telegraph editor-in-chief David McNicoll, who regarded Horne as an upstart seeking to displace him in Packer’s favours, called me in. With a serious mien, he asked me what had happened to Donald in the pub. As I relayed the details, a smile slowly and perhaps involuntarily flickered across his face before he tut-tutted ‘how dreadful, poor Donald’.

Horne saw himself as one of Packer’s chosen and loyal lieutenants, and naturally expected that the great leader would not only express his concerns at such a terrible event, but that the miscreant would be sacked to join his newly-unemployed brother. So the following morning Horne awaited the call that never came. I had told Horne of my meeting with McNicoll the previous night, so there was no doubt that Packer would have been well-informed about the incident. By lunchtime, the tension had reached a point that only a few glasses of the appalling retsina at the local greasy spoon could resolve, so we left the office, with instructions where we could be reached in the event of any messages from on high, climbed the steep stairs to the long-since demolished restaurant in Castlereagh Street, and lunched on lemon lamb and retsina (and more retsina). By five o’clock, still no messages, Coleman had rested his head in sleep on the festive table, I had thrown up (following Coleman’s earlier lead) in the toilet and Horne had quietly cried. It was the beginning of a breach with Packer that three years later would end in Horne’s ‘inevitable’ sacking as editor of the Bulletin and his sabbatical’ in advertising.

The unexpected success of The Lucky Country was the basis on which Horne at last erected an edifice of self-belief. This enabled him to stop the role-playing covering the insecurities that led him to believe that ‘For a large part of my life I thought I was the most alarming failure’. With the remarkable exception of his editing the Observer, he had been masquerading as a variety of different characters, finding satisfaction in none of them. ‘What I knew fundamentally was that I wasn’t quite sure who I was’. At last, by rejecting much of his past, (‘I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things’) Donald found intellectual attire that gave him comfort, security – and the adulation of the left elite he had previously scorned.

But the emergence of the new ‘real’ Donald Horne meant the end of many of his old friendships and alliances, such as with Quadrant magazine, which he had co-edited for a couple of years; it did not mention him at its 25th anniversary and ignored his death; some, like James McAuley, never spoke to him again.