Donald Horne’s Death of the Lucky Country, his attack on the dismissal of the Whitlam government, its title an allusion to Horne’s 1964 bestseller, was the first ever adult non-fiction book I owned. I have a vague memory of pestering my mother to buy it for me, the $1.50 price tag (still on the back of my copy) being beyond my budget at age ten.

I don’t remember exactly why I wanted Horne’s book; as a very young Liberal I was happy to see the Whitlam government gone. But recently reading Ryan Cropp’s excellent Horne biography, A Life in the Lucky Country, I can see why Horne appealed to my developing interests. He was a ‘public intellectual’ – the quotation marks because this term and perhaps role has faded – someone who bridged the world of ideas and general audiences. Horne’s books — he was as Cropp notes a prolific author – were always easy to read and, thanks to the secondhand bookshops that once existed in large numbers, usually affordable without parental financial assistance.

Continue reading “Donald Horne’s life in the lucky country (some comments on Ryan Cropp’s Horne biography)” →