Oh it's a lucky country ... the Angelic one says so, and so does the hole in bucket man ...

 

The judges hadn't been expecting a classic conundrum when they sat down to sort out the winners of the pond's weekend hunger games.

Insiders had always expected prattling Polonius to have a lock on Sunday, with one of his patented dreary summaries of the year, but nobody had tipped a tie, a dead heat, where two brave contenders couldn't be separated, not even by a nose, for the pond's Saturday outing ...

At first it had seemed an innocuous enough effort ... an attempt to make the best of the Lib knifing in Victoria ...

You had to have sharp eyes to spot our Henry, co-joined with another, at the bottom of the digital edition's main feature, blathering about the lucky country ... but then if you turned to the extreme far right of the page, there was a hot contender, a keen rival, the Angelic one, also blathering about the lucky country ...

Peas in a pod, inseparable ...

The judges argued for hours, but simply couldn't separate the hole in the bucket man brooding about the lucky country, and the Angelic one assuring those living in the hive mind that they were the luckiest in the world.

One judge was particularly irked, all the talk of the lucky country meant that the pond had to ignore the rcent fuss generated by Vivek's classic tweet.

Oh dammit, just to keep all the judges content, if the pond calls it X can the pond confront the YOUNG TRUTH:

The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”

Whiplash? About a sociopathic teacher pushing his pupil beyond the boundaries of reason and sanity? Just what the country's education system needs ...

Sure enough Vivek brought the attention back from Uncle Leon to him, attention which had always been unfairly misplaced...

It was a thing of beauty, this outburst, this desperate attempt to save Uncle Leon and his desire to import engineers ...

Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.
Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.
“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.
This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.
That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.

Deeply weird shit, with the promise of much more to come as the immigrant wars heat up, and concentration camps organised, and mass deportations are planned, and might even begin, and might even sort out a few tech bros...

And now, judges overruled, honour served, the pond can turn to the Angelic one delivering the good news, her gospel if you will, in Cheer up, Aussies, we live in the best and luckiest country on Earth, Yes, with all the bad news from overseas it’s no wonder we sometimes feels like the barbarians are at the gates. But look around and you can see Australia is still the land of plenty.

When in doubt and in search of banal stock images, always go the beach, It is a great shame if Australians succumb to the pessimism that seems to permeate older cultures, the author writes. Picture: AFP

That set the Angelic one off on a euphoric journey of Oz triumphalism, an alpha and omega, an ending and a beginning ...

At the end of one year and at the beginning of a new one we are expected to look back with a critical eye but forward with optimism.
However, today we generally don’t hear much optimistic talk or feel much optimism. We seem to hear of nothing except wars, disaster and mayhem in world affairs.
We can add to that our own domestic worries about the cost of living, the electricity failing and even the gas being cut off.
This pessimism is the case all over the world. Recently on a trip to Norway, a beautiful, rich country, I was struck by a doleful remark from a man running a shop in the fish market: “All these wars and terrible things happening.”
It seems that people living in the rich and insulated West have forgotten how precarious is the peace and security we thought would never end.
NATO countries are told to prepare for war, the Middle East is in flames and the great Pax Americana appears to be crumbling into isolationism. Terrorism is everywhere and little kids are being blown up. No wonder many people feel as if the barbarians are at the gates.
However, it is a great shame if Australians succumb to the pessimism that seems to permeate older cultures because we Australians are living in probably the most blessed, resource-rich country on Earth.
We are not a continent suffering war or the threat of war, and despite having some internal divisions we should have every reason to be optimistic – yet we are not.

Bloody Norwegians, fancy getting upset about all these wars and terrible things. Why didn't he just go to the beach ...Australians enjoying the best that summer has to offer have every reason to be optimistic. Picture: AFP

Yes, the entire world should be Sydney-centric, even if you have to spend an hour on the bus to get to a beach, such that those silly western Sydney-ites had to invent a fake beach and surf to live out the dream.

What is it with the beach?

On with the dreaming and the celebration, though suddenly the Angelic one began to have saucy doubts and fears, raising sinister suspicions and memories of ancient reptile grievances...

The reason is a natural preoccupation with domestic policy. For instance, despite divisions blamed on multicultural policy, we are fortunate that we have not yet developed the level of domestic terrorism we have seen in Germany and elsewhere.
Live and let live multiculturalism in itself is not a recipe for division; rather, it is vehement religious and cultural intolerance that is the root of division, when people are threatened for just being Jewish or for just being Muslim.
Neither should it be an offence to tell someone they should go back to where they come from – even if it is a stupid, crude sentiment abhorred by many people.
Not all speech we might find seriously lacking in thought or kindness should be labelled hate speech or be an offence as long as it does not include incitement to violence.
On the domestic political front, the pessimists have a point.
The cost of living is too high and the No.1 culprit is the cost of energy, as it affects everything. The federal government’s renewable energy schemes, aside from unreliability, could make the cost of living worse. Changing the electricity network is very expensive and requires a huge number of electricians to install the infrastructure – electricians we don’t have. Nevertheless, the government ploughs on trying to convert all our electricity generation to renewables – although we have enough gas under the ground to supply half the world.
Meanwhile, the opposition says it is going to bring in nuclear, which also may take about 100 years to work with safety, although we have all the uranium under the ground that we can export to other countries so we don’t have to risk being contaminated by stored nuclear waste or blown up. So, energy policy is confusing and controversial, and energy supply is looking grim into the future.

Of course, of course, to live the beach dream, we must nuke the country to save the planet, but while things might be deeply grim, it's not as grim as elsewhere, The bedlam in Gaza and the Middle East shows we have much to be thankful for. Picture: AFP

Oh dear, that set the Angelic one off on another bout of pessimism ...

On top of that, pessimism is warranted about the multitude of social problems and useless social policy fixes.
Top of the list is mass ignorance caused by bad education. Those of us who were stuck teaching the Visigoths of 9E remedial English in the 1980s and ’90s could see that coming a mile off. Bad curriculum, bad methods, kids’ terrible behaviour and even worse expectations, and you have a recipe for social decline.
Then there are the sometimes well intentioned but failing schemes meant to plug a serious deficiency, the most notable of which is the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The NDIS, which was meant to help the truly disabled, is like almost everything the government has poured money into: out of control. As well as encouraging a broadening of the notion of disability, especially autism, the scheme leads to welfare churn, is riddled with corruption and encourages a mentality of government dependence.
Another one that is going to send us broke is the overly generous childcare subsidy for people with combined incomes of up to a gobsmacking $500,000. That strikes me almost dumb, but I will write more about this in the coming year.
Last, there is the even more appalling waste and human cost of “closing the gap” between our world and that of the Indigenous Australians, the national shame. Some of this, like the energy situation and the NDIS blowout, is fixable; some of it, like closing the gap, is not.

Sheesh, that all sounds a worry, it sounds like we're irredeemably rooned, but luckily the Angelic one has the perfect bromide ...

There are many reading this who will nod and think that optimism about Australia, whether it be government energy policy, multiculturalism or the international situation is succumbing to Pollyanna-like naivety.
But stop and think about our history. The great challenge for Australia is to do what our ancestors did. 

By golly, she's right. What we need to do is organise a few hunting parties, bung on a massacre or three, poison the waterholes and the flour, arrange for a little indentured servitude, and everything will be fine ...

And so to a few final thoughts ...

To be resilient and look into the future, to see Australia as what it should be and could be.
We have always been a young culture that looked to the future. I am descended from a 14-year-old boy who narrowly avoided the noose and a young Italian peasant in search of adventure and his own life.
Consequently, we are the youngest, most successful and one of the richest democracies on Earth. Aside from all our natural advantages, our geography, our wonderful climate and abundant resources, we have in ourselves, our own people, a unique breadth of culture and diversity of experience.
Unlike my miserable Norwegian friend, we should be optimistic. So, cheer up, Australia, and have a happy new year.

Is it any wonder the judges found the Angelic one irresistible? 

Mixing talk of how lucky the country is, how much better than miserable Norwegians, then spending almost the entire column mired in pessimism and moaning in the most miserable way about how everything was fucked. 

Such a gem, such a mind ... almost like talking to an ancient boomer revived by AI ...

And so to our Henry and a consorting co-conspirator, co-scribbling another, in an epic opus that the judges simply couldn't ignore or discard:

Sixty years on from Donald Horne’s instant classic, has The Lucky Country run out of luck? Published in 1964 and serialised in The Australian, the impact of The Lucky Country was immediate and all-pervasive. Donald Horne declared that ordinary Australian people were not the problem: the elites were. Today that seems truer than ever before.

Scribbled like a genuine member of the lizard Oz 'leets.

The reptiles promised this outing by Henry Ergas and Alex McDermott was a full 13 minute read, just the sort of thing you need to have in hand for that beach outing.

Naturally there was a penetrating snap and question to start the long haul off Has a nation of gamblers with a disdain for ‘theory’ ridden its luck for too long?

What a conversation starter ... and what a chance to plug the lizard Oz ...

“Join the Lucky Ones” ran the front-page headline of The Australian on Tuesday, December 1, 1964. Starting the next day, readers could enjoy “the first big instalment of Donald Horne’s controversial new book The Lucky Country”, which was being published that week.
Horne had a long association with Frank Packer and Australian Consolidated Press, but in a publishing coup Rupert Murdoch’s new national newspaper had secured exclusive rights for “the most candid, controversial book of the year”.
The Australian had begun life less than six months previously as a daring experiment, the first nationally circulated newspaper in a country beginning to fizz with a sense of expanding possibilities yet faced with new, sometimes daunting prospects in a dramatically changing world.
Horne’s much-anticipated “witty and irreverent study of Australians and their way of life” couldn’t have found a stage better suited to its bold approach or for the questions it was firing, at point-blank range, into the national conversation.
Australians were reintroduced to themselves in the weeks that followed as a people who “hate discussion and ‘theory’ but can step quickly out of the way if events are about to smack them in the face”.

There was a handy tie-in snap to promote the lizard Oz itself, Join the Lucky Ones: Page 11 from The Australian newspaper on December 2, 1964 featuring an extract of Donald Horne's 'The Lucky Country'

At this point a few of the judges became restless. Was this really about rounding the Horne or marvelling at Emeritus Chairman Rupert?

They found out that “to understand Australian concepts of enjoyment one must understand that in Australia there is a battle between puritanism and a kind of paganism and that the latter is beginning to win”. Competitive sport, they were now given to understand, had all the qualities of “a ruthless, quasi-military operation”, making it “one of the disciplinary sides of Australian life”.
As for mateship, it reflected “a socially homosexual side to Australian male life” that involved “prolonged displays of toughness” in pubs, where men “stand around bars asserting their masculinity with such intensity that you half expect them to unzip their flies”.
Perhaps most arresting was the argument that went with the title’s assertion. Australian life, combining scepticism and “delight in improvisation”, had resulted in dependence on a type of gambler’s luck.
As circumstances shifted, Australians’ “saving characteristic, ‘the gambler’s coolness’ ”, had helped them to “change course quickly, even at the last moment”.
But the aim of those swerves had always been to “seek a quick easy way out”. Now that strategy needed to be reconsidered.
Abrupt changes
The Lucky Country packed many punches – and they landed at the perfect moment.
The tremendous post-war growth of an educated and engaged public had been evident since the mid-1950s as new magazines proliferated and the market for Australian books expanded more prodigiously than at any other time in the century.
Coupled with that were global shifts even more dramatic and described in The Australian’s first editorial, which spelled out both the paper’s vision and the challenges the nation faced.
Since the end of World War II all the major European empires had ceded or lost control of the lands and people to Australia’s immediate north. As British, Dutch and French imperial power in Southeast Asia collapsed, new nations – including Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam – were born and ancient ones, such as Burma and Thailand, reshaped. Behind them lay “the brooding power and intelligence of the new China, a land with whose people’s desires and plans our own future is deeply entwined”.

But what of that reptile hero, Ming the Merciless? What of 'Nam and such like? What of the swinging sixties, and the desire to leave ancient patriarchs behind?

Well it was a tricky journey, but in the end, the pair managed the feat. There was plenty of time to downgrade Horne, and celebrate All the way with LBJ: The first Australian visit by a US President. United States President Lyndon B Johnson greets the crowd in Swanston Street, Melbourne. Picture: Ken Wheeler

Time then to slip in a quick celebration of visionary Blainers ...

These abrupt changes coincided with Britain trying to join the European Common Market, making it clear that wherever the United Kingdom saw its future, it was not primarily with the Commonwealth.
Losing the blanket of certainty that Australia’s close relationship with Britain had long provided was a blow. But, The Australian insisted, it could prove “a salutary shock”, as it helped us realise “that now, as never before in our history, we stand alone”.
Collection of snapshots
The Lucky Country’s impact was immediate and all-pervasive. Despite some scathing reviews (one confidently predicted the book would have been forgotten by the next football season), it flew off the shelves. Its initial print run of 18,000 sold out in nine days and the pace showed no sign of flagging.
In 1965 it sold another 40,000 copies before repeating the feat in 1966, a staying power beyond its publisher’s wildest dreams.
One of the books that truly defined the decade, it entrenched itself in the national consciousness in a way similar to Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance, published two years later, another title that instantly entered the national lexicon.
Blainey’s deeply researched work, which reflected his training as a historian, was tightly argued. In contrast, even Horne admitted that his book was “a collection of snapshots of Australia”. An assemblage of ideas and insights that had been amassing for a decade, Horne thought it was part of the book’s success, handing readers a host of opinionated pages of observation and commentary.

The reptiles interrupted to show Donald Horne at home: the author constantly fretted that his seminal book’s title had been misunderstood and misused.

Then it was on with the journey:

More than the loose structure, though, the book’s style was crucial to its impact. That style came from Horne’s long spell as a journalist, editor and advertising man.
Horne had a keen understanding of what readers wanted to know and talk about. He had spent years honing his approach, addressing Australia’s burgeoning magazine and newspaper readers, and recognised their hunger for a new type of journalism that The Australian sought to embody: urbane, expository, intelligent, sparky, informed.
And if it worked for magazines and papers, why not for a serious – if chronically irreverent – book about who we were and how we now lived?
The Lucky Country introduced this sharp change in tone to Australia in the 1960s, marking it as ineradicably as David Williamson’s plays would do. The content matched the tone, too, aggressively insisting that the way we lived had changed so abruptly that the nation could no longer be served by the standard-issue ideas.
The national mythology, populated by bush legend figures (shearers, bushrangers, drovers) and grizzled
Anzacs, had no relevance to daily reality.
Australians were urbanites and suburbanites, and increasingly so: from 1947 to 1966 the percentage of Australian living in cities leapt from 68 per cent to 83 per cent.
Misappropriated and misunderstood
Horne’s coup was to bridge this gap between myth and reality. Certainly to his mind The Lucky Country’s success came from the fact it captured Australia as Australians experienced it, not through the fake lenses of a glorified past.
It was, Horne claimed, the first book to reflect “the suburban nature of the lives of most Australians without jeering at them”. What really cut through, however, was the book’s underlying thesis.
Despite its gadfly-like style, the book worked off a set of powerful assumptions that constituted a strong, even startling, argument.
Horne would complain ever after that its title had been misappropriated and misunderstood. But it is hard to deny that the title itself made the argument palpably clear.
Earlier exercises in self-reflection generally portrayed Australia’s journey to nationhood as a process of maturation. Nurtured under the shelter of Britain’s wing, foresight, hard work and inspired guidance had allowed the infant nation to grow into a strapping adult, capable of standing on its own feet.

Gad sir, surely not, surely not plucky Britain ...

Perhaps that's why the reptiles offered up instead Lucky for some: Dawn Fraser after splashing her way to victory in the 100m freestyle at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Picture: Getty Images

Always the patented visual cliché, the insatiable desire to do a march of time ...

 

But there was still that business of reconciling the march of time with the downfall of Ming ... slowly, slowly ...

Horne knocked that narrative for six. Australia’s prosperity and stability were not, he argued, the result of increasing national maturity, much less diligence and determination. They were due to sheer good fortune. To make things worse, it was a good fortune the country didn’t deserve – or know how to use.
The problem wasn’t the bulk of ordinary Australians, who weren’t a bad lot. It was “the people on top”. Our leaders and elites were second-rate provincial mediocrities who had got stuck in a groove some 50 or 60 years earlier and never budged out of it, even as one generation passed to another and still another.
Premature senility
Thanks to them, the nation was in a time warp, living out a fantasy that bore no relation to its realities – or its challenges.
The proper national metaphor, in Horne’s eyes, was not a maturational shift from boisterous youth to fully fledged adulthood; it was a leap from childhood to premature senility. Without “a radical overthrow and destruction of the prevailing attitudes of most of the nation’s masters” the decades to come would likely witness “a general demoralisation; the nation may become run down, old-fashioned, puzzled, and resentful”.
The radical overthrow and destruction of Australia’s outmoded approach, and the subsequent renewal, could, Horne speculated, possibly come through the rising generation. He was drawn to generational explanations of change, citing Walter Bagehot’s comment that “generally one generation succeeds another almost silently.
But sometimes there is an abrupt change. In that case the affairs of the country are apt to alter much, for good or for evil; sometimes it is ruined, sometimes it becomes more successful, but it hardly ever stays as it was.”

Of course there's the possibility vulgar youff might not have the first clue as to the topic, so the reptiles belatedly inserted a reminder... Modern classic: Cover of The Lucky Country, featuring the painting of the same title by Albert Tucker. Picture: Supplied

That should set vulgar youff straight ...

Generational change had salvaged the national project before. The great Australian initiative, when Britain and other outside models of development had been energetically rejected, had emerged in the decades at the turn of the 20th century. This was when a nationalism of mateship represented “the general egalitarian position” that, flecked with Irish anti-English hostility, had formed an explicit contrast to an England of wealth and privilege. To those who had experienced that earlier time, “this present pause would be unbelievable”.
Robert Menzies epitomised everything that had gone wrong. He had absorbed too much of the pro-British obsequiousness of the post-World War I world, notably “the ceremonial clinging to Britain” that was “part of the delusional structure of the people who were running Australia”.
Unable to escape that delusional structure’s grip, subsequent generations had fallen into Menzies’ stride rather than broken it. And while Menzies’ leading rival, Arthur Calwell, could not be accused of being unduly pro-British, he was no better able “to recognise and dramatise the new strategic environment of Australia”.
Fresh start
As a result, “the nation that saw itself in terms of unique hope for a better way of life is becoming reactionary – or its masters are – addicted to the old, conformist” ways of doing things. The inability to cope with change meant the “momentum towards concepts of independent nationhood has slowed down, or stopped”.
There were, however, inklings of a fresh start. Although “still full of mystery”, the generation born during and immediately after the war “seems fresher”. Who knew, “it may be the generation that changes Australia”.
Expressing the egalitarian pragmatism that Horne identified as the quintessential philosophy of the national consciousness, the baby boomers would be socially progressive, tertiary-educated, technocratic pagans and managerially gifted hedonists. As they gained control, the better qualities of the Australian people, sprawling and sunburnt on the nation’s beaches, would finally be able to express themselves unencumbered by the tired leftovers of a bygone era.
Exactly how this revolution would occur was left unclear.
Horne’s career had to this point been on the political right. He was still editor of Quadrant when (...)

At this point the reptiles interrupted the pair in mid-stride, because you can never get enough beach when you're doing a search of the national psyche ...Bathers at Bronte Beach, Sydney, 1964, from John William's new book Line Zero: Photo-reportage 1958-2003. Picture: Supplied

Then came the problem, how to reconcile the thought that Ming the merciless had been singularly useless, while downplaying the coming of Gough. 

Easy peasy ... take a sudden, sharp turn ... it turns out the interruption was handy, a chance to explain that this Horne was in fact a conservative who'd taken a wrong turn, and so needed a firm hand, a stern correction, and our Henry was just the right member of the lizard Oz 'leet do do it (with the help of that other scribbler Alex) ...

(...)The Lucky Country came out, a vigorous anti-communist who had run as a Conservative in an English election while living there in the 1950s.
In some ways, he might still have been a conservative – for example, in his identification of the ideals of egalitarianism and fraternity as the essence of a national culture that needed to be preserved.
What is certain, however, is that by the time of The Lucky Country, Horne was no conservator. His conservativism was what he now described as being of the “radical”, even “anarchist”, variety. Enormous social and political renovation was the order of the day and the book’s task, Horne said, was “to produce ideas that may prompt action at some later time” – but that would need a change agent only the future would disclose.
Whitlam the messiah
Given that sense of anticipation, it is unsurprising that Horne drank the Gough Whitlam Kool-Aid deeply and early. When Whitlam replaced Calwell as ALP leader, Horne declared that he “seemed to understand that not only the Labor Party but Australia as a whole needed a psychological reorientation, a new tone and style to make it adaptable in the modern world”.
In April 1973, less than six months after the federal election that brought “the ludicrous Menzies era” to a close, Horne predicted that Whitlam could easily become Australia’s greatest prime minister. Until then, it had begun to seem “as if our sense of nationality was going to remain rather grisly: a fairly second-rate European-type society cutting itself off from its environment and from the mainstreams of the age, trying to keep up its spirits by boasting about its material success, its mines and its quarries”.
Now he predicted a new national anthem within 12 months and a republic within 10 years. The eternal “tomorrow” of utopian political vision had suddenly become, as it were, Monday morning – and Whitlam was its messiah.
Inevitably, having soared to such heights, the deflation when the curtains fell on the new dawn was all the more traumatic. It exploded into visceral anger in the book Horne wrote immediately after the 1975 dismissal.
Whitlam, Horne said in Death of the Lucky Country, had been doubly “assassinated” – once by the governor-general, then again “by his defeat in an illegitimately called election, done in by strong and powerful enemies”.

The ludicrous Menzies era? 

But the reptiles have spent the past decade celebrating those picket fences. Time to expose the false messiah, In Gough we trust: Horne remained incandescent with rage long after the end of the Whitlam experiment. PIcture: Sunday Telegraph

Gad sir, it wasn't time, it wasn't time at all ... it was the 'leets ... as only members of the said 'leets would know ...

The elites had had their revenge. Public violence, Horne suggested, would be an entirely understandable response. Horne’s own response was unending, incandescent, outrage.
Mingled with bitterness, that outrage pervades everything Horne wrote after Whitlam’s ignominious end: largely second-rate works that have faded from memory. He had, it turned out, only one book in him – but it was, nonetheless, a book of immense importance, not least because of its tough-minded approach to Asia and its adamant rejection of non-alignment as a bastardised form of neutralism.
To say that is not to ignore the paradox that underpins the book. Horne’s discussion in The Lucky Country of Australia’s British inheritance was rich and nuanced. But as the years passed Britishness became a birth flaw to be denounced with ever greater ferocity.
Yet for all of Horne’s strident nationalism, The Lucky Country is redolent, if not derivative, of the Britain of the mid to late ’50s.
During his stint in Britain, Horne had fully absorbed the new concept of “the establishment”, coined by London columnist Henry Fairlie in 1955 to describe not simply the individuals who held and exerted political power but the whole network of institutions, practices and attitudes through which those in or near power maintained their ascen­dancy.
By 1960, denouncing the dead hand and crippling impact of a musty, hidebound elite had become the stock in trade of an emerging class of British com­mentators.
Horne brilliantly transposed that leitmotiv to Australia, just as he transposed those commentators’ biting tone and the advertising-influenced writing style of the new American journalism.

Now please remember that the main point of the exercise is to remind readers of the hive mind of how prescient the Emeritus Chairman was, A front page story pointing readers to an extract from Donald Horne's 'The Lucky Country' to be published in the Australian; the next day, on December 2, 1964.

Sure, it was long ago, and the rag never recovered from the sacking of Adrian Deamer, and the Chairman's sharp turn to the right, but keep living the dream ...a chance to celebrate the lucky country and at the very same time, celebrate the era of Ming the Merciless ...

But jingles are no substitute for deep analysis – and The Lucky Country’s marvellous hits come amid some disastrous misses.
No miss weighs more greatly, or has had more deleterious consequences, than Horne’s easy, airy dismissal of the extraordinary economic advance Australia had experienced since the ’40s. To describe that achievement as due to blind luck is simply absurd.
It was, in fact, achieved in the face of a world economy profoundly and increasingly adverse to primary exporters, who had to deal with plunging commodity prices, as well as the relatively slow growth, and chronic balance of payments problems, of Britain, which was still Australia’s crucial export market.
That Australia managed to not merely cope with that environment but grow rapidly was no gift of nature: it reflected the remarkable adjustment capability of its primary exporters, who, as well as turning to Asia’s emerging markets, reduced their costs more rapidly than prices were falling.
And it was the adaptiveness of its primary exporters, along with the entrepreneurship of towering giants such as Lang Hancock and Arvi Parbo, that set the foundations for the mining booms Horne derided as just due to luck.

Meanwhile, the reptiles still couldn't get enough of the beach, Party’s over: Bronte Beach, Boxing Day 2024. Picture: NewsWire / Flavio Brancaleone

Anyone who's lasted this long will be happy to help clean up the trash ...

The belief that Australia’s prosperity was the result of good fortune rather than entrepreneurship and aspiration became one of the left’s key illusions. It framed Whitlam’s disastrous economic policies, which assumed the Australian economy was “indestructible”; it has recurred in recent years as successive Labor governments have dismissed mining, low-cost energy and agriculture as mere residues of earlier ages. The blind luck thesis had a natural appeal to the new elites who, in the decades after Whitlam’s fall, committed themselves to the fundamental remaking of Australia.
So did the overestimate of the merits of technocratic bureaucracy and the underestimate of the merits of Australian traditions that permeates Horne’s work. In that respect, Horne was right: the baby boomer generation changed Australia. And it was armed with the Whitlam-Horne vision that its leading scions became the new establishment.
By the late ’80s this new order had almost entirely replaced Horne’s reviled old second-rate elites, taking the commanding heights of cultural institutions and regulatory bodies, as well as dominating acceptable political discourse.
Undoubtedly a classic
Under first the boomers, and then their children’s generation, the longstanding policies, prac­tices, norms and pronouns that had framed Australian life were upended, reversed, junked, repudiated.
In 1964, Horne declared that ordinary Australian people were not the problem: the elites were. Sixty years later that seems truer than at any other time in Australian history, but the elites in question are those whom Horne heralded and championed.
The great irony, though, is that the ordinary suburban Australians Horne brought to the forefront of national conversation have proven the immovable bulwark against which those new elites have collided, as they repeatedly rejected the new establishment’s wishes and projects.
Horne himself may not have appreciated this irony. But he can claim the credit for foretelling the two great protagonists in the national drama that continues to play itself out in the public square.
In the end, it is the hallmark of a classic that it is a book that can be read in a slightly or very different way by each generation, always having something new to say. Set against that test, The Lucky Country is undoubtedly a classic.
For all of its shortcuts and grievous errors, its insights still dazzle, no matter how often they are read or reread. So does its freshness, its sense of humour and perhaps most of all, its eager hopefulness and sense of aspiration.
On this joint birthday of The Lucky Country and of the newspaper that, 60 years ago, launched its career, renewing that spirit remains a task worthy of giants.

Oh FFS, if the legacy media really does think that it's part of the story, part of the renewing of the spirit, able to take on a task worthy of giants - in the era of the full to overflowing intertubes and vulgar youff and terminal phone addiction - then it's truly delusional. 

Credit where credit is due to this delusional pair, Henry Ergas is a columnist with The Australian. Alex McDermott is an independent historian.

Never have a pair laboured on at such length trying to reconcile the irreconcilable.

Onwards and upwards with the lizards of Oz, oh lucky nuked country ...