Quite a journey
This year is the 60th anniversary of the publication of Donald Horne’s iconic study of Australian culture, The Lucky Country. The Australian Academy of the Humanities are honouring that anniversary by using its 2024 Symposium, ‘Ideas and Ideals of Australia’, as an opportunity to consider a contemporary equivalent of Horne’s account of the state of the nation.
Given the pace of social and cultural change we are facing, and given how inadequate has been the response to that change from members of our political class, this is a timely moment to be discussing what such an account should consider.
Horne’s book was widely taken up at the time, of course, even though it was not long before the irony was stripped out of the title and its primary argument was thus widely misunderstood. But it was a first of its kind, an account of a national society that tried to encompass the whole of its culture and make some sense of it.
I read The Lucky Country at university in the 60s, where it was much admired despite the clear indications that Horne had something of a chip on his shoulder in relation to academic expertise. Its middle-brow but often acerbic take on Australian society and culture was a reasonable fit with the emerging intellectual fashions as Australia was beginning to take this kind of analysis and critique more seriously. Horne’s book opened the way for such discussion as well as for a burst of competing contributions – such as Craig McGregor’s series of books which began with Profile of Australia in 1966.
My personal response was less positive. It’s a highly opinionated book, full of confident generalisations, and so it can be persuasive. But there is also an elitist element to it, particularly in its treatment of a vernacular popular culture, and a slightly irritable tone. When compared to the more complex and historicized cultural analysis coming from elsewhere that I was reading at the time — Hoggart’s Uses of Literacy, for instance, or Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society — the argument and the body of evidence seemed pretty thin. So, I was never a fan.
But it has stuck around, both as a resonant critique of Australian attitudes, and paradoxically as a source for some of the mythologies that have formed around those attitudes. So, it deserves the prominence it is being afforded by the Symposium.
Nevertheless, and inevitably, a lot has changed since then. The title of my own recent attempt at a state of the nation account, The Shrinking Nation, talks about a very different Australia. Far from the comfortable complacency Horne describes, Australians now appear to be far from happy with what their country has become.
They are particularly disappointed in the performance of those charged with its stewardship — its elected politicians, and the broader political class that sustains them. That disappointment is evident in many places but perhaps most strikingly in the shift away from the two major political parties that has become more pronounced over the last two elections.
It would be difficult now, I would think, for anyone dealing with contemporary Australia to talk confidently about the existence of something Horne called ‘The Australian Dream’. I am speaking during the Academy Symposium’s first session. The session’s title, ‘Dreams and Discontent’, implies that this dream is over and has given way to quite different and much less contented views of the possibilities offered by Australian everyday life. This is a nation that can no longer house its population, for instance, and is facing at least another decade before even the most adventurous policy interventions have a chance of fixing that.
The symposium, convened by Frank Bongiorno and Mark McKenna, also picks up absences from Horne’s account which have become major issues in the intervening period — coming to terms with indigenous cultures and rights, dealing with environmental and social change, and the impact of feminism are among them.
While Horne’s anniversary provides a moment for historical reflection, the event also provides a moment for the Academy to do something important for its role in our society — to direct its considerable academic expertise to the current state of the nation, to its key public concerns, and to its compromised capacities to respond positively and effectively to the currents of social and cultural change.
