AustLit

'The familiar periodisations of post-World War II Australian history sample their own versions of Donald Horne, each evoked in Ryan Cropp's biography. There is the ‘mean-spirited’ (p.116) Cold War warrior through to Horne's emergence as ‘Australia's leading republican’ (p.40) in the 1970s. Then comes Horne's prominence at the intersection of ‘public culture’, ‘cultural policy’ and (in retaliation under John Howard as – so Horne described him shortly before his death in 2005– ‘the ayatollah of the Australian character’) the ‘culture wars’ from the 1990s onwards. In between, of course, was The Lucky Country, that incisive account of the average Australian (‘a man in an open-necked shirt, solemnly eating an ice-cream’), never out of print since 1964, set for school curricula, its ironic title so frequently misunderstood.' (Introduction)