Still lucky, but getting smarter

August 28, 2004

Donald Horne wrote A Lucky Country 40 years ago. He revisits the impact it had when it was published in the 1960s and examines its influence today.

It's 40 years ago this month since Penguin Australia decided it would go ahead and publish it anyway. Their head office in London had said the book I had written about Australia wasn't the kind of thing Australians wanted to read. We decided to call the book The Lucky Country and, three months later, its first print (of 18,000) sold out in nine days.

Its new angles had caught the mood of a growing market of educated readers looking for more relevant ways of seeing a changed Australia. It provoked immediate discussion-sharpening, sorting out new things to think about (and was to be voted by Sydney Morning Herald readers as one of 20th-century Australia's most influential books). It became a publishing "phenomenon" and a household phrase.

But the 1960s was itself a phenomenal decade. I don't mean the international 1960s. Of course they were phenomenal (with a few Australians among the world players). But there was a peculiarly Australian '60s. It was the decade of a public opening out of new ways of seeing Australia, all of them still with us, that offered the greatest renovation of perceptions Australians had known. One can't understand contemporary Australia without going back to the Australian '60s and comparing then with now.

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This great shift was in the home-grown stuff, not in what came with the latest issue of Time magazine. It's true that some of it had originated overseas - early forms of new feminism had barged into Australia using some of the new US unorthodoxies ("women's lib", "male chauvinist pig", etc) but it was rapidly domesticated after 10 university and media women, called together by the journalist Beatrice Faust, met in Melbourne, and established the Women's Electoral Lobby - which also helped change Australian perceptions and practices. (The result? The campaign against discrimination against women has led to one of Australia's greatest social changes, even if it's still work in progress.)

The reform of the White Australia Policy was, inevitably, purely home-grown, born in 1960 out of what may have been Australia's most influential pamphlet - Immigration: Control or Colour Bar? (1960). Sponsored by a group of 20 or so Melbourne intellectuals meeting in a house in Camberwell, it formed a nucleus for immigration reform associations that led to influential people being lobbied. (The result? Only a dozen or so years later, the White Australia Policy - the very heart of previous national self definition - had officially gone.)

It was a change moved along by an unspoken truce between the political parties not to exploit racism. Liberal prime minister Harold Holt started the process and his successor John Gorton was for a while the rhetorical front-runner, prophesying that Australia might "provide the world with the first truly multiracial society".

Lasting for 30 years until John Howard became prime minister, this truce offered the mighty lesson that xenophobia is endemic in any society, but usually it becomes dominant only when politicians wish it so. (An aberration? The Tampa election scares of 2001 were based on three forms of xenophobia - nationalist, religious and racist.)

Another change. Early in the '60s, I had lunch with the heads of the leading pastoral houses in Sydney. By the time the brandies arrived they were arguing with rage, fear and frustrated love that there would be no end to Australia riding on the sheep's back. The principal images of the Australian economy were still the export of farm produce. The principal images of Australian virtue were still rural. (What happened? By the end of the decade, for the first time in Australia's history, people were beginning to take for granted something that had been there for decades - that Australia was probably the world's most urban, and suburban, society.)

In the '60s, academics, writers and artists told the story. The ANU economist Noel Butlin established what no one seemed to have recognised before - that the building and servicing of all those streets in suburbs and towns had been one of the principal dynamics of Australian growth - and Adelaide University historian Hugh Stretton unrolled the political and social philosophies that lay behind the Australian suburban dream.

The "new novelists" who were at last giving Australian fiction both variety and bulk - Tom Keneally, Patrick White, Frank Moorhouse and most of the others - wrote books about Australians as city and town dwellers, and when they stayed with small towns, they could, as with Thea Astley, show a new kind of sophistication.

When Australian drama burst into continuing life with the rough theatre explosion associated with David Williamson's Don's Party, it was very largely an explosion into urban living. The cop shows that sustained local production in the newly arrived Australian television drama series were based mainly in Australian cities. Done in an inner-city terrace, the "explicit" Number 96 got top ratings.

When the Australian film industry twitched back into life (after 30 years running an average of only two movies a year followed by 10 years' absolute silence) it tended to stay for a while with rural backgrounds, but of these, Wake in Fright gave the myth of rural mateship one of its biggest bashings.

Beginning with Gorton, national governments subsidised programs for public works in state capitals and in 1968, Gough Whitlam began putting together his "metropolitan program". (The result? Australia is now being recognised for the much more complex place it is.)

"National development" - the faith in developing Australia's natural resources at any cost - had for a hundred years been one of the strongest elements in Australian patriotism. Now, in the '60s, it began to meet three enemies. One was an environmentalist movement that agitated to save beach sands, caves, reefs, old-growth forests, mangrove swamps. One was that national development was beginning to be whacked from a hard-headed view by those, such as the University of Sydney geographer Bruce Davidson in The Northern Myth, who opposed development that wasn't economically rational. (Much development was more national cult than economic plan.) And trembles were beginning of scepticism about the traditional policy of building up industries behind subsidies and high tariffs.

The third were attacks on lack of innovation. As Robin Boyd showed with wit and venom in his The Australian Ugliness, Australian manufacturers hadn't been much good at manufacturing. OK in copying, deficient in innovation. Australia was being lampooned as a highly derivative society. Or, as it was put it in my book: "Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck". (What happened? Things have changedfor the better. But the jury is still out.)

In the '60s, in education, there began the strongest shift Australians had known. Education could be seen as the key to almost anything - a lethal thump to the she'll-be-right attitude seen as typical of Australians. By the end of the '60s. among people who had done their reading (at that stage, admittedly, not many), there was also talk about a "post-industrial society" where services would replace manufacturing as the principal employment dynamo and where manufacturing would work with fewer people and a higher level of "technology". Like education, "technology" became a keyword. (The result? "The tertiary sector" is one of the great industries of the land, although carrying a great bureaucratic weight and misdirected "vocational" expectations.)

With a lift in education there was also a lift in the level of public-affairs programs. Inspired by the genius of journalist and, later, documentary maker Bob Raymond, Four Corners started on the ABC in 1961 - and was imitated in shows on other channels that were sharper than such shows are now; there was a "satire boom" in television; two new national dailies and re-arrangements of three old ones brought in the new comment journalism. (What happened? Sadly, most public affairs on commercial TV joined the entertainment industry.)

For decades, the only really active social science in Australia had been economics, so that as the '60s began there were no sociology textbooks on Australia and no worthwhile political studies. For a while, the best political stuff came from the brilliant intellectual entrepreneurship of Henry Mayer at Sydney University in, of all things, an undergraduate reader.

It was only in the late '60s that Australian studies moved out of the kindergarten. In history, more was offering, but it was specialist and narrow. Intelligent general readers got their break with the first two volumes of Manning Clark's A History of Australia, as wide in scope as a 19th-century novel, and then Geoffrey Blainey's Tyranny of Distance brought the past "back to life" with a vital use of detail. Both of these successes - impelled by two quite different imaginations - achieved what had seemed previously unachievable: they encouraged people to read Australian history. (What happened? "The cultural cringe" was on its way out.)

The dedicated work of hundreds of other Australian historians was also beginning to open Australia out all over. Naturally there were disagreements. Some of the silliest were about what historians were choosing to write about. A history book should always show a regard for evidence (a matter that is bigger than footnotes).

But the opening out to diversity that began in the '60s served us well. It was the decade of a great success in political theatre when 90 per cent of voters said "yes" to a constitutional change that symbolised that Aborigines were Australians. When the ANU historian and archaeologist D.J. Mulvaney wrote The Prehistory of Australia, this provided the indigenous people with a history, with its own societies and cultures and showed how they had been here, in possession, for a longer time than the native Americans had occupied their lands. (The result? This was the first decade in which the indigenous people began to be publicly seen as human beings like other Australians, if with different values and ways of life.)

Previously, in a long fit of madness many, even most, Australians had been persuaded by their own creation myth that somehow the indigenous people were not actually in possession of the lands they occupied.

One of the achievements of the '60s was the careful conceptualisation by the social scientist Charles Rowley that what went with that dispossession was as, above all, "the destruction of Aboriginal society". What mattered most was not how many massacres there had been, but that dispossession disintegrated the structure of the Aboriginal societies.

In his index, Rowley gave almost two columns to "society" and less than a sixth of a column to "massacres". (Another aberration? If everyone involved in the Windschuttle skirmish had set their course by Rowley's clear conceptual vision, discussion would not have veered into the squalid and the plain silly.)

By the end of the '60s all the old imperial masters had evacuated Asia. With its east-of-Suez policy, Britain was the last to go; in trade with Australia, it had shrunk to a bad third after Japan and the US - and now it was talking about going into Europe. The cult of the British royal family continued, but with strategic significance gone, economic significance fading, cultural glamour yielding to a more diffuse cosmopolitanism and new kinds of cooking smells coming from "wog" kitchens in the suburbs, "being British" wasn't working.

Talk about Australia becoming a republic became an intermittent mumble in public discussion.

Meanwhile, in the universities they were trying out new words to describe an Australia of ethnically mixed origin, and out of this "multiculturalism" would emerge.
The so-called assimilation program had been a farce. (What were immigrants to be assimilated to? Being "Australian"? What did that mean? During the long British twilight, no agreed answer.) In fact, the native-born and the wogs were, on the whole, making their own accommodations. The movie They're a Weird Mob broke box office records: it was a nation-builder. (The result? Being British has almost gone and Australians are much more aware of their multinational, multiethnic, multiracial and multireligious origins but without proclaiming the civic identity that holds things together.)

The '60s were the time when serious talk began on what a more independent Australian foreign policy might look like - and how Australia should be engaged with Asian countries. (There was even talk about Australians as "White Asians".) A commonsensical acceptance of change had already prompted prime minister Robert Menzies' first two foreign ministers as, earlier, had Ben Chifley, to open out their vision to include at least some of the Asian countries.

In the '60s, that discussion began in earnest and it began to look as if, apart from the detail, it might be settled. (What is happening? Discussion was - one hopes only temporarily - narrowed by dimness of vision and personal petulance.)

The '60s were also the decade in which the official Australian lighthouse beam to world affairs became "the United States Alliance". Coral Sea Week (celebrating a US victory instead of the historic Australian victories of Milne Bay and the Kokoda Trail) had become an annual major Australian event: combining, in the medieval manner, honour and self-interest, the three prime ministers after Menzies made pilgrimages to the White House to declare their fealty.

What is happening? Seriously undecided. In this connection Howard has shown himself a true man of the '60s.