Australians are quite fond of referring to Australia as “The lucky country”. Australia is such a relaxed and pleasant place that they have good reason to. The term was originally popularized by Donald Horne, who made it the title of one of his books. Because of the agreeable title, lots of Australians bought the book but few can have read it -- as the book is NOT a celebration of Australia at all. It is a miserable, carping book that says that anything good in Australia is only an outcome of sheer luck. So poor Donald has had the ultimate humiliation of lots of people buying his book yet still thinking that he intends exactly the opposite of what he actually says.
Perhaps for that reason, few people have bothered to refute Donald’s silly negativism. Another well-known Australian, Clive James, has however recently said a few words on the subject. Excerpt:
"[Donald Horne's] central tenet, that his homeland was a lucky strike consistently mismanaged by second-rate politicians, caught on as a dogmatic aid to national self-doubt. As I read on through our recent and gratifyingly rich heritage of commentary and memoir, it became clearer to me all the time that we hadn't become a prosperous and reasonably equable democracy by the accidental dispensation of benevolent nature and a favourable geographical position. The country had been built, by clever people. Our constitution itself was the work of people who had studied history. They were readers of newspapers and periodicals, they were eternal students in the best sense, they were bookish people. They had built a bookish nation. But, as so often has been the case with Australia's consciousness of itself, the problem was to realise it."
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