Cirrus@Austlit

'Encountering Donald Horne’s writings today makes for a different experience compared to reading his books fresh off the presses. Where his portrayal and his criticisms of mid-century Australian life seem to me, half a century after publication, apt and amusing, his contemporaneous readers had different responses. Upon reading the Lucky Country (1964), for example, former prime ministerial department head Allen Brown told Robert Menzies that Horne’s opinions on matters Brown knew about were simply “wrong and ill-informed”; a reviewer of the same book famously shrugged in the Canberra Times that it had all been said before and would be “forgotten by the end of the summer”.' (Introduction)