Cirrus@Austlit

'It has become a bigger cliché than the phrase itself: that in adopting the title The Lucky Country for his 1964 bestseller, which turns 60 this year, Donald Horne did not intend to deliver a compliment. ‘Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck,’ Horne wrote in the rather grand opening to the final chapter, which carried the same title as the book. ‘It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.' (Introduction)