You might have missed it in the news, but a few weeks back, on the same day, the Antarctic recorded a temperature 40 degrees above the average while the Arctic hit 30 above. In years ahead these kids will be linng up to piss on the graves of these people.īut while Horne wrote about our cultural cringe, the stakes are far higher today for the Lucky Country. A judge recently ruled the Federal Environment Minister had no duty of care to future generations when approving new coal mines and gas projects. The kids are already out on the streets demanding some kind of future, but they’re up against it. The federal government currently gives more money to the fossil fuel industry than they do to schools. This is not particularly reassuring for younger generations. The Prime Minister meanwhile believes in The Rapture, and end-of-days reckoning where the faithful ascend for salvation, while the rest are damned to remain behind and burn. The yokel in the hat was Barnaby Joyce, the Deputy Prime Minister. Fires, floods… frogs falling from the sky. This Old Testament thinking is not only still prevalent in modern Australia, it’s held by the men that run the country. The leaders were missing.Ī guy in a hat – last seen drunk in a paddock yelling at the sky – eventually turned up to tell us the flood was a “one-in-3500-year event” only for it to happen again three weeks later. Volunteer firefighters fought the fires while locals in tinnies plucked people off rooves in Lismore. Despite being warned for decades now by scientists these natural disasters would become more frequent, the blokes in charge could only act surprised. When Lismore flooded a whole two metres above the previous record, nobody turned up to save the town. When the Black Summer fires burned up and down the eastern seaboard two years ago, the Prime Minister was drinking mai tais in Hawaii. The above passage couldn’t sum up modern Australia any better. The Lucky Country was published over 50 years ago now but would be horribly relevant if it had been published last week. “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.” Horne wrote about how the luck we enjoy as Australians – endless white beaches, riches in the ground, a fish on the first cast – had lulled Australians into becoming culturally lazy. “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck,” wrote Horne. One critic described the book as, “a bucket of cold saltwater emptied onto the belly of a dreaming sunbather.” The book came as a rude shock to sun-drunk Australians.
They only got a few pages in however before realising it was anything but. When Donald Horne wrote The Lucky Country in 1963, Australians picked up the book as an affirmation of their ridiculous good fortune.