Gadfly

• Donald had written an essay called “Mind, body, age” that vigorously burst from the page with life, while addressing death.
• Being out of the loop, no longer an active participant in the cultural life of his beloved Sydney, hurt him.
• In his accomplished and insightful biography Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country, Ryan Cropp puts the man in his context and, without a heavy hand, helps us understand his motivating psychology.
• Good biographies can be like that – Robert Caro is still finishing the biographical series on Lyndon Johnson he started 50 years ago.
• Read more:
  Donald Horne's 'lucky country' and the decline of the public intellectual

The Lucky Country

• Horne is best known as the author of The Lucky Country – a book that seemed to capture the zeitgeist when it was published, reluctantly, by Penguin in 1964.
• The issues explored in The Lucky Country changed with new versions, but the critique remained: Australia got by on luck; it was held back by second-rate leaders who lacked vision, imagination and even a realistic assessment of its place in the world.
• The Lucky Country, which owes more to his journalism than the more ambitiously polished writing in The Education of Young Donald, was a two-way mirror, revealing the nation to itself and him to it.
• Read more:
  An armchair, a desk and 4000 books: the Horne family study gets a second life

Changing contexts

• Cropp shows he has mastered the historian’s essential skill of avoiding this trap, while keeping the narrative moving with fresh and lively writing.
• One striking contrast is between Horne’s confidence in Hayek’s wartime anti-bureaucratic, libertarian ethos, and Gough Whitlam’s rejection of it.
• He was bored and wrote many letters to his mother (like so many others now preserved in archival boxes).
• Times change, contexts shift, and responses by thoughtful people are recalibrated.

Intellectual tradition

• His teachings and methods helped shape a Sydney intellectual tradition that still echoes today.
• For those untouched by this tradition it was mystifying, but for those like Horne, Murray Sayle, Paddy McGuinness and many others, it provided an enduring framework that had the benefit of flexibility.
• The cynical, libertarian realist became, by the late 1960s, more optimistic and more open to what Cropp characterises as “opportunities for civic renewal”.
• The discipline of a biography, even one as grounded in public events as this, is that it demands a singular focus.

The cultural conversation

• The coincidence of the publication of Horne’s Observer, funded by Frank Packer, and Tom Fitzgerald’s Nation in the late 1950s spoke to the need to aerate the national political and cultural conversation.
• Cropp conveys a sense of this through the slightly limited prism of Horne’s worldview, with its emphasis on business, religion, Asia and politics.
• Cropp has captured a full life, well lived, that was a tribute to the importance of paying attention and making a difference.