Afbeelding auteur

Donald Horne (1921–2005)

Auteur van The Lucky Country

43+ Werken 669 Leden 10 Besprekingen

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Bevat de naam: Donald Horne

Werken van Donald Horne

The Lucky Country (1964) 244 exemplaren
Death of the Lucky Country (1976) 40 exemplaren
The education of young Donald (1967) 38 exemplaren
God is an Englishman (1969) 28 exemplaren
Money Made Us (1976) 27 exemplaren
Dying : a memoir (2007) 19 exemplaren
The Permit (1965) 18 exemplaren
Billy Hughes (2000) 15 exemplaren
Time of hope: Australia, 1966-72 (1980) 13 exemplaren
Ideas for a nation (1989) 12 exemplaren
The Intelligent Tourist (1992) 12 exemplaren
Confessions of a New Boy (1986) 11 exemplaren
Avenue of the Fair Go (1997) 10 exemplaren
The lucky country revisited (1987) 10 exemplaren
Donald Horne: Selected Writings (2017) 8 exemplaren
The next Australia (1970) 7 exemplaren
Into the open (2000) 6 exemplaren
An interrupted life (1998) 6 exemplaren
In Search of Billy Hughes (1979) 5 exemplaren
The Coming republic (1992) 4 exemplaren
Winner take all? (1981) 4 exemplaren
Portrait of an optimist (1988) 2 exemplaren
2001 : why are we celebrating? (2000) 1 exemplaar

Gerelateerde werken

The Best Australian Essays 2004 (2004) — Medewerker — 22 exemplaren
The Queen: A Penguin Special (1977) 16 exemplaren

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Everyone my age knows the name of the Australian journalist, writer, and public intellectual Donald Horne AO (1921-2005) because everyone my age has either read The Lucky Country (1964), or heard everyone else talk about it so much that they thought they didn't need to read it themselves. Indeed, the title of that book went into the vernacular where it is misused all the time to signify what a beaut country Australia is. Misused because, as the blurb at Goodreads tells anyone who looks it up:
Horne took Australian society to task for its philistinism, provincialism and dependence. The book was a wake-up call to an unimaginative nation, an indictment of a country mired in mediocrity and manacled to its past.

Ouch. But true. It was still mostly true when I read it in my young adulthood, even after three years of a progressive government in 1975. Greg at Goodreads thinks it was still true in 2015 and in comments we can see that a reader called Terry Wang thought so too in 2021 ... but I think that's a bit harsh... though you do have to wonder a bit about an electorate that ...

Let's not get sidetracked.



Most people, however, do not know that Horne also ventured into writing fiction. There is probably a good reason for this. As always I am open to correction, but I suspect that his sole venture into the novel, The Permit, which was published in 1965 by the independent publishing company Sun Books, sank like a stone into oblivion. Because, alas, it isn't very good at all. It's derivative, tedious and predictable.

Five or ten pages into 'Monday', the first chapter of this ponderous satire, and a reader will recognise its origins in Franz Kafka's posthumously published The Castle (1926, Das Schloss). With chapter headings named by the days of the week, the reader of The Permit will find by the heavy-handed end of 'Tuesday' that actually, it would be better to re-read The Castle.

And that's what I did. I'd already read The Castle round about 1982, probably as a set text for my BA, but I had a Naxos audio book, narrated brilliantly by Allan Corduner, and translated by David Whiting, and it was a fresh and refreshing experience to revisit this classic of absurdism.

As you can see at Wikipedia, The Castle:
Dark and at times surreal, The Castle is often understood to be about alienation, unresponsive bureaucracy, the frustration of trying to conduct business with non-transparent, seemingly arbitrary controlling systems, and the futile pursuit of an unobtainable goal.


Bureaucrats and politicians have always been cheap targets, but at least Kafka's absurdism is entertaining. K arrives in a village to take up a position as a land surveyor, but it turns out that there has been a mix-up and there is no position. To sort this out, he embarks on a quest to meet with a bureaucrat called Klamm but he soon discovers that the village is so intimidated by the authority of the Castle, that his efforts are considered highly problematic and he gets himself into all sorts of bother. Not least when he decides to marry Frieda so that he overcomes the problem of not having a residency permit. To get accommodation he has to take up work as a cleaner. Although the reader knows that nothing K can do is going to resolve his problem, nothing in the novel is predictable, and much of the absurdism seems perfectly real.

Horne's The Permit, however, plods through his scenario with weighted boots.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/04/26/the-permit-1965-by-donald-horne-and-a-nod-to...
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Gemarkeerd
anzlitlovers | Apr 25, 2023 |
Mainly an interesting period piece, but always good to know where hackneyed phrases come from, particularly if, as in this case, they get misused: Australia is a lucky country, it turns out, because even though our politicians and other 'leadership' types are entirely incompetent, the state somehow struggles on. Horne writes well, and he's funny, but it's unclear to me whether his fundamental argument was true: was Australia really a country being held back by a lack of ambition and gusto at the highest levels? Was Australia really being held back at all? In cultural terms, yes, but keep in mind that when Horne published this, White had just published Voss and Riders in the Chariot, modernist art was getting going, and Peter Sculthorpe was about to publish Sun Music I. So things were really on the upswing. Horne's book itself might have been a part of that.

On the downside, it's very irritating to read a book this long that avoids proper nouns almost entirely. I say White had just published Voss, and Horne does mention that novel--but not in the section on literature. There are few to no names at all, regardless of the context. So one doesn't really learn much about who or what Horne thought was to blame, or who was helping, or even that there were people in Australia in the late '50s and early '60s at all.

More amusingly, he says the Young Liberals were energetic, while the other political parties were totally moribund. Somewhere, Whitlam is laughing.
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Gemarkeerd
stillatim | 3 andere besprekingen | Oct 23, 2020 |
2 February 2011
Update

One of the things that makes Australians feel so lucky is, having satisfactorily subjugated the indigenous population, it has never really faced an external threat. We have sent, I suspect, more than our fair share of men to fight other people's wars, if you like, but despite Japanese bombing of part of Australia in WWII, we are rarely concerned with such issues.

And yet.

We have this incredible balancing enemy within: the weather. To have watched the bushfires a couple of years ago in Victoria where two hundred died, whole towns razed to the ground; the devastating floods a couple of weeks ago in Queensland and then Victoria where a vast unnatural inland unanchored sea floated about; followed by what is happening this moment as I write:

The cyclone that is hitting Queensland, which sounds like it will be even worse when that is hard to imagine.

Natural enemies abound and they have their impact in unexpected ways. Julia Gillard's government is in a precarious position at the best of times. Evidently rallying together is not on the mind of the Liberal (ie conservative) Opposition leader. He is begging for donations to finance a fight against the idea of a national once off tax levy to pay for the rebuilding which must next take place. It is almost enough to make one laugh.

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So I'm sitting on the pavement at the Marion Shopping Centre, covered in blood and thinking, yes, indeed, Lucky Country.

My mother had caught her foot on some loose pavement, and fallen down hitting her head which bled horribly for a while.

Two lovely girls independently stop. One of them gives me her mobile so I can call a friend to come and get us. The other one gives me a packet of tissues. Shane, Security from the Shopping Centre comes out and deals with phoning an ambulance while dishing out sensible advice and first aid.

The ambulance comes and a couple of great guys give my mother a thorough examination, the bleeding has stopped, they think she can go home as long as she is happy to.

Honestly. We are the luckiest people in the world to live in this country.

I'm with Mikael on this one: 'who cares if donald horne meant it ironically, it bloody is a fucken lucky cuntree' http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/16234175

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Gemarkeerd
bringbackbooks | 3 andere besprekingen | Jun 16, 2020 |
Only two pages on the Aboriginal civilisation pre 1788 when Australia's first colony was established, basic history, good pictures and art used.
 
Gemarkeerd
nadineeg | Jun 12, 2018 |

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