Why did I miss this one?!?!

I hate picking things up late. I also hate realising that I’m ignorant too. It’s fair to say that the older you get the more you realise you don’t know, but still, when you miss out important information or texts you realise that you’re a long way behind the times.

I had a moment like this yesterday, it will continue till probably tomorrow night. I finished reading ‘Farewell my lovely’, the wonderful Raymond Chandler novel on Thursday night, so went to the book shop and got 3 more Penguins. I picked up ‘The Lucky Country’ by Donald Horne, I obviously knew the name but thought it was in the realm of ‘Shiralee’ or ‘Cloudstreet’ as an important Australian Fictional work, so hadn’t jumped on it earlier. I kept on thinking whilst I was reading the book (and I’ve read about 2/3 of it since picking it up last night, nearly sat and read the whole thing last night but was getting tired) that I wish I would have picked this up when I was 15 or 16, as everything would have made so much more sense.

Whilst written in 1964 (with several revisions subsequently), this text reflects Australian society perfectly even now. You can apply the key messages readily now, I think they really resonate:

‘Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck'

This quote is pretty widely known, and quite ironically it is often used incorrectly to imply that we are indeed rocking along. Really though, how relevant is it today?!? Carbon Tax anyone? Resource boom is putting plenty of money in the coffers, but Australians are no-where near courageous enough to have the foresight to cipher any of these funds to protect the long term future of the environment. Climate sceptics are falling by the way-side, so there is no debating that something should be done, but we do have second rate people who are too scared of business to take a stand

‘Most Australian writers seem to find it impossible to come to grips with their own people. They caricature their countrymen or idealize them for qualities most of them don’t posses’

Horne goes on to describe Australia as the first suburban nation, and talks about the difficulty of actually identifying any Australian cultural values of note. He also talks about the difficulty academics have with respecting Australia , and our unusual position between the US and the UK when looking at cultural influence.
I found this fascinating. The ugly American OS has been replaced by the ugly Australian, particularly in places like Bali and in the UK. I hate the parochial lust for booze that Australian’s OS have made synonymous with our country, and of how hard I find it to respect so many of my peers. There seems to be a lot of self loathing here, and I think it’s a really poignant statement that we have built ourselves up on nothing, really.

‘There is no real feel for Asia’

I think we’re still very ignorant of our neighbours. We may travel there more often now than what we did 40 years ago (I think all Australians wanted to travel back to the UK), but I believe that we still don’t respect our neighbours, and we don’t build the community of this region. Our immigration policy is disgraceful, we look towards Asia as merely a potential refuge for illegal detainees that we don’t want to process here. It’s terrible.

I don’t think I’ve made my points succinctly enough, Horne makes them very well. I’ll finish the book and write some more, but just wanted to jot something down now. Key take out I guess is that I wish I would have read this years ago – I would have been on the ball so much more!