The Lucky Country: Popular Penguins

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Damien Cave: (New York Times bureau chief in Sydney & friend of Bookoccino) "This often-oversimplified classic raises difficult questions about Australia's elites that are still worth asking. Are Australians, for example, still 'a largely non-contemplative people' who have "a limited view of the possible"? Do they 'seek similarity where it often does not exist -- even amongst themselves'?"   With an introduction by Hugh Mackay'Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.'The phrase 'the lucky country' has become part of our lexicon; it's forever being invoked in debates about the Australian way of life, but is all too often misused by those blind to Horne's irony.When it was first published in 1964 The Lucky Country caused a sensation. 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. Although it's a study of the confident Australia of the 1960s, the book still remains illuminating and insightful decades later. The Lucky Country is valuable not only as a source of continuing truths and revealing snapshots of the past, but above all as a key to understanding the anxieties and discontents of Australian society today.