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BIOGRAPHY
Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country
Ryan Cropp
La Trobe University Press, $37.99
This is an impressive biography, impeccably researched and beautifully crafted. In its scope, detail, and fluency, it is comparable to the best biographies of George Orwell. The comparison is apt: numerous reviewers likened Horne’s God is an Englishman (1969) to the plain-speaking prose of Orwell, and the publisher’s blurb claims this biography positions Horne as an “antipodean Orwell”.
But all of Orwell’s biographers, as Anna Funder emphasised in Wifedom, denied agency to Orwell’s first wife. Thankfully, Ryan Cropp does not similarly airbrush the women from Donald Horne’s crowded life.
Donald Horne, pictured at the launch of his book Into the Open in 2000.Credit: Brendan Esposito
Politically Horne was no Orwell. Until the 1970s, he was a committed and active cold warrior, a self-styled radical conservative. In the late 1940s, in a torrent of articles and opinion pieces, he relentlessly denounced the “totalitarianism” of the Chifley government’s postwar planning and its mild socialism, and advocated libertarian individualism and laissez-faire economics.
In the early 1950s he joined the Conservative Party in England and campaigned against the Attlee Labour government, even contemplating becoming a Tory MP. By the mid-1950s he had embraced the fiercely anti-communist Australian Association for Cultural Freedom (AACF), later edited its publication, Quadrant, and became increasingly apocalyptic in his Cold War attitudes.
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Hired by Frank Packer, Horne became editor of The Bulletin in 1960. He stripped the magazine of its old racist shibboleths, but steered it in a more strident anti-communist direction. Where others discarded their global bipolar spectacles in light of changing geostrategic realities, Horne became more paranoid about the communist threat at home and abroad. Assisted by the AACF and the “hyper-conspiratorial” Frank Knopfelmacher, he used The Bulletin to mount a crusade against communist treachery in universities.
It was later revealed that ASIO, as part of its “spoiling operations”, played a hidden role in this campaign. Packer unceremoniously sacked him in 1962. In this period, Horne was regarded by the liberal left, as Cropp notes, as an “unapologetic red-baiter, Packer stooge and all-round intellectual gadfly of the political right”.
But then came The Lucky Country, published in 1964. It was his first book and became an instant hit. Within two years it sold a remarkable 80,000 copies and, regularly revised by Horne, it has never been out of print.