"The lucky country" is a label that has stuck to Australia ever since Donald Home, one of the country's best-known social critics, wrote a book of that name back in 1964. The book gained instant fame and is still regularly reprinted. But Mr Home has been much misunderstood. Far from praising his country, he was trying to shake it out of its complacency. Australia had been fortunate in its natural endowments, he was saying, but it lived on other people's ideas, and its leadership was second-rate. If things went on as they were, its luck could not last.
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