Donald Horne

Donald Richmond Horne (26 December 1921 – 8 September 2005) was an Australian journalist, writer, social critic, and academic who became one of Australia's best known public intellectuals, from the 1960s until his death. Horne was a prolific author who published four novels and more than twenty volumes of history, memoir and political and cultural analysis. He also edited The Bulletin, The Observer and Quadrant. His best known work was The Lucky Country (1964), an evaluation of Australian society that questioned many traditional attitudes: "Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck." Background and early years Donald Horne's early life was recounted in the first volume of his memoirs The Education of Young Donald (1967). He was born in Kogarah, New South Wales and raised in Muswellbrook (where his father was a teacher at the local school) and Sydney. He enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sydney in 1939, but his studies were interrupted by war service. He later attended Canberra University College at the Australian National University, to train as a diplomat. He moved back to Sydney in 1945 without completing his studies. Instead, he wrote for the Daily Telegraph and other Packer media. Despite never completing an undergraduate degree, in 1973 he was offered a research fellowship in Political Science with the Faculty of Arts by the University of New South Wales. He held several academic positions there for the next fifteen years.