Here we are again, luck ringing over the land. Ryan Cropp’s new examination of the life and work of Donald Horne (1921–2005) comes out as we resume unpicking the gordian knot of what exactly is Australia. As Cropp observes, it has become impossible to describe this nation without the word luck, as if a continent rolls dice. It is the language of gamblers, of the complacent. It wasn’t introduced by Horne – any survey of the country’s newspapers will find Australia panegyrised or dismissed for riding its luck, but with the publication of The Lucky Country in 1964 Horne caught a truth in a sentence: ‘Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck.’ It was Horne’s personal stroke of luck, changing him as it changed his country. In later years, when Horne became one of those people who ran the place, had Donald joined the second-raters, sharing the spoils of chance?

Antithetical to ‘luck’ is the idea of planning – preparation, work, systems, structurally leading to just sustainability. Cropp paints a young Horne bridling at the perfectionist rhetoric of centralised government; an anti-communist ideologue, something of a prig. John Anderson (professor of philosophy at Sydney) and Brian Penton (of the Sydney Daily Telegraph) loom like Gog and Magog as he ingratiates himself, impressing and annoying in equal measure, destined to become a Canberra mandarin. A young man easy to admire but hard to like, who falls into journalism, copies of Dickens, Tolstoy and Waugh under arm.

But what book is this? Is it another Great Expectations, where the wise reader waits for the protagonist to abandon erroneous beliefs? Is it a War and Peace, where a Cold War brawler shows his soft belly in times of plenty? Is it a Brideshead Revisited, wistful reassessment of a bygone time?