Abra Pressler

A Big Dialogue: The State of the Arts in The Lucky Country? When: Wednesday 13 November, 5.30-7.30pm Where: Louie Louie, Verity Lane Market, Canberra Price: $20 – $40 per ticket (concessions available) Register here. The Academy, in association with Australian Dialogues, will present a Big Dialogue on arts policy on the eve of our 2024

Friday 15 November, 1.30-3.00pm Culture has long been integral to national community, and this relationship was being reshaped and reinvigorated at the time Donald Horne wrote The Lucky Country. Horne celebrated the culture and lifestyle of ordinary Australians while bemoaning the quality of Australia’s elite, and the 1970s and 1980s witnessed greater investment in the

Friday 15 November, 9.00-10.10am Australia of The Lucky Country era has often been recalled as a closed society, in view of the tariff wall intended to protect Australian industry and the still prevailing notion of Australia as a ‘white nation’. It was also popularly imagined as a ‘man’s country’, its social policy underpinned by the

Thursday 14 November, 2.00-3.30pm Debate about the nation occurs through language, but the impacts of Australia’s changing demographic profile, multicultural ideology and policy, and the reinvigoration of Indigenous languages, have shifted the meaning of Australia as one of ‘the English-speaking peoples’, a still common formulation when Horne was writing The Lucky Country. This session will

Thursday 14 November, 9.45 – 11.15am Donald Horne published The Lucky Country at a time when that era’s version of the culture wars – the cold war confrontation between the West and the Communist world – was beginning to give way to concepts such as the ‘quality of life’ and causes and issues such as