2024 Symposium

Friday 15 November, 3.00-3.30pm Towards the end of The Lucky Country, Horne references Vance Palmer’s ‘Battle’ (Meanjin No.8 March 1942) and its exhortation to foster the wartime and post-war Australian culture that best determined “not only whether we are to survive as a nation, but whether we deserve to survive.” It’s one of twenty impactful […]

Friday 15 November, 1.00-1.30pm Professor Sarah Collins FAHA will launch the Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia edited by Dr Amanda Harris FAHA and Professor Clint Bracknell FAHA. About the book: Cambridge Companion to Music in Australia, edited by Amanda Harris and Clint Bracknell As a companion to ‘music in Australia’, rather than ‘Australian music’,

Friday 15 November, 3.30-5.00pm In this session, we invite each speaker to imagine what the country looks like in 60 years – 2084. What shape and direction will Australia take – demographically, politically, economically, culturally and digital futures? What position will it occupy in the region? What would ideal and dystopian futures look like? What

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, 11.00am-12.30pm Australians of The Lucky Country era were beginning to reimagine their place in the world, and even in the cosmos, in the era of space travel. This session will explore the ways available for Australians to think about environment, space and place today and their historical background; examining space, the planet,

Friday 15 November, 10.10-10.30am What is Donald Horne’s legacy? Surely a writer’s legacy is his work and this paper will take a concise look at his writings with particular emphasis on his liberal humanism, pluralism and thoughts about social change. In the belief that thoughts don’t spontaneously generate this paper will also examine the forces

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