Sixty years ago, Penguin published a small paperback – Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties. Its cover was adorned by a commissioned painting – Albert Tucker’s profile of the archetypal Australian – male (of course), probably a returned soldier, his shirt open, beer mug in-hand, the ace of spades in his top pocket. Fronting a familiar, ocean-blue backdrop, Tucker’s granite-faced Aussie filled the frame, soaking up the sunshine. Like Horne’s depiction of Australia, he seemed to have no idea how he’d come to have it so good.
But visible above the waves, behind the back of Tucker’s Australian bloke, there are four yachts with menacing, shark-like sails. If this is a paradise, it is stalked by danger, haunted by the prospect that the country’s luck was about to run out.
