Selected Writings is a useful corrective to this one-dimensional picture. Compiled by Donald’s son Nick, it sketches a more detailed and complicated portrait of a man once awarded the title ‘National Living Treasure’. Two chapters of Horne’s most famous work appear alongside a kaleidoscopic range of public writing: critical essays (his preferred mode), prose, memoir, poetry, satire, philosophy, and history. Nick gives structure to Donald’s intellectual and literary trajectory by organising the book into broadly chronological sections under thematic headings such as ‘The Australia Discussion’, ‘It’s All about the Culture’ and ‘The Thoughts of Old Donald’. This variety of subject matter is concrete evidence of Horne’s lifelong credo, ‘give it a go’.

Although The Lucky Country was only a fragment of Horne’s public output, it was the springboard from which he launched his career as a public intellectual, republican activist, and late-life icon of the political left. Those with longer memories, however, recall a different Horne: conservative firebrand, anti-communist crusader, cultural cringer, and courtier to Frank Packer. In this collection, Nick revives the pre-Lucky Country writing under the banner of his father’s preferred term, ‘Radical Conservative’. Indeed, it is bewildering to witness the future chairman of the Australia Council rampaging against government funding of the arts, or denouncing a form of moderate ‘leftness’ eerily similar to his own politics in later life.

The great riddle of Donald Horne’s life is this potholed journey from right to left. In his memoirs, he explains his political metamorphosis by insisting that his natural optimism was always in conflict with his pessimistic intellectual training. Glyn Davis endorses this interpretation in the book’s biographical introduction: ‘ironic detachment was never Donald Horne’s most plausible persona. He was by instinct an activist.’ Yet the evidence provided in Selected Writings would suggest the reverse. Horne’s best work mixes irony with a winking didacticism. Detachment was his trademark. Confronted in this collection with the full range of his opinions, one senses he tried many of them on like hats.

Presenting Horne’s writing in this way – the unfiltered ‘collected works’ – only amplifies his reputation for shape-shifting. It also divorces political arguments from their very specific contexts. Horne’s denunciation of moderate progressives in ‘The Metaphor of Leftness’, for example, was surely fuelled by the paranoid political climate of the 1950s, just as the radical nationalism of his ‘Orphans of the Pacific’ would have tapped into the widespread national pride and self-confidence of the mid-1980s. This writing cannot be separated from its time. Doing so downplays Horne’s willingness to change his mind, particularly when many of his contemporaries let their opinions solidify like concrete.

Paying close attention to the way public work is shaped by character and personal experience is the bread and butter of the biographer. In Horne’s case, responsibility for revealing the man behind the masks has so far been his alone. He spent a lifetime chiselling away at his own life narrative, and large chunks of The Education of Young Donald (1967) – easily the best of his five memoirs – are well-chosen inclusions in Selected Writings. But one question plagues the reader throughout: how deliberate was Horne’s transformation from radical conservative to progressive activist? The collection includes the previously unpublished essay ‘Ambition’, in which he writes that biographers ‘tend to judge personalities by the effects of their actions, giving them much more rationality than they possess’. Horne was nothing if not open-minded. It seems much more likely that his political and intellectual apostasy was a gradual response to a radically changed world than it was an opportunistic adoption of fashionable new opinions.

Donald Horne (photograph by Alec Bolton)Like many writers of his generation, Horne wrote memoir as national history. ‘I looked in the mirror and saw an Australian’, he writes in an excerpt from The Education of Young Donald. There is some truth to this claim. Horne was a great generaliser. His capacity to explain things in the simplest terms, to distil abstract ideas into a single sentence or phrase, to take the national temperature, to write on any topic; these qualities make his writing a window onto the times. It would be difficult to write a history of postwar Australia without reaching for a quote from Horne. In this regard, it is unfortunate that there was not space in Selected Writings for his work on 1960s new nationalism and foreign affairs.

It would be a great shame if this collection marked the end of the conversation about Donald Horne. Yet remarkably little ink has been spilled chronicling the lives of Australia’s intellectuals, those writers and thinkers whose ideas changed the way Australians think about themselves and the world they live in. Horne’s ideas and public work – original or not – changed Australia. He was, Glyn Davis writes, ‘a man who helped the nation understand itself’. He wrote engagingly on modern Australia’s principal dilemmas: the post-colonial predicament, Asia, the republic, the post-industrial economy, and globalisation. His simple, precise prose – sprinkled with ‘telling anecdotes’ – ensured that he reached a wide audience. That ill-defined creature, the Australian public intellectual, was largely his invention.

Reading Donald Horne (at his best) is like reading a concise general history of twentieth-century Australia. Selected Writings does justice to a public career spanning nearly sixty years. To the end, he maintained a tolerance, civility, and openness rarely seen in our current public discourse. As Nick writes, his father’s life is ‘evidence that people can, in good faith, change their minds’. ‘Public wafflers’ are a dime a dozen in modern Australia. This book is a reminder of what we should expect from them.