The "lucky country" was meant as a dig rather than a term of endearment.
So, too, was Donald Horne's caustic polemic, The Lucky Country, which is arguably post-war Australia's most influential work of non-fiction.
But this is a Lucky Country, and today I feel lucky to be here as we mark the 60th anniversary of our unbreakable alliance.
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To make more sense of Australia's ongoing culture wars, I would read Horne's The Lucky Country and Paul Sheehan's 1998 book Among the Barbarians.
So wrote journalist Donald Horne at the start of the 1960s, but like so much of his opus, The Lucky Country, it could have been penned today.
Australia has often been called "the lucky country" since its prodigious natural resources and fertile agriculture have long afforded an astonishingly high quality of life for its citizens.
Lucky the country whose president, after suffering so much, could publicly welcome both the prosecutor and the judge who had sent him to jail at the Rivonia trial in 1964.
Now we've been lucky in this country, although we made our luck, because of the expertise of our police and intelligence services and security services, in avoiding a number of even worse disasters and atrocities than we've actually witnessed.
All of us born in the USA are lucky to live in a country where we are given the right to vote.
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We, as a country, are lucky to have them both and I would argue everyone assembled in this conference is lucky they are still deeply involved in the security interests of all of us involved.
The party with the most coherent, consistent and radical set of ideas for putting pep into the country will be lucky to secure the 5% of the national vote needed to win seats in parliament.
And then for Americans lucky enough to travel outside the country, the horrors of our devaluationist policies in the States follow us wherever we go.
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Psychologically, the reforms have changed what seemed to be a defining feature of Australians' national character: the happy-go-lucky belief that, though their country more than others might be a victim of external events, something would always turn up.
Do most Americans realize how lucky we are to live in a country of such diverse landscapes and cultures?
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The people of Indonesia are lucky I was never President of this country.
Gore said students need to recognize how lucky they are growing up in a country with more freedoms and prosperity than any other.
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But we were lucky enough to be born in a country where here, everybody gets a fair shot, everybody does their fair share, everybody plays by the same set of rules -- no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from, no matter what your last name is, you can make it here if you try.
We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few.
Lucky for me, she lives near my country getaway and was free.
That is why I say I do not believe that in this country, freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few.
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"I feel so lucky to be able to travel all over the country and talk to girls and boys about some of these really dark times that we find ourselves in, " says Thompson.
And we remind ourselves just how lucky we are here, together, in the greatest country on Earth.
Yet it is equally certain that Mr Speight's preferred solution a divided country, in which ethnic Indians would be lucky even to vote, let alone to hold any power would also bring ethnic unrest.
Although Preuss got lucky and immediately entered the toasty store, others across the country were willing to wait in the freezing cold just to get merchandise.
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Excitingly for those lucky enough to be American, we live in the most talented country in the world.
How lucky you are, said the visitor, to live in a country where your children can grow up this way.
The deputy prime minister told the BBC he felt "lucky" to be playing a part in "making sure this country is strong, prosperous and safe in the future".
Ricky Engel, a 16-year-old from Grosse Pointe, wasn't so lucky when he was playing a round of golf at a local country club, and drove his cart under a tree, usually a hot spot for the flies.
So in so many ways you all are lucky to have this kind of center, because communities all over the country need this kind of resource -- in some way, shape, or form -- because as you know, it's hard if you don't have a place to go.
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"They worked hard to leave their country and come here for the opportunities that I'm so lucky to have, " Gomez said of his parents.
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