Chaired by Peter Rose

The Education of Young Donald trilogy is Donald Horne’s autobiographies — The Education of Young Donald (1967), Confessions of a New Boy (1985) and Portrait of an Optimist (1988). They’re the story of an Australian prophet; his years away from home, the gallery of characters he meets on the journey, the “successes that were failures and failures that were successes”, and his unexpected emergence as a voice of the nation. Seventeen years after his passing, analysis of his legacy feels timely in a country still dumbly surfing on its luck.