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Timid Minds

Hilary McPhee December 06

Sixty years after A.A. Phillips first wrote about the ‘cultural cringe’ in Meanjin – turning his incisive eye onto Australia’s reflexive second-guessing of its own developing culture – Hilary McPhee tackles the question and its legacy anew. What is the state now of our cultural definition, and what kind of climate is needed for creativity to flourish? A brief extract is below and you can now read the full essay on our editions page.



‘Cringe’, wrote A.A. Phillips, is ‘a disease of the Australian mind.’ This was an unpleasant enough notion in the Australia of the 1950s, then a remnant colonial monoculture with no separate language to hide behind. Now with our cosmopolitan aspirations and liberal assumptions, it seems unthinkable.

Arthur ‘Angell’ Phillips, critic and schoolmaster, had been commissioned by Clem Christesen to write ‘The Cultural Cringe’ for Meanjin in 1950. Clem did not much like the essay when it came in but ran it anyway, and eventually conceded that the reader response had been gratifying. Alliteration always helps and the phrase soon entered the language though some, like the member of the Commonwealth Literary Fund when asked to support publication of The Australian Tradition, a collection of A.A. Phillips’ essays, wanted ‘The Cultural Cringe’ dropped. Australian culture, he argued, needed bolstering not admonishing.[1]

But A.A. Phillips was no reprimander. His assessment was affectionate but very much to the point. Menzies’ Australia was an insecure, often sycophantic nation, its cultural baggage a complex mix of adulation and hostility. Intellectuals headed to Oxford or Cambridge almost as a matter of course. The centrifugal pull of the great British metropolis was irresistible and the anticipation of rejection must have guaranteed it. A.A. Phillips’ recognition of the tendency to tag along dutifully behind England instead of doing our own thing may have been a bit too close to the bone and the psychological insight uncomfortable. He knew what Australian intellectuals were up against, not only within the institutions of the day but also inside their own heads, and he named the crippling lack of self-esteem, which yearned for Australia’s meaty individualism to be appreciated. But by the early 1950s there were signs of real change. Returned soldiers and artists and writers among the refugees and ‘New Australians’ were making intellectual life here more complex. Debates in the pubs and at the university seem to have been increasingly about our place in our region and the distinctive shape of Australian culture.[2]


Notes
1. I am indebted to Jim Davidson’s forthcoming entry on A.A. Phillips for the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and his Sideways from the Page, Fontana Books, 1983, p. 34. Back

2. The Burstall Diaries 1953–56, forthcoming. Back


 

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Comments

by phill
06 Dec 10 at 14:29

This was a really eye-opening essay, probably my pick of the bunch in the last issue. Brilliant that you’re making it available online guys.

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by sophie
06 Dec 10 at 16:35

It’s great, isn’t it?

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