The current popular interpretation of A.A. Phillips’s term ‘cultural cringe’—in a similar way to that of Donald Horne’s phrase ‘lucky country’—is a distortion of what the term was originally intended to convey. Coined in 1950 in the pages of Meanjin, the term has come to refer to Australians’ inherent lack of faith in their own culture, often at the popular level. This is divorced from the originally intended meaning, which was explicitly linked to ‘high’ culture. Phillips wished to create a national culture that conceded no inferiority to Britain, and indeed was unembarrassed to be Australian: ‘temper, democratic; bias, offensively Australian’, as his hero Joseph Furphy famously put it nearly half a century earlier.¹

Arthur Angell Phillips was fifty years old when he published his most famous essay, ‘The Cultural Cringe’, in Meanjin.² By no means a famous critic—if indeed there was such a thing in 1940s and 1950s Australia—he had been a schoolmaster at Wesley College, the Melbourne private school, since 1927, and was to remain one until his retirement in 1971. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, the poet, recalls the story told of Phillips towards the end of his teaching career, meeting new boys at the school and fondly recalling teaching not just their fathers but also their grandfathers.³ Teaching was his primary vocation, and that of his wife Mary, too, whom he married in 1935. Among the Phillips Family papers in the State Library of Victoria can be found a cache of love letters written between the couple in the year before they married.⁴ At this stage Phillips was primarily preoccupied with his career, but in 1937 he joined Dolia Ribush’s theatre company as business manager, later acting in the first production of Douglas Stewart’s Ned Kelly (1944). According to Jim Davidson, this period of his life was singled out by Phillips himself as the most rewarding, and his lifelong correspondence with the Sydney-based New Zealander Stewart—convivial, irreverent, literary—is testament to the friendships he formed in these years.⁵