A.A. Phillips and the ‘Cultural Cringe’: Creating an ‘Australian Tradition’

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

Clem Christesen brought Meanjin to Melbourne in 1945, the year Phillips’s first article in the magazine, an attack on the obscurantism and jargon of modern literary criticism, appeared.⁶ In a tribute to Meanjin published in 1956, Phillips recounted how the idea first came to him to become a critic. He was attending a literary gathering in the early 1930s, discussing his passion for Australian writing, when the publisher and bookseller Frank Wilmot told him that ‘you oughtn’t to be talking this stuff, you ought to be writing it’.⁷ But, as Phillips pointed out, there was very little in the way of publications in which a critic might publish in 1930s Australia, and the lack of quality contemporary work was also a hindrance.

However, 1938 saw the publication of Kenneth Slessor’s One Hundred Poems and R.D. FitzGerald’s Moonlight Acre and, said Phillips, ‘now it looked as if the drought was breaking’.⁸ Southerly started soon after, but it was when Meanjin ‘bounced into the fray’ that, according to Phillips, the required forum truly arrived. He said that as Southerly was smaller than Meanjin and its editors part-time, it was not as effective, lacking Meanjin’s ‘vigour and enterprise, keeping its maidenly skirts unstained by political defilement or by open espousal of cultural nationalism’. Not only did Meanjin provide Phillips with the medium in which to practise his craft, but the beliefs, ideas and aspirations of its editor, Christesen, matched his own. Christesen’s ‘absorption, his earnest sense of what needed to be done, gave the paper bite and vitality’. The two, said Phillips, shared a common goal: ‘an almost obsessive hope to see in (our) life-time(s) the emergence of Australian arts of vigour, confidence and increasing maturity’.⁹ This is what he meant by ‘cultural nationalism’.

The two men were thus united in their desire to see the creation of an Australian tradition in literature and the arts. Phillips became a key figure in the development of Meanjin in the years after the Second World War and through the 1950s and 1960s, serving on the editorial board and as an associate editor at various stages. He contributed many essays, helping set—with Vance and Nettie Palmer and Christesen himself—the journal’s agenda. With great generosity, Christesen wrote in a letter to Phillips in 1980 that ‘whatever reputation the journal achieved was due largely to your contributions and to your pervasive influence’.¹⁰

In the pages of Meanjin, since its first publication as Meanjin Papers in Brisbane in 1940, writer after writer had identified the need for a distinctive Australian culture, one that reflected the peculiarities of the Australian environment. The debate concerned the shape the ‘Australian Tradition’—also the name of Phillips’s book of 1958, in which some of his essays on Australian culture, including ‘The Cultural Cringe’, were collected¹¹—should take. In the second issue, poet James Picot (who died in 1944 in Japanese internment) discussed the Jindyworobak aim of creating an Australian poetry wholly divorced from outside influences, an aim Picot sympathised with. In the Australian context, he said, ‘it is just no good talking Keats, however much we may like Keats’, although he acknowledged Australian poets needed to belong to the ‘wider cultural world’: ‘After all, we live in the world of Lenin and Hitler and Einstein and Freud and Whitehead, and the Australian is as intelligent as anybody else!’¹²

Christesen concurred. The stated aim of the newly founded Meanjin Papers was ‘the promotion of a distinctively national culture’.¹³ The Jindyworobaks and their outlandish mentor P.R. ‘Inky’ Stephensen—whose tub-thumping essay ‘The Foundations of Culture in Australia’ (originally published in his magazine the Australian Mercury in 1935) called for the creation of ‘our own indigenous culture’¹⁴—were published in Meanjin, but their jingoistic view, by the early 1940s associated with the fascist Australia First Party (Stephensen spent much of the war interned in a POW camp), was rejected. Phillips said he had ‘no sympathy’ with political nationalism—an unsurprising statement, given his Jewishness—while Christesen described himself as ‘socialist, democratic left of centre’.¹⁵ Phillips said he did not necessarily agree with the ‘politico-social line’ developed by Meanjin’s editor, but nevertheless thought it a good idea for a journal to take a stance. The ‘leading factor’ in Phillips’s ‘cultural nationalism’, he said, was his ‘dismay at the stagnation of Australian life in the 20s and 30s’. He refused to accept Australian inferiority ‘as almost an expression of natural law’ and was opposed to ‘imitativeness which stifled initiatives’. He saw a need to regain a ‘confidence in ourselves as a community and a sense of pride in it’.¹⁶ To do so, a national culture needed to be articulated and endorsed, and it had to be free of the influence of Britain.

Christesen wanted to see a national culture engaged with international issues, and W.A. Amiet, in Meanjin’s ‘Nationality Number’ of 1941, laid out the rules in peremptory fashion:

Rule 1. Get rid of the inferiority complex … Rule 2. Get it clear that ours is a literature, not a branch literature … Rule 3. To obtain ‘national’ results, don’t harp on the ‘national’.¹⁷

Amiet’s third rule summed up what the problem was for the cultural nationalists, namely that of parochialism. Parochialism was the enemy, and yet … an Australian culture had to be Australian—of course. The solution lay in the 1890s. Phillips and his mates saw themselves as re-creating something like the ‘communal identity’ of that halcyon decade. Writing in the 1970s, he said that ‘the impulse behind my engagement in cultural activities was that pipe-dream of an invigorated Australian art and a wider cultural movement’. What he had hoped for in the 1950s, he said, was ‘something not unlike the cultural efflorescences in Periclean Athens or Elizabethan England. It was obvious how much these flowerings had been fertilised by the community’s sense of a common identity and of a pride in it’.¹⁸

Even today, when for many the idea of a ‘cultural cringe’ is anathema, these words seem remarkably ambitious. But how else was the tradition to be created? Either Australian culture was worthy of comparison with those of other nations and civilisations or it wasn’t. If not, so be it, but Phillips was not conceding that point. An Australian canon needed to be identified, and Henry Lawson and Joseph Furphy were its foundations; new writers needed to be found, and Phillips set about doing so, praising the likes of Frank Dalby Davison, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Douglas Stewart and Alan Marshall; universities needed to be persuaded to take Australian literature seriously and to ‘accept it as a legitimate subject of undergraduate study’, and Phillips said that it was not until the end of the 1950s that this was achieved and ‘academic disdain began to thaw out’;¹⁹ and a milieu of criticism needed to be conjured up.

The role of the critic was thus key. Phillips said that in the 1930s and 1940s he frequently heard writers complain that they had to work ‘without critical discussion’ of their writing, and that it was ‘like trying to breathe in a vacuum’. He saw how he could be of use, and his criticism would not merely be about commenting on contemporary work but would also include ‘a re-assessment of earlier work’ and an ‘attempt to help develop a sense of Australian literature as a continuing entity worth considerable attention’.²⁰ Meanjin was the mouthpiece, and the band of writers, academics and critics who contributed to that journal were the vanguard of the ‘cultural community’, in a manner imitating those of previous eras in Australia and elsewhere. In an article of 1943, Christesen called this band of poets and writers the ‘Meanjin School’; although, in defining the term, he tried to debunk it at the same time.²¹

For Phillips, it was the lack of proper recognition for Australian writers that was so damaging: ‘most intellectuals and culture claimants’, he said of the 1930s, ‘dismissed Australian writing without even bothering to read it’. There was a ‘continuing cultural colonialism’ affecting Australia before Meanjin’s emergence, and it ‘tended to destroy initiative. It bred an automatic depreciation of almost everything Australian.’²² Alluding to the lack of Australian literature courses in universities, Phillips said that the only important contribution by a Melbourne academic in the field of Australian Literature in the 1930s was the infamous article in the Age by G.S. Cowling (the imported Professor of English at the University of Melbourne) in which he made the ‘lordly assumption that literature of worth could not be produced in Australia’.²³ It was this article that stung Inky Stephensen into writing his manifesto, the precursor, as Phillips recognised, to his own definition of, and attack on, the cultural cringe.

It seemed to Phillips that the 1890s had been the one period when ‘depreciation’ of Australian culture had not existed—or had been present to a lesser degree. Furthermore, that period had produced what he believed to be Australian writing of genuine quality, specifically the works of Lawson and Furphy. Therefore, the so-called ‘Legend of the Nineties’ (the title of Vance Palmer’s 1954 panegyric to the era) could serve as the bedrock for the Australian canon, the existence—and brilliance—of which Phillips sought to promulgate.

This canon would serve as the foundation needed by contemporary writers, helping them leave behind the cultural stagnation of the interwar years. And the Second World War was viewed as the spark required to set them on their way. Belligerent imagery abounded. In his ‘editorial note’ to the Meanjin ‘Crisis Issue’ of March 1942, entitled ‘War on the Intellectual Front’, Christesen associated the Second World War and the sudden threat of Japanese invasion with a chance to enter ‘intellectual battlefields’ and ‘cut away from that capitalistic commercialism which is strangling cultural life’.²⁴ Continuing the warlike theme, Vance Palmer, in his article ‘Battle’, lamented the lack of tangible culture worth defending in Australia—‘no monuments to speak of, no dreams in stone, no Guernicas, no sacred places’—but declared that the war and its challenges presented the chance to create the Australian versions of these things.²⁵ Meanwhile, elsewhere in the issue, John K. Ewers identified a gaping hole in knowledge of Australian culture, as he described lecturing students at the University of Western Australia on the topic of Australian literature and found them expressing surprise at the existence of ‘such a wide field’ and feeling that ‘somehow they had been cheated of an important part of their literary heritage’.²⁶ Clearly this lacuna required urgent attention.

In those moments of extreme tension in early to mid 1942—before the battles of Coral Sea and Midway and the turning back of the Japanese on the Kokoda Track (and before the slide into disillusion and ennui chronicled, for example, by Donald Horne in the second volume of his autobiography, Confessions of a New Boy) and at just the point Meanjin’s ‘Crisis Issue’ was published—there was a sense of urgency and nervous excitement among Australian writers and intellectuals reflected in Palmer’s stirring article and in the rest of the ‘Crisis Issue’. Writing nearly a decade later, Christesen missed the fire he saw in the Meanjin of 1942: ‘there was a quickened mental alertness’, he said, along with ‘a heightened consciousness, a fresh hope for the nation’s future. The promise of a cultural renaissance surpassing that of the 80s and 90s was tremendously exciting to some of us.’²⁷

Where had this ‘heightened consciousness’ gone? Christesen lamented its passing, and made the obvious comparison with the political situation in his year of writing, 1951, which saw the Menzies government’s attempts to ban the Australian Communist Party. He declared that the ‘traumatic shock’ suffered by ‘our writers’ had made them ‘inarticulate’, but he hoped this would be temporary and predicted that soon ‘a fresh impetus will become evident, as the political situation develops: they will use the wound as the bow’.²⁸

Therefore, the dream of 1942 still existed in 1951. It had not been realised, but Christesen and his group still believed in it. And what was this ideal of an ‘Australian Tradition’ for which they were aiming? As Christesen said in his note to contributors in Meanjin’s 1943 Joseph Furphy centenary issue: ‘It is suggested that contributors should accept the challenge of our Australian environment, endeavour to interpret today’s imagination and thought in prose and verse, reveal awareness of Australia’s position in world affairs, and give emphasis on the continued development of a strong and virile national literature, with all its significant marks of “difference”.’²⁹

Phillips, beginning to write for Meanjin two years later, set out to identify these ‘marks of difference’. For him, the ‘Australian Tradition’ was democratic, with a strong emphasis on radicalism and the pursuit of social justice. In a discussion of Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life (1903), he pinpointed one of the two unifying elements of the novel—along with its ‘ironic interplay of circumstance’—as its ‘democratic faith’: ‘a faith expressed not only in the radical social theories which Furphy preaches but in the sturdy individualism of his outback characters’. Furphy, said Phillips, reacted against the romantic novels of early Australia, as he was a writer who ‘valued Truth’ and because of his ‘robustly democratic convictions’.³⁰ Thus the egalitarian ‘bullockies’ and drovers in the novel are celebrated, while opprobrium is reserved for the squatters who, in what appears to be their main crime, deny the bullock drivers the fresh grass they need to keep their teams going (Furphy had had his career as a bullock-driver curtailed when he lost his team in the harsh drought of 1883).³¹ Furphy, of course, had made the connection between the democratic and the Australian explicit in his famous description of his own novel. Phillips said that ‘the student of the next century who wants to understand democratic pioneering’ would first of all look at the works of Mark Twain or Walt Whitman, and then would turn to Furphy’s novels, perhaps finding them of similar quality to Twain’s.³²

But it was important that Phillips differentiate this ‘Australian Dream’ from its American counterpart. He compared the twin ideals of the frontier and the outback, and declared that ‘Australian writers have perhaps expressed that spirit (of the frontier/outback) more truthfully and more individually than the artists of any other of the New Countries’. He admitted the relative scarcity of such writers, but said that ‘the robust individualism, the sardonic humour, the humane, simple yet ironic spirit of the Frontier speak in convincing tones in their work’. This humane humour is best seen in Furphy’s ‘isocratic irreverence’: his literate, comic rendition of the famous Australian levelling tendency—‘the key’, said Phillips, ‘to much Australian writing’.³³

In an essay on ‘Rolf Boldrewood’, the squatter-cum-gold mine manager who wrote adventure novels in the 1870s and 1980s, Phillips identified how the idea of Australia as a ‘land of opportunity’, which Boldrewood presented in his novels (most famously Robbery under Arms of 1883) had, by the 1890s, ‘almost disappeared from the mythology’: ‘the men represented by Lawson and Furphy will have none of it. To them it is no justification of the social order that the under-dog could rise to the top because that implies that there was still to be a bottom.’ Thus, according to Phillips, ‘the Australian mythology, somewhere between the generations of Boldrewood and of Furphy, parted company with the American Dream’.³⁴

Geoffrey Blainey, a former pupil of Phillips at Wesley College who was to deliver the address at his funeral in 1985, wrote to Phillips about this essay near the date of its publication, contemplating Phillips’s use of Boldrewood to try to understand the Australian ‘mythologies’ of the nineteenth century.³⁵ Phillips had identified Boldrewood’s ‘hybrid social attitude’.³⁶ Boldrewood (real name Thomas Alexander Browne) had been a member of the ‘squattocracy’, running land in the Portland area of western Victoria, and then near Swan Hill on the Murray River, where he was forced to quit by severe drought in 1869.³⁷ He then worked as the goldfields commissioner at Gulgong, at the very time Henry Lawson was growing up in the area, a connection made by Phillips, who said that it ‘was permissible to suppose that in 1870, Thomas Everard Browne, alias Rolf Boldrewood, the middle-aged Warden of the Gulgong gold-field, patted the head of the three-year-old Harry Larsen, alias Henry Lawson’.³⁸

Thus Boldrewood had been a participant in the mining boom, a phenomenon looked down upon by the squatter class. The attitudes expressed in his novels—a mixture of the squattocratic belief in hierarchy and the more democratic sensibility of the goldfields—reflect this dichotomy. Wasn’t Australian society more complex than the ‘myth-makers’ had made out? Blainey questioned the ‘assumption’ held by Russel Ward that ‘there was a distinctive and dominant social mythology in Australia by the close of the nineteenth century, and that the great majority of Australians in the bush or cities believed in it’. Blainey wondered whether the ‘underdog-mateship cult’ expressed by Lawson and Furphy was as widespread and strong in the cities as it was in the bush. He pointed out that the Bulletin—supposedly the ‘great levelling’ journal—was in 1900 as geared (through its excellent mining columns) towards those of a materialistic bent as any other section of society, and that it was therefore reasonable to assume that many Australians ‘worshipped’ material success, if not to the degree seen in America.

Phillips, according to Blainey, had identified a problem with the ‘mythologising’, by writers such as Ward and Vance Palmer, of the 1890s bush legend. The ‘legend’ as expressed by Furphy and Lawson, said Blainey, was ‘distinctive and articulate and competent and influential’, and thus very attractive to writers and historians. But Ward, while showing how it grew and spread among pastoral workers, failed to take into account the growth of competing legends, for example the material one identified by Blainey, or the national obsession with spectator sports.³⁹

Phillips, however, tried to show that Boldrewood’s idea of Australia was one redolent of the 1850s or 1860s, and that by the 1890s this way of thinking was anachronistic. Phillips was not the man to undertake what Blainey calls the ‘biggest task’ (‘still undone’ in 1965)—‘to look at the mythology of other sections of society and see how it differs from the pastoral proletariat or what it has in common’⁴⁰—because he believed in that legend as the basis for his Australian canon. He said that ‘before the nineties there was no such thing as Australian writing, no continuous stream of creative work; there were only occasional books, standing like waterholes in a sandy bed of apathy’.⁴¹ Thus the radical, democratic, bushman legend of the nineties may well have been only one mythology among a number; but that, according to Phillips, did not alter the fact that, as far as creating a distinctive Australian high culture went, this mythology was by far the most important.

And what a culture was being created! Phillips described it as a ‘strikingly original’ school of writing, bemoaning the fact that English writers had wilfully ignored this ‘revolutionary’ style pioneered in Australia. If they had not, they might have realised that ‘for the first time in centuries, Anglo-Saxon writing had broken out of the cage of the middle-class attitude’. Lawson and Furphy, he said, ‘wrote of the people, for the people, and from the people’, and to them the middle classes were ‘foreigners’, which is what differentiates them from the likes of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy.⁴²

The traits of this working class, democratic literature were several: the irreverence and individualism of Furphy, of course, and also a ‘directness of spirit’, which he identified, as an example, in the novels of Frank Dalby Davison. Phillips described Davison’s Man-shy (1931), the story of a heifer that wants to return to the wild, as a celebration of the ‘square-jawed independence which is the core of the Australian tradition’.⁴³ Davison’s father, Frederick, was a member of the Australian Natives’ Association and from 1897 to 1899 edited its journal, Advance Australia. He was a ‘Progressive’ with a ‘fervent belief in the White Australia policy, the British Empire, national development and private enterprise’.⁴⁴ Phillips ignored some of the more unsavoury aspects of Davison senior’s politics, and focused on the nationalism. He recalled his first meeting with Davison in the mid 1940s, in a city pub ‘with the six o’clock swill swirling about us’. Davison told him about the four years in the mid 1920s he had spent on a selection north of Roma in Queensland. It was a tough life with his first wife and child, and it ended in failure. Davison told Phillips that it was ‘pretty disastrous, but I got a hell of a lot else that mattered out of it’. Phillips at first thought he meant material for books, but ‘now I recognise that as a shallow interpretation’. Phillips equated Davison’s love of the land with the Australian nationalism ‘imbibed from his father’. Phillips identified the same connection to the land in the writing of Katharine Susannah Prichard, whose Coonardoo (1929), he said, looked on the Australian outback with ‘the affection of intimacy and the pride of possession’, following a hard-fought battle to subdue the land, which had ‘graven on the Australian a new, proud and individual character’.⁴⁵

If the first part of Phillips’s task had been to identify the tradition, the second part was the need to nurture writers such as Davison and Prichard and thus ensure the continued currency of this tradition. For a schoolmaster, it might be said, this came easily. Blainey, replying to a letter from his former teacher in 1955, wrote that Phillips may have been correct to say that ‘no one ever taught anyone to write’, but that he still minded Phillips’s literary advice in the margin of his homework: ‘flabby’, Phillips would scribble, ‘when we used to imitate the spacious and ornate style of writing’. ‘I mind the line well,’ Blainey continued, ‘as the old bushmen say. Since then, I’ve mostly tried to write tersely.’⁴⁶

Other writers were thankful for Phillips’s advice too. It is noticeable, as one looks through Phillips’s letters, that he received many from poets and writers—A.D. Hope, James McAuley, Eric Lambert and Thomas Shapcott, to name some—to whom he had been giving advice and criticism after close readings of their work: he was a great encourager. Poet and novelist David Martin in particular was full of praise for his friend. After Phillips had delivered the funeral oration for Vance Palmer in 1959, Martin, writing to congratulate him, said that ‘this is a good occasion to remind you that many of us have for you a regard very similar in kind to what we had for Vance’. In another letter ten years later, Martin described Phillips as ‘perceptive’ and ‘honest’, declaring his ‘generosity is tempered by a commitment to a literary truth’. He compared Phillips with Vance and Nettie Palmer, saying that Nettie ‘used to stress the importance of this kind of encouragement to writers’.⁴⁷

The comparison with the Palmers, his great friends, would no doubt have pleased Phillips. He viewed them as the founders of his own brand of cultural nationalism, and, like them, he believed strongly in the role of the critic as great promoter and encourager of culture. Phillips’s was a Leavisite idea of literature: it must serve a higher purpose, improve the lives of those who came into contact with it. This was wrapped up in the idea of giving Australians their own, meaningful culture. Phillips wrote of the Palmers that their ‘main aim’ was ‘to nurture the growth of Australian literature which would have both a sense of the future and a continuity with the Australian past’. He recalled Nettie describing herself as the ‘watchdog of Australian letters’ and described her ‘responsiveness’ to Australian writers: this was valuable because ‘so many Australians at the time were so disdainfully indifferent to their own writers’.⁴⁸

Cultural nationalists of the Phillips–Palmer ilk were not without their critics. In the 1970s they were disparaged as ‘monists’ and derided for their elitism.⁴⁹ Their Leavisite mission was seen as the classic symptom of the Melbourne intellectual’s urge to improve the world (as opposed to the Sydney intellectual’s desire to ignore it). Phillips was accused of idealising the 1890s and skirting over the problematic issues of that decade’s bigotry, but he said that it was ‘natural for us to look back to the Nineties when it seemed that a strong sense of communal identity and a pride in it had generated forward movement’. He admitted that ‘no doubt our view of the Nineties was largely illusory’, but he pleaded the mitigating factors of changed ways of historical thinking and emphases in 1970s academia.⁵⁰

He might have added that the level of sophistication of critics had quite possibly advanced, too. The folksy nature of the cultural nationalists’ ‘tradition’ presented an easy target. Manning Clark’s focus, in a 1949 Meanjin article, on the centrality of ‘mateship’ to the Australian tradition is an obvious example of this irksome (to many) naivety. Clark said that mateship was ‘the key to the messianic note which runs through Lawson’s and Furphy’s works. If mates can live in harmony with each other … then why should not the whole of society do the same?’ He quoted famed 1890s idealist William Lane’s definition of communism as ‘just being mates’. ‘Naïve?’ wondered Clark. ‘Possibly: still it is a measure of their faith.’ For Clark it was not a problem that this literature was naïve, because, as he saw it, that was part of the literature that young societies created—‘vigorous, unsophisticated’—as opposed to the ‘more complex’ literature of the old societies of Western Europe.⁵¹ The idea of ‘mateship’ was simple and natural, not complicated and intellectual. Phillips agreed, seeing ‘dinkum-ness’ as being another trait of Australian literature. He explained it in relation to Eleanor Dark’s novel The Timeless Land (1941), set in Sydney Harbour in 1788, in which, among other plot strands, the story is told of a convict who escapes and achieves ‘first, physical independence, and then spiritual integrity through an act of sacrifice’. Phillips points out that ‘Mrs. Dark does not label him as the First of the Dinkum Aussies—for an Australian audience, that would be unnecessary’.⁵²

In a review of Phillips’s book The Australian Tradition, Donald Horne attacked this view of literature in strident terms. He quoted Phillips on Australian novelists’ focus on ‘the importance of the common man’ and their ‘unembarrassed preference for revealing the simple verities rather than the sophistications of human nature’. But for Horne such preoccupations were merely a ‘recipe for bad writing’: ‘a concern with the sophistication of human nature is surely exactly what ‘great’ novels are about’. He chafed at what he saw as an acceptance of lower standards, which had ‘bred a class of impostor novelists, whose work is read and seriously discussed as literature’. Horne proposed all sorts of reasons for this ‘full scale literary fraud’: these included vested interests—‘it’s a protected industry’ and ‘you can get away with murder as a literary critic if you discuss the Australian holy books’; the excessive tolerance of universities; the desire to go down well with ‘non-intellectual majorities’ who want Australia to be ‘good at everything’; the ‘fellowship’ of the literary life; and belief in the ‘inherent virtue of writing’—even if it is substandard. Horne said that provincialism had been passed off as literature because the majority ignored it—‘and for that one can hardly blame them’.⁵³

By the mid 1960s Phillips was reduced to writing essays in support of provincialism in an attempt to parry the attacks of Horne and others. ‘Should we try to see Australian writing in the light of “universal” standards?’ he asked, or ‘should we judge it by its special meaning to ourselves?’ He admitted that ‘a raucous nationalism’ had led to excessive ‘over-praise’ for Australian works in the past, but he contended that subservience to ‘metropolitan’ standards would be ‘wrong and dangerous’. Provincialism, he contended, had a lot going for it: its ‘freshness, sincerity and flavour’ raising it above the ‘imitativeness’ of metropolitan writers. He declared that ‘provincial cultures’ could stand aside and thus sort the important from the merely fashionable: ‘when we cringe to metropolises, we forfeit this chance to serve both them and ourselves’. Phillips, reprising his ‘cultural cringe’ essay, took aim once more at ‘the chill emanating from that class of Australian intellectual … intimidated by the fear of being provincial’.⁵⁴

This is where Phillips’s legacy lies: he was unashamed of being Australian and he was unashamed of Australian culture. If the culture he promoted tended, according to his critics, to the hackneyed or the unsophisticated, nevertheless it was an Australian culture, and Phillips and the other members of the Meanjin School, working in difficult times for the intellectual and the artist, were unafraid of promoting and celebrating it. ‘You don’t like all this stuff about gum-tips and wattle-blossoms, do you?’ asked a young intellectual acquaintance of Phillips in 1948, upon seeing him with an Australian anthology tucked under his arm. ‘Why not?’ replied Phillips. ‘Do you think poetry should be about daffodils and nightingales?’⁵⁵ And some years later, in 1961, Phillips and his wife Mary spent nine months touring Europe. He recounted how, in Split, the two of them paused to listen to a nightingale, a reverent moment for both of them, as here was the bird so lauded by the poets of the English tradition. ‘Is that it?’ was the critic’s uneasy reaction to the bird’s song. The lyrebird and the Australian magpie, he reckoned, had a far more beautiful song, but the Australian’s natural assumption was one of the inferiority of the native birds.⁵⁶ This was the cringe he sought to dispel.