Looking at Australia from Europe one has the sense not so much that we are different as that we struggle too hard to be the same. Artists in London, Paris, New York or Rome produce splashes and blobs and triangles of colour, or twist metal junk into odd shapes, and a whole generation of Australian artists do the same. A London clique cultivates obscure and difficult poetry derived from the convoluted psychology of a declining culture and an Australian avant-garde soon follows suit. Obscenity becomes the done thing in fiction, drama and film, and Australian writers, producers and critics clamour for freedom to do likewise. There are anti-this, that or the other demos in London or Washington and, after sufficient time-lag, there are similar demos in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. All this is current evidence, surely, not only that nowadays mass media bring the world into every living-room but that we still suffer from what A. A. Phillips once called our ‘cultural cringe’—except that we now cringe before mass media images and the latest fashion in sophistication rather than genuine artistic creation.

If this were a publicity blurb for the Information and Cultural Section of the Department of Foreign Affairs it would be easy enough to take the mickey out of British sophisticates who think we still live in a ‘cultural desert’ or refuse to credit us with whatever virtue accrues from being up with the latest. We have half-a-dozen painters and a handful of poets who can stand beside the best of their English or American contemporaries, and a novelist who looks more like a potential Nobel laureate than anyone writing in England now. We have architects and town planners who are beginning to provide Australian cities with a new sense of ‘architectural grandeur’. Meanjin Quarterly has now completed thirty years under one founder/ editor, surely an English-language record. In addition, we maintain a respectable standing in all branches of practical knowledge as well as in the arts and sciences. There is even an Australian school of philosophy (and a tidy, practical commonsensical school it is) although only professional philosophers seem to know about it, and not all of them.