The tendency to look overseas for great literary works is hardly new. The notion of ‘cultural cringe’ (coined by AA Phillips in 1950) describes an Australian assumption that ‘the domestic cultural product will be worse than the imported article’. We suppose it’s being done better internationally, and look to international markets as arbiters of taste. We measure our own successes against international works—both in terms of sales and reception—and maintain the baseline assumption that international work represents the highest level of achievement.

Emmett Stinson charts the evolution of the cultural cringe in a more recent context, describing it as a ‘national will to fail that became a self-fulfilling prophecy, stymieing Australia’s attempts to forge a national culture’. It’s not hard to see this at work within nonfiction. Overseas works are now more accessible than ever and are rapidly becoming global hits almost instantaneously. This exposure means many Australian readers have tastes saturated by international literature, and I recently became painfully aware that my own are no exception. On my list of nonfiction-writing heroes, Australian writers had been mostly shuffled aside to make room for the hottest new thing coming out of the States, or sometimes the UK. Looking up to so many international writers as my heroes indicates some of the difficulty I have conceiving of myself as an Australian nonfiction writer.