Too Close to Home: Australia's Cultural Cringe Complex

Photo courtesy of Athithan Vignakaran via the Unsplash License

Growing up in Australia I was always comforted by the contemplative nature of the beach at sunset, feeling like it suited me more than the sun-dressed vivacity of the Australian beach by day. Endless stretches of cooling sand against a disappearing horizon, wondering what lay on the other side of the vastness and dreaming of forging a life beyond it. 

Now, back in that spot for the first time in two years, a London life in full swing across that same vast ocean, watching the pink and orange milky sky melt into the horizon and dance across the water, I am faced with my own ignorance, a weakness even, in succumbing to an all too Australian penchant for cultural self-deprecation. This scene once represented the longing to explore and cast my net beyond that horizon, which somehow depended on a lifelong rejection of my Australianness which I don’t think was particularly deserved.  

My own experience speaks to a larger sociocultural trend of perceived cultural inferiority amongst Australians, which, with its entangled colonial roots, has been casting a physical and intellectual distance between Australia and the rest of the West for generations. One only needs to walk through the streets of Clapham to witness an age old rite of passage in the Australian life cycle materialise - the quintessential Aussie ‘year in London’ to immerse oneself in culture and traverse the European continent before conceding to the sunshine and expanse of open space. But what of those of us who choose to stay?  

It feels no coincidence that London is at the crux of this self-discovery, that the wanderlust of youth so often draws Australians back to the ‘motherland,’ with its ornate sense of cultural everythingness, while still being able to knowingly titter at the British sarcasm from which our own humour derived. It is at this nexus where the Australian national inferiority complex emerges - but I can’t help but think that if Australia’s youth was defined by its colonial status and a cultural endowment from Britain, surely, we are now entering a cultural adolescence of rebellion and a desire for independence.  

The origin of this inferiority complex was theorised by Arthur Phillips, headmaster of Melbourne’s prestigious Wesley College in the 1950s - the educational environment of which one can rightly assume was to be as English as possible. Phillips landmark essay ‘The Cultural Cringe’ outlines his belief that ‘...it is not so much our limitations of size, youth and isolation which create the problem as the derivativeness of our culture,’ that the very essence of Australian culture as a ‘new’ colonial offshoot of Britain does not provide Australia with the intellectual tradition and credibility essential to producing ideas and art comparable to that of our Western counterparts. Even as the geopolitical order shifted, and the Americanisation of Australian culture drew us away from Britain and arguably towards a blended rhetoric of cultural independence, there still exists this perpetual inferiority, a physical and metaphorical distance from the West which enshrouds the creative environment and forms a centrifugal pull towards the metropolises of the world.  

The Australia of the 1950s which Phillips is reflecting was inching towards an independent cultural identity in the wake of the Second World War, however the nation’s cultural understanding was indelibly tied to a colonial dependence to Britain and the West. It has only been since the 1970s that a so-called ‘post-colonial Renaissance’ has seen Australia forge its own intellectual and artistic traditions, not only separate to Britain but arguably in spite of it. Challenging colonial narratives, Aboriginal Australian art, folklore and practices have reemerged in the Australian cultural consciousness and constructed a new national identity not of youth, but unencumbered antiquity. Nonetheless, it would be the height of hubris to mythologise this cultural cringe as merely an anachronistic token of a colonial past. It still remains that less than four percent of Australia’s population is Indigenous, with the key tenants of Australian national identity and geopolitical influence stemming from our involvement in a British war and the evocation of the ANZAC spirit of ‘mateship’ and the ‘Aussie Larrikin.’ 

In conversation with Professor Alana Harris, an Australian historian who specialises in modern British social, cultural and gender history at King’s College London, we reflected on our understandings of home. She espouses how many Australians, and historians in particular, have a certain “respect for structure and ritual and hierarchy,” which Australia is perceived to be lacking in. Having attended the University of Oxford for postgraduate studies, Dr Harris discussed the cultural “allure of Oxford and Cambridge in the imaginary,” as centres of antiquity and intellectualism, yet describes how “I realised that my intellectual and historical grounding at Melbourne was fabulous, world class and much more theoretically sophisticated…than that of what I encountered in Oxford.”

With insights into both Australian and British higher education, it seems the intellectual environment in Australia is not lacking for not being steeped in history and ceremony, but better for it. Dr Harris mirrors this sentiment in her teaching strategy, “being not from here but teaching about here was a little bit of an accidental superpower, because it means that you are always looking through the other end of the telescope on things and not taking anything as read or for granted.” Rather than being entrenched in prestige and ritual like their British counterparts, Australian intellectuals are perhaps better able to do as Australians do - muck in, make noise and do things differently.  

When interviewing Dr Harris for this article, a poignant moment for me was our discussion of the nuances of the life cycle within this diaspora. A conversation between two individuals who know what it is to leave home, Dr Harris with an established and successful career as an educator and historian, and me at the very beginning of mine - hanging off every word.  Explaining her post-doctoral project looking at diaspora with over a hundred oral history interviews, “one of the questions that I always asked was: “if I say home to you what do you say?” Depending on how old they were, people talked about where they wanted to be buried”  indicating how “a goodly number talked about wanting to be buried where they originated, and two decades on I sort of understand that a bit more than I did ten years ago.” Perhaps it is not a cultural inferiority which draws Australians to the metropolis’ of the world, but the wanderlust of youth. This idea of an Australian intellectual brain drain a symptom of an insecurity which does not necessarily exist in the hearts and minds of people who consider Australia home – the meaning of which perhaps becomes more potent as the life cycle goes on. 

It is pertinent to note that this Australian penchant for comparison exists within the country as well as internationally. Coming from Perth, a small, isolated city on the country’s West Coast, I too felt the aching sense of isolation and inferiority to the cosmopolitan hubs of Sydney and Melbourne on the East Coast. Dr Harris echoed this sentiment when describing her sense of insecurity when moving from rural Victoria to the metropolis of Melbourne. Indeed, the perception that certain places and people are the arbiters of intellectualism and culture is not a new one, and perhaps the fundaments of the cultural cringe theory speak to a wider issue of class as opposed to culture. From the economic and cultural gap between Westminster and England’s north, for example, to the archetypes of the ‘country bumpkin’ versus the city dwellers with their so-called cultivated sensibilities, it is undeniable that class, or at least the perception of it is at the core of this cultural cringe idea. 

Beginning its colonial life as a destination for British convicts, with an accent forged by a dialectical melting pot of cockney slang, Australia does not have the tradition of grandiosity which our Western counterparts can claim. What we do have however, is a vibrant post-colonial renaissance of the oldest culture in the world, a nation with one of the highest qualities of life in the world and awe-inspiring natural landscapes. Perhaps it is time to deconstruct the faux-British residue of our colonial beginnings and start taking pride in Australian art and perspectives and be rid of Cultural Cringe for good.  

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Edited by Hania Ahmed, Creative Editor