‘In Search of a National Idea’ Australian Intellectuals and the ‘Cultural Cringe’ 1940 – 1972

Abstract

The ‘cultural cringe’ was a powerful force shaping Australian ideas in the post-war years. Struggling with both the heavy cultural shadow of Britain and the brutal apathy of Australian philistinism, intellectuals tried to find ways to escape the colonial rut of a meagre, material culture. This thesis will, for the first time, place together the work of eleven writers and explore their responses to a cultural insecurity they all felt with peculiar intensity. Ultimately, it will be argued that the ‘cultural nationalists’ – A.A. Phillips (who coined the term ‘cultural cringe’ in a 1950 essay), Clem Christesen, Nettie and Vance Palmer, Brian Fitzpatrick and Russel Ward – failed in their quest to define and celebrate a distinctive cultural tradition unique to Australia, free of the tentacles of Britishness. Others such as Manning Clark and Bernard Smith created powerful visions of Australia, but struggled to make these resonant or relevant in an Australia that by the 1960s was changing rapidly. Donald Horne and Patrick White despised cultural nationalism, seeking other ways to ‘create’ Australia; but it was Judith Wright who came closest to the successful realisation of an original idea of Australia, incorporating the Aboriginality of the continent, and in so doing a successful refutation of the hated cringe.