by Rosetta Taylor

Created on: February 02, 2010   Last Updated: June 03, 2010

The term 'cultural cringe' has been applied to more than one country, but to nowhere more often than to Australia.  It is usually applied to the outlook of a population which does not apreciate its national identity.  The nation's residents regard products, attitudes and lifestyles which have been imported from elsewhere as being somehow superior to the home grown variety.  This  attitude was particularly prevalent in Australia in the decades following WWII.  So why did Australians have an inferiority complex, and is it still apparent today?

Social commentator A. A. Phillips coined the phrase ‘cultural cringe’ in 1950, to define the prevailing national view that Australian artistic achievements were always less worthy than their European counterparts, and that no Australian could achieve anything significant without having first spent some time overseas, particularly in Britain.

Even as recently as the 1960’s and 70’s, any overseas celebrity visiting Australia would be met, as they stepped off the plane, by journalists whose first question would invariably be "What do you think of Australia?"  More than one, puzzled by the question and the need for approval that lay behind it, quipped "All I've seen is the airport".  It was as if Australia, like a bashful teenager, hoped that it was attractive, but needed someone else's endorsement in order to believe it.

The origins of this malaise can be found in Australia’s beginnings as a penal colony.  After the conclusion of the American War of Independence in 1782, England could no longer send its outcasts and delinquents to North American penal colonies.  British prisons overflowed into the rotting hulks of decaying ships moored in the Thames estuary in London.  The upper classes wanted this sad detritus of humanity removed from Britain’s shores, and the decision was made to create a new penal colony in Botany Bay, the site of Captain James Cook’s landing in 1770 in the country that later became known as Australia. 

The first fleet, carrying about 780 convicts, arrived in 1788, and Australia remained officially a penal colony until 1823.  Many of the convicts were Irish rural poor and the destitute underclass of London, shipped out to the penal colony on trivial charges.  These convict beginnings were a millstone around the new nation’s neck for many years,

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