It is salutary, however, to revisit that number of Meanjin in the summer of 1950, when the journal was marking its tenth anniversary in an atmosphere of gathering crisis as the crusade against communists and ‘fellow travellers’ gained momentum. Christesen saw the liberal arts as facing ‘fearful odds’. ‘I myself know that ten years ago I was freer to write and publish what I wanted than I am today,’ he editorialised, ‘and I can sympathise with those others who have decided to lock their desks until better times.’ This sense of grim foreboding serves as a framework for viewing the 1950s cultural scene, but it had not had time to filter down to the contents of that summer number. A.P. Elkin, in ‘Aborigine and White’, was determinedly optimistic about Aboriginal policy, contrasting 1930 as a time of despair with 1950, a time of ‘hope and advance’. Among the books attracting favourable reviews were important pioneering works such as Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Sir John Franklin in Tasmania: 1837–1843 (1949), Margaret Kiddle’s Caroline Chisholm (who, Henrietta Drake-Brockman declared, ‘must rightly become a figure of legend, a national inspiration, pattern of an ideal attitude of mind for “the good Australian”‘) and Nettie Palmer’s Henry Handel Richardson (both published in 1950).

Yet, quite apart from Phillips’s article, the preoccupation with the old imperial connection is never far beneath the Meanjin surface. Katharine Susannah Prichard actually begins her piece on ‘Lawrence in Australia’ in London: ‘My flat in London was perched high over the roof tops and trees of Chelsea Embankment. After reading Sons and Lovers there, soon after it was published, I felt as if a comet had swung into my ken.’ Here, the impact of reading the book is inextricably linked with her experience of London. Prichard contrasts her delight in Sons and Lovers with her intense dislike for Kangaroo (presumably read at home in Western Australia): ‘how fatuous and absurd are yards of Somers’ drivel about Australia.’ In tossing off Kangaroo during his relatively brief Australian visit, Lawrence had, for Prichard, taken on an imperial, judgmental role.

In her ‘London Letter’, Dymphna Cusack describes how first impressions of England – the familiar ‘midsummer loveliness’ and ‘the sense of “oldness” of it all’ – can give way to disillusion. ‘Today I celebrate my fifteenth month in England. And I understand England and the English less than I did in the first week.’ She was baffled by the mood of pessimism and resignation. England seemed to have its head in the sand, ‘while the vast rump of the British Empire is exposed humbly to the boot of Uncle Sam’. England stood accused of abdicating its responsibility to the old Empire, and the white dominions in particular. Yet her time in England was still something to ‘celebrate’.

All this has a resonance for me as I recall my own journey in 1956 to Oxford, where one was received benignly as a colonial, a status that at least conferred the advantage of being exempted from the rigours of the English class system. I was there at the time of the Suez crisis and was shocked by the jingoistic mood that saw students standing on street corners singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Mind you, it didn’t last long: on this occasion, it was Britain that was, with good reason, exposed to the boot of Uncle Sam. (Though, of course, it was a mark of Menzies’ Britishness that he took Australia out on a limb in lonely support of Britain and France in their hare-brained military escapade.) Being on a rather inferior scholarship, I only spent a year at Oxford and never developed any sense of belonging to that institution; my time there took on the character of a strange and exotic interlude in my life. But it was an experience that, on the one hand, confirmed assumptions of cultural dependence while, at the same time, dramatically conveying a strong sense of cultural difference.

For a time, it seemed to be accepted that, by the 1970s, encouraged by the ‘new nationalism’ associated with John Gorton and Gough Whitlam, the cringe had given way to a new cultural confidence. As early as 1966 Phillips himself thought his article had become dated, and he only included it in the second edition of The Australian Tradition that year because of its ‘historical interest’ and as a precaution against any ‘recrudescence’ of the cringe. By 1983 he had come to believe that ‘it is time to accord the phrase decent burial before the smell of the corpse gets too high’.

But somehow the cultural cringe just refuses to stay buried: it continues to rear its ghostly, Uriah Heepish head. A few examples will suffice. In 1988 the failure of the bicentennial stage production Manning Clark’s History of Australia: The Musical was attributed by some of its supporters, at least in part, to a recurrence of the cringe. Nor did the contributors to Meanjin’s forum on the subject in 2000 seem convinced that the cringe had been put to rest. Natasha Cho quotes Frank Moorhouse on the disqualification of his novel Grand Days from the Miles Franklin Award: ‘the judges were struggling with various mutations of what used to be called the cultural cringe and I don’t think they knew they were infected.’ And the sense of the cringe as a continuing malaise was reinforced by Don Watson in his recent ‘Rabbit Syndrome’ Quarterly Essay, in which, with grim humour, he advanced the suggestion that Australia might as well concede its political and cultural bankruptcy and petition for inclusion in the USA: ‘The cultural cringe ends the day we join.’

The term has, of course, been easily adapted for use in characterising the American relationship. Two years ago, Phillip Adams remarked that today ‘Australia effects the cultural strut. But older readers will recall that for generations we had the cultural cringe.’ However, for Adams, the worst cringe of all was ‘the political cringe’, and he went on to lambast the sycophancy of Hawke and Howard in their dealings with the USA and its presidents. On the other hand, Alexander Downer recently accused those who pointed with concern to the bad international press Australia was getting on the refugee issue of being guilty of the cringe. Clearly, it has become a handy term of abuse increasingly dissociated from its original meaning.

But, in the winter number of Overland, Ken Gelder takes us back to the imperial legacy, accusing Australian Book Review itself of ‘re-emergent Anglo-centricity’. Evidence cited for this is an advertisement for the journal placed in the London Review of Books. And he specifically lays the charge of cultural cringe against essays by Peter Craven on ‘Shakespeare in Australia’ and Andrew Riemer on Wagnerian opera. Gelder does not elaborate on his use of the term: he assumes that we all know what he is talking about. And perhaps Craven gave him the opening by confessing towards the end of his essay: ‘For me the Hamlets that live in my mind are performances I have heard rather than seen, so that, as an Australian enthusiast for Shakespeare, I have, as it were, travelled blind. Is this an example of Cultural Cringe or Complex Fate?’ Clearly, Gelder was not going to look a gift-horse in the mouth.

Before considering the legitimacy of Gelder’s attack, a contribution by L.J. Hume to the intermittent debate on the cultural cringe – a contribution that seems to have been generally overlooked or ignored – merits some attention. Originally published in the Political Theory Newsletter in 1991, Hume’s ‘Another Look at the Cultural Cringe’ challenges the historical validity of the concept. While he concedes the cringe might have limited application in the field of literature, beyond that he characterises it as a tactical weapon wielded by nationalists of the left. If there was cultural insecurity, it was largely ‘an upper-class phenomenon’, but, for the community at large, it was hardly a factor. Hume makes his own dislike for nationalism clear: ‘communities which are comfortable with themselves and sure of their place in the world do not embrace nationalism.’ And he concludes that ‘the cultural cringe – that pervasive, unthinking, admiration for British and foreign things – did not exist, but it was needed, and so it was invented’.

Hume’s argument is a complex one, and it ranges from the performing arts to the manufacturing industry, but its plausibility is weakened by a tendency to equate the cultural cringe with an interest in, and receptiveness to, ‘overseas ideas, products and fashions’. So, for example, he takes the fact that he can detect no decline in such interest and receptiveness in the 1960s and 1970s, and uses it to question the orthodoxy that there was a cringe in the 1950s that was giving way to Phillips’s desired ‘relaxed erectness of carriage’. But, of course, this was not what Phillips was on about: indeed, elsewhere he has mounted a defence of provincialism. It was the tendency for drawing on ‘needless comparisons’ in making cultural judgments that disturbed him. The negotiation between provincial and metropolitan cultures cannot be reduced to some sort of imaginary current account deficit. It is conceivable that the interest in ‘overseas ideas’ might increase as a provincial culture gains more confidence in its capacity to deploy them to its own ends.

Hume also ignores the fact that Phillips’s cultural cringe came in two forms: the ‘Cringe Direct’ and the ‘Cringe Inverted’, the latter being ‘the God’s-Own-Country-and-I’m-a-better-man-than-you-are Australian Bore’. Phillips did not pursue the ‘Cringe Inverted’ very far, but it was always much easier for Australians to be assertive in the field of popular culture – one has only to think of our relentless commitment to sporting achievement – than in matters that carried the burden of high culture.

There is, ultimately, a frustrating perverseness to Hume’s argument in its refusal to recognise the realities of cultural dependence in any imperial relationship, but his ‘minority report’ on the cringe is useful in alerting us to the need to probe the kind of agendas that might influence those who, often so casually, invoke the term. Nor should Hume himself be exempt from this critique: clearly, his whole argument is conditioned by his aversion to nationalism. (One wonders how Hume would have accounted for the kind of fervent nationalism that comes so naturally to many Americans – for what country could be more sure of its place in the world as a superpower?)

Tempting as it is to speculate on what Gelder’s agenda might be, I shall confine my comments to the examples he cites for the cringe. Gelder sees Craven’s enthusiasm for Shakespeare, and his enjoyment of productions by visiting English companies, as evidence of a ‘yearning for British (and Irish) high culture’, and he gives the impression that the essay has only a marginal relevance to Australian culture. In fact, the essay presents, as its title indicates, an Australian perspective on the teaching and staging of Shakespeare. It is a personal piece, and I would dispute some of Craven’s judgments. I think, for example, he does less than justice to the Nimrod productions of the 1970s: I recall the magical ‘Twelfth Night’ and the subversive ‘Much Ado about Nothing’, delivered in fruit-shop Italian. But that is not the point. One could take issue with Craven’s lament for ‘our lack of a first-rate classical theatre’, but one should recognise that he attributes this to a failure of arts policy, to ‘cultural slovenliness, not inevitable national second-rateness’. I don’t think Craven is making the kind of ‘needless comparisons’ Phillips had in mind. If you enjoy Shakespeare, why on earth would you not want to see productions by the leading English companies? But the way Australian audiences receive these productions has changed markedly since the days of the legendary Old Vic tour of 1948, when Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh made their royal theatrical progress across the continent. In the end, it does seem that Gelder’s problem is not so much with Craven but with Shakespeare as a symbol of English ‘high culture’.

Riemer’s essay, on the other hand, can hardly be accused of ‘Anglo-centricity’: this must be cringe of a broader, European kind. Gelder complains that this ‘pompous little piece … touches Australia only at the end’, as if this is evidence enough. The real issue, it seems, is whether ABR, which ‘claims to represent national writing’, should publish an essay on Wagner, anti-Semitism and ambivalent Jewish responses to the operas. The fact that the Adelaide Ring production mentioned by Riemer was borrowed from Paris is evidence of economics, not cringe (Gelder may be more comfortable taking in the 2004 cycle, which will be the South Australian company’s own production). But it would seem that essays on Shakespeare and Wagner, no matter how they rate for ‘Australian content’, are, for Gelder, part of the new ‘aristocratic demeanour’ he detects in ABR.

At the other end of the spectrum is concern about ‘the cultural strut’. In 1990 Chris Wallace-Crabbe gave a lecture, later published, entitled Beyond the Cringe: Australian Cultural Over-Confidence? By a nice irony, it was given under the auspices of the Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at the University of London. (And, incidentally, is it reprehensible that ABR should, in advertising in the London Review of Books, want to tap the English interest in Australian writing?) According to Wallace-Crabbe, we have had too much ‘blandness and optimism’. This is partly because ‘Australian reviewers are timid about passing judgment’; but beyond this, it has much to do with what Alan Davies identified as ‘small country blues’ (Meanjin, 2/1985). ‘A small social system,’ Davies pointed out, ‘implies a strained and possibly under-equipped élite’:

A second source of small country discomfort lies in the imbalance and tension between imported and local ideas. Cultural rifts of portentous depth and sharpness open up between a corps of importers of ideas, who live like merchants exacting their percentage from the knowledge products they bring in and render fit for local distribution, and a corps of loyalist protectionists, who buy the locally-made for preference and mock their adversaries’ abject ‘cultural cringe’.

It was not all bad news – small countries enjoyed some advantages in solving their problems – but the ultimate message was that ‘we should spend less time in awed upward contemplation of the great metropolitan centres and a good more looking sideways at the experience of like small nations’.(Sweden, here we come again.)

As Davies’s remarks implied, it was no longer a case of old-fashioned imperial Anglophilia – what Jim Davidson has called ‘de-dominionisation’ has proceeded apace, even if the non-arrival of the republic suggests the process is not quite complete. The metropolitan centres are more diverse – New York or Los Angeles, perhaps; Tuscany as a home for expatriates; even, when it comes to Wagner, Bayreuth. But there is also the sense in which, as the critic Geoffrey Thurley points out, a provincial society may ‘acquire its own centre of gravity – a gravitational mass which may well begin to attract the old parent society’ (quoted by Ian Britain in Once an Australian). The huge appeal of Neighbours to the Brits is a case in point, and it is interesting how the Kylies and Jasons could use its success to promote their careers both here and there.

The relationship between centre and periphery is much more ambiguous these days. Take, for example, the appointment of the Australian Ross Stretton as director of London’s Royal Ballet. In a recent article in The Age, Valerie Lawson noted that Stretton gained much of his experience in the USA before returning to take charge of the Australian Ballet, from which he has moved to become the first non-British director of the Royal Ballet. In less than a year, Stretton has made himself unpopular, though he was always going to have a tough time winning friends and influencing people because, according to Lawson, ‘to the British ballet establishment, he is an Australian – an unfortunate choice, some believe, at a time when national identity is under threat, or at least in question’.

That British national identity might be under threat is a nice irony, but there is more than a whiff of provincial resentment on Lawson’s part when she explains that ‘the attitude in the British ballet world is this: Australia does not tell us what to do. We tell you.’ Yet clearly a lot has changed since the Royal Ballet’s Peggy van Praagh became the founding artistic director of the Australian Ballet in 1962 – nor should we forget the company’s prehistory, invoking a rather different tradition in Edouard Borovansky and the Ballet he founded at the outbreak of World War II.

Theatre, of course, and ballet and opera in particular, have always had a global dimension. But the broad sweep of contemporary globalisation has contributed to a rather different brand of cultural insecurity. Suddenly, we are bombarded with the requirements of what is rather mysteriously called ‘world’s best practice’. (Is there an international bureau somewhere that adjudicates on competing claims to world’s best practice?) Sometimes this seems to flow through to the arts in an unfortunate tendency to hail a production or cultural event as ‘world class’. Why not be satisfied with excellence? What, in any case, does ‘world class’ mean? That whatever is being singled out for this accolade would pass muster in London or New York? Perhaps the plethora of international festivals that now punctuate the arts calendar contributes to the tendency to conjure up some notion of a world league, as opposed to a local one; but there can be little doubt that this preoccupation with being ‘world class’ reflects the sensitivity associated with ‘small country blues’. And, in a relatively small arts community, it is not necessarily an inbred clubbishness that contributes to timid reviewing – though that can certainly play a part – but also the feeling that severity may threaten an endangered species. One cannot help noticing how many film reviewers strain to give the most generous verdict to each new local movie (will David and Margaret give it three stars or three and a half?) conscious of a responsibility to preserve a healthy Australian film industry, so vulnerable to the sheer global power of Hollywood.

On the other hand, it is possible that expressions of a certain sceptical Australian temperament, with its historic distrust of effusive nationalism, may sometimes be misread as cultural cringe. I think our alleged predisposition to cut down tall poppies has been exaggerated but, insofar as it does exist, it owes much to this strain in the culture. It has, incidentally, done much to enrich the distinctive Australian tradition of humour and satire, from Roy Rene (‘Mo’) to Max Gillies.

The cosmopolitanism that goes with globalisation has its advantages. In spite of US economic and political domination, centre and periphery in the arts are much more fluid. And multiculturalism contributes a new range of metropolitan centres that are important for particular communities. Nor is expatriatism what it used to be; the traffic to and fro is now more varied and more frequent. And we are more comfortable in our treatment of the celebrity expatriates of the old school, grateful for their achievements while reserving the right to be irritated or annoyed by their performances; and, indeed, there may also be some sympathy for their situation, inasmuch as they are marooned in the ruins of the old imperial relationship.

Recalling the Cold War climate of 1950 when Arthur Phillips invented the cultural cringe, it is possible to see the pessimism expressed by Clem Christesen as having a contemporary parallel in the depressed mood of the cultural élites so mocked by Howard and his cronies. The post-Mabo impasse on reconciliation, the failure of the republic, the Tampa crisis and the programmed persecution of asylum seekers have all contributed to a sense of frustrated powerlessness and a feeling of alienation from ‘mainstream’ society. But we don’t need Phillips’s cultural cringe to account for this predicament. We’ve managed it all on our own. Even the failure of the republic owed much more to politics than to any residual loyalty to the monarchy. But the cultural vulnerability and anxiety felt by any small country – that is something we just have to live with.