Australia

Cultural Wasteland

Australia's identity as a cultural wasteland continued after Australia was federated in 1901, where it was repeatedly imagined as inferior in relation to its “mother country,” the United Kingdom. This view continued to mire the cultural imagination for most of the 20th century, where Australia is repeatedly imagined to be devoid of the idealized versions of culture that characterize European civilization. A. D. Hope, for example, decried the nation as a vast cultural desert in his infamous poem “Australia”—a place where civilization has eroded, like a “sphinx demolished” or “stone lion worn away.” This view of Australia as a cultural [Page 53]desert is expressed in numerous other national writings, including Robyn Boyd's treatise on the nation and its design sensibility in the 1960 work The Australian Ugliness. For Boyd, the nation is an empty cultural wasteland—a chaotic and accidental rubbish dump fashioned in the image of U.S. urban culture. Australia's design ugliness is categorically distinct from the United States', however, evident not only in the trash spawned by the greed of mass production but also by the dreary conformity, banality, and complacency of Australian culture at large. It is for this reason that Boyd regards the Australian ugliness as the worst of its kind, evident in the wasted potential of the nation's natural beauty: the cheaply produced cream-brick veneer houses that line the sprawling suburbs, the mess of electricity wires that blight every street, gaudy plastic decorative flowers placed on restaurant tables, old mattresses thrown over back fences, chair lifts harassing holiday areas, and soft drink signs marring the highways and service stations. “Most Australian children grow up on lots of steak, sugar, and depressing deformities of nature and architecture,” he writes.

Ten years earlier, A. A. Phillips decried Australia's belief in itself as a cultural wasteland in his infamous 1950 essay “The Cultural Cringe.” Phillips critically addressed the ingrained feelings of inferiority Australian intellectuals evidenced when evaluating the nation's theater, art, and music. He critiqued the perpetual deference to British and European definitions of culture in which anything produced by local artists, writers, and musicians was regarded to be derivative and deficient by comparison. This had a major impact upon the way Australians began to view their own culture, and by the 1960s, there was a growing interest in the distinctiveness of Australian culture, including a revalorization of the cultural products previously dismissed as inferior or secondary to European forms, including Australia's distinctive folk culture and convict ballads. By the 1970s, the convict stain had largely diminished, as Australia began to value its unique history as a colony of convict “underdogs.” Australian history was embraced with pride, as numerous Australians began to research their cultural heritage in the hope of finding a convict ancestor.

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