Australian cultural creep, not cringe
Pardon my smugness, but I feel like one of those kids who has just got his mitts on one of Willy Wonka's coveted golden tickets.
This particularly golden ticket, a Christmas gift from friends, grants entry not to a chocolate factory but A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer prize-winning play opens this week in Sydney starring Australia's first lady of the stage and screen, Cate Blanchett. So what better way to restore some much-needed dignity, poise and elegance to this blog than to consider the saintly Cate, and what she has come to represent.
Blanchett's Blanche is set to become one of the highpoints in what has already been a strong cultural year for Australia, both here and abroad.
Geoffrey Rush has already dazzled Broadway, and won a Tony to boot, for his performance in Exit the King, an absurdist comedy which he first appeared in at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne. Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah, the haunting love story of two troubled Aborginal teenagers, took the Camera D'Or for first-time film-makers at Cannes. The blind Australian aboriginal singer/songwriter Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu has become something of a global sensation, and earlier this month provided the inaugural "number one" for with his brilliant album Gurrumul. It has already gone double platinum. Why, Huw Jackman even compered the Oscars, burnishing his reputation as the world's most likeable Aussie.
Australian cinema is having a stellar year, with Samson and Delilah, Balibo, Beautiful Kate and the re-release of the seventies classic Wake in Fright- even if, as , they are struggling to compete with imports from Hollywood.
It has also been a strong year for Australian literature, with The Slap (which I'll come to soon) winning a clutch of awards. That is one of the many reasons why the debate over territorial copyright reform has become so heated. Australian authors and publishers cannot believe that an Australian government headed by a bookish Prime Minister is prepared to countenance what they would see as the destruction of one of the country's great cultural success stories: the boom in home-grown authors and books since the early 1970s.
Trawling through a second-hand bookstore the other week, I came across the original essay by Arthur Phillips, an Oxford-educated Melbourne schoolmaster, in which he coined the phrase "cultural cringe". Written in 1950, it was actually sparked by a programme on the ABC called "Incognito", where the same piece of music was played by an Australian and a foreigner, and listeners were invited to guess which was which. "The programme's designer has rightly a disease of the Australian mind," wrote Phillips, "an assumption that the domestic cultural product will be worse than the imported article". Phillips thought the cringe "is a worse enemy to our cultural development than our isolation," and that Australian writers and artists were often overwhelmed by "the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon culture".
Interesting stuff, but a museum piece, right? If Phillips were around today, surely he would be struck by the cultural confidence of Australia rather than any lingering sense of cringe. Perhaps he would even go further, and write with pride of the country's cultural influence abroad, whether in the acting of Geoffrey Rush, the writing of Tim Winton, the singing of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, the theatrical and operatic direction of Neil Armfield or the poetry of Clive James.
That, for me at least, is the meaning of Cate Blanchett: she is yet another reminder of how the cultural cringe has been overtaken by Australia's cultural creep.
I'm 
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