‘Perth has world class people… Let’s promote this more!’
Image: Walkabout Magazine – September 1, 1969
Reading Committee for Perth’s most recent On the Ground Update I was struck by Dr Kate Brooks GAICD appeal for Perth to sell its people as hard as the state’s other attributes. ‘We talk a lot about our land, infrastructure, lifestyle and resources. We should be selling our people just as hard.’ This is a timely rallying call for Perth. We have world-class universities, a cutting-edge innovation sector that spans industries and a third of ASX listed companies are headquartered here. In the words of Dr. Brooks: ‘Perth has world-class engineers, technologists, medical and health researchers, sustainability specialists, tradespeople and people experienced in operating some of the most complex industrial systems in the world. Let’s promote this more!’
Few would reject Dr. Brooks’s appeal. But in Perth, and Australia more broadly, the idea that we should promote ourselves has a long and complex history. While we find it relatively easy to publicise our blue skies and beaches, we have not always found it as easy to sell ourselves. Why is this the case? To cast some light on why we are reluctant self-promoters, this article offers a brief history of the Australian hesitation to self-publicise, and the connection of this unease with the famous cultural cringe. It then offers some twentieth century examples of when industry leaders, politicians and even the iconic larrikin Paul Hogan cut through the cringe and put the people first.
History of the Cringe
The origins of the cultural cringe date back to settlement. As Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey argued in his influential book The Tyranny of Distance (1966), early colonists panged with anxiety over Australia’s geographical remoteness from London, Europe and North America. He argued that distance had an indelible effect on the character and outlook of the Australian people. As settlement proceeded, anxiety over isolation combined with insecurity about the country’s convict origins, giving rise to what historian John Rickard described as a ‘sense of exile that was fundamental to the colonial psyche’ (Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, 1996).
By the end of the nineteenth century, many colonists fixated that there was something inherently shameful about the Australian project. They ceaselessly compared Australia to England, or America or Europe, paying particular attention to what Australia lacked that those places had. Those who could afford to holiday usually travelled overseas, not within Australia. The perception that Australia was a second-rate colony was so keenly felt that it drove the nation’s most important political movement – Federation. As John Hirst argues in his history of the Federation movement, political idealists like Henry Parkes were animated in large part by anxiety about perceptions of Australia’s reputation as a colony, and a fear of its people being thought of overseas as ‘second-class’ (Hirst: The Sentimental Nation, 2000). In Australia, not even good governance was free from the shadow of cultural inferiority.
Federation did not extinguish the cultural fear of being perceived as second-rate, however, and Australia’s cultural cringe persisted into the twentieth century. Though it was not used as a term until the mid-century, the idea of the ‘cringe’ found expression among writers and artists who struggled with the ingrained feelings of inferiority that so pervaded Australian culture. The Australian writer and critic Arthur Phillips, who coined the ‘cultural cringe’ in 1950, described the problem thusly:
The core of the difficulty is the fact that, in the back of the Australian mind, there sits a minatory Englishman… not the common man with his blending of solidity and tenderness: but that Public School Englishman with his detection of a bad smell permanently engraved on his features… Subconsciously the educated Australian feels a guilty need to placate this shadowy figure.
Although Phillips had identified the issue of too many menacing Englishmen living rent free in the Australian mind, it would take more than diagnosing the problem to cure it. Fourteen years after Phillips wrote The Cultural Cringe, the social critic Donald Horne penned the most visceral expression of Australia’s cultural cringe ever published – The Lucky Country (1964). In Horne’s cynical vision, Australia was a second-rate country run by second rate people. Australia was ‘lucky’ Horne said, only insofar as it hadn’t fallen prey to the mediocrity of its leaders and its institutions. Presumably Horne exempted himself from the mediocrity he so readily identified in others. How Philips’s minatory Englishman must have loomed over him as he wrote!
Philips had pre-empted Horne’s critique when he wrote of the tendency of the Australian intellectual to hurl ‘denigratory criticisms at the Australian community without any attempt to check their accuracy.’ Though some of Horne’s general critiques were fair enough, he offered few solutions as to how Australia might address its apparent mediocrity. The book proved immensely popular, nonetheless. It has never been out of print. A testament perhaps to the fact that some Australians were, and are, chronically addicted to the second-rate narrative and will lap up any drivel that confirms their long-held subconscious suspicions that something about us is inherently wrong. It is the pervasiveness of this suspicion, which has existed for almost 250 years, that makes it so hard to promote our people and their achievements.
Fighting the Cringe
The story of the Australian cultural cringe is not one-sided, and our history is dotted with characters that have encouraged us to fight it. One-hundred years ago the Victorian industry leader Harold Clapp, who had travelled widely in the US, found American people knew little of Australia. In America, there prevailed an opinion of Australia as a sun-scorched land of droughts, bushfires and strikes, he said. But when Americans visited Australia, they discovered that Australian life and conditions for investment were much better than what we had let on. Clapp said they were always aghast at what poor boosters we were.
Clapp held that the foreigner’s poor perceptions came down to Australians speaking poorly of the country overseas. Raging against the reticence to boost Australia, he said that Australians needed to ‘see the good things.’ There was always room for improvement, he said, but the ‘self-deprecation’ and ‘“not too bad” business’ hurt Australia’s image, squandering its potential for investment, growth and prosperity. The Americans tell us ‘To get the right people’ he said in 1926, adding ‘we will not get them if we go in for self-deprecation.’ Perceiving the need for Australia to speak with a more positive voice, Clapp oversaw the foundation of the Australian National Travel Association (1929), a predecessor organisation of today’s national tourism body Tourism Australia.
Clapp’s convening of government, industry leaders and the Australian people around a positive, shared vision of Australia, laid the groundwork for tourism to become a billion-dollar industry by the end of the twentieth century. But so powerful was the cringe that even a coherent national vision that translated to real economic performance could not always keep it at bay. In a 1983 address to the National Press Club, John Brown, the minister for sport, recreation and tourism in the Hawke government lamented that Australia still hadn’t got past the cultural cringe, ‘the feeling that we seem to promote we’re inferior.’ Brown was standing next to Paul Hogan, announcing his appointment as an ambassador for the now famous ‘Come and Say G’day’ campaign.
It is an irony of the cringe that Paul Hogan’s role in overcoming it, if only for a short time, remains overlooked. This is probably because we are as prone to celebrating Hogan as we are to cringing at him and the 1980s campaigns that bore his image. Nevertheless, he is responsible for deriving a central insight into the politics of Australian self-promotion that bears repeating. Advertising Australia, he said, was about promoting the people, not just the scenery. With his laconic wit and irreverent turn-of-phrase he got in front of a camera and boosted the people in a way that many, though certainly not all Australians found authentic. The campaign was hugely successful, attracting record numbers of American tourists. It generated hundreds of millions in tourist revenue, but perhaps more significantly, boosting long-term visa applications as well as increasing interstate travel to record levels.
What can Perth learn from Australian history?
The lesson from the Hogan campaign is clear. When we are confident about who we are it drives the movement of people and capital, which in turn drives investment and prosperity. Many of the challenges Perth faces in the twenty-first century, particularly its internal perception as being peripheral and isolated, mirror the national challenges Australia has faced since settlement. Deliberate self-promotion is a historical problem as old as the nation itself. The consequence is that we are not as comfortable with celebrating our people, their abilities and their achievements as our counterparts in America. History tells us that we make this choice at our peril!
Confidence begets confidence and insecurity begets insecurity. A cynical remark about Perth’s isolation reinforces a narrative that Perth is too far away. We would do well to remind ourselves that Perth is in the same time zone as twenty-one percent of the world’s population and that by 2050 nine out of ten of the world’s largest cities will be closer to Perth than to Sydney. There is innovation underway in Perth that would stagger some visitors, only because we shy away from telling the world about it.
Pondering a solution for the cringe Arthur Phillips asked ‘what is the cure for our disease?’ National growth was important, he said, but more than that we had to ‘progress in the art of being unselfconsciously ourselves.’ This is where Hogan succeeded and where the pathway to future success lies – not in emulating Hogan, but in choosing to proudly and unselfconciously promote the people. Phillips wrote that ‘cringe is a worse enemy to our cultural development than our isolation.’ This remains as true today as it did in 1950. But good thought leadership can move us away from the parochial and antiquated ways of thinking that otherwise hold us back. Bringing bold, positive leadership to the conversation is what we do every day at Committee for Perth.
Each time we talk about Perth we make a choice. Do we pump it up as the best city in the world, or do we self-deprecate because of our ingrained, subconscious insecurities? We rarely attribute our aversion to self-congratulation with the circumstances of our past. Understanding where our impulse to denigrate rather than celebrate comes from is an important step forward. The second step might be that the next time you hear someone proudly tell you that WA stands for ‘wait a while’, look them in the eye and tell them: ‘the only thing we are waiting for is to move on from the cringe and realise the massive opportunity that stands before us!’