Did New Zealand also have a “cultural cringe”? For BFD readers perhaps unfamiliar with the term, the “cultural cringe” was the wide-spread belief (at least among the elites) that Australian culture was inherently inferior, to British culture especially. Literature, music, painting – it was all supposedly better if it came from overseas. Australia’s world-leading early cinema was also suppressed for decades partly due to the belief in the superiority of Hollywood.
The cultural cringe was supposed to have been killed off in the 60s. That’s when a generation of expats, such as Clive James, Barry Humphries, Germaine Greer and others went over and showed Mother England that Australia was as good or better than the Poms. The Australian Renaissance in cinema in the late 70s, and “Oz Rock” in the 80s, did the same in America.
But a new cultural cringe is tightening its dead, clammy hand on Australia – and, once again, it’s being pushed by the elites.
University teaching of Australia’s music history has become so tokenistic that many graduates lack a “basic outline’’ of our musical heritage, academics claim, with one former music school chief bemoaning the academy’s ideological objections to music studies of “dead white men’’.
Peter Tregear, principal fellow at the University of Melbourne and head of the Australian National University’s School of Music from 2012 to 2015, said Australian music studies had been “a landscape of decline’’ since the 1990s.
The same is happening to Australian literature. Not a single Australian university now has a dedicated program of Australian literature, despite a slew of world-dominating Australian writers.
The cause is, once again, elite intellectual fads – this time augmented by the grim march of Cultural Marxism. Acclaimed Australian playwright David Williamson wrote Dead White Males in 1995, criticising the already near-universal domination of Marxist post-structuralism in university Humanities. Nothing much has changed in the decades since.
[Tregear] attributed this to scarce research grants, lack of dedicated undergraduate subjects and lecturing jobs in the field and attempts to decolonise the curriculum.
“It is acceptable (within universities) [… ]to say, ‘Well of course we’re not going to study Australian music because it’s largely written by dead white men and because it might not reflect Australia as we find it today.’ Simple as that, out it goes,” Tregear said.
The end result, he said, was that a “complex Australian music history (especially the role of women) gets lost under the presumption it was all really just ‘dead white males’”[…]Tregear, an academic, singer and opera conductor, said universities’ neglect of Australia’s musical past was a new form of cultural cringe: “We’ve gone sort of full circle […] from being embarrassed about our past — to, well, being embarrassed about our past.’’
Suzanne Robinson, an author and former music lecturer at the University of Melbourne, said at Melbourne and other universities, the teaching of our music history — from influential classical composers such as Percy Grainger and Peggy Glanville-Hicks to the evolution of local jazz and folk — was now so superficial that “we are not producing students who have any idea of even the most basic outline of Australia’s music history (or) how national identity has been formed through music’’.
theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/neglect-of-music-history-our-new-cultural-cringe/
Which is probably the idea. What students don’t know about, they can’t think about.
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