author
Best known for coining the phrase "cultural cringe," this Australian critic helped shape the way readers and writers thought about national identity and literature. His essays remain a lively doorway into debates about culture, confidence, and belonging.
Arthur Angell Phillips, usually known as A. A. Phillips, was an Australian writer, critic, and teacher born in Melbourne in 1900. He studied at the University of Melbourne and at Oxford, and later taught for many years at Wesley College in Melbourne.
He is most closely associated with the idea of the "cultural cringe," a phrase he introduced in a 1950 essay published in Meanjin. The term captured a feeling that Australian art and literature were too often judged as inferior to work from Britain or elsewhere, and it became one of the most influential ideas in Australian cultural discussion.
Phillips also wrote works of criticism including The Australian Tradition, and he maintained a long connection with Meanjin. He died in 1985, but his writing still matters because it asks a sharp, lasting question: how does a culture learn to trust its own voice?