• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

The Institute of Australian Culture

Heritage, history, and heroes; literature, legends, and larrikins

  • Home
  • Articles
  • Biographies
  • Books
  • Ephemera
  • Poetry & songs
    • Recommended poetry
    • Poetry and songs, 1786-1900
    • Poetry and songs, 1901-1954
    • Rock music and pop music [videos]
    • Early music [videos]
  • Slang
  • Timeline
    • Timeline of Australian history and culture
    • Calendar of Australian history and culture
    • Significant events and commemorative dates
  • Topics

Section 30 [The Foundations of Culture in Australia, by P. R. Stephensen, 1936]

18 April 2014 · Leave a Comment

[Editor: This is a chapter from The Foundations of Culture in Australia (1936) by P. R. Stephensen.]

§ 30

Cultural manna

Formal education, as dispensed in class-rooms by pedagogues, furnishes ultimately, no doubt, but a small part of the individual’s mental outlook and cultural equipment. Class-room instruction is important in its way, because it lays a groundwork in the mind, but the real education of a person begins after leaving school. The real education of the citizen to-day is obtained from books, from the newspapers, from the cinema, and from the wireless broadcasting stations. An adult learns more voraciously and unconsciously than a child.

In all these informal sources of real or adult education, no less than in the formal school and university pedagogy, Australian sentiment is crushed back into second place, or into no place at all. Whether in school or out of school, the paradox is that the Australian idea, in Australia, is relegated by the people’s educators to the far background, or else never comes into the picture.

Why, why, why? When we can answer this insistent question, we shall have travelled some considerable distance along the road to Australian self-respect; and we shall be approaching the means of a resurgence of that creative spirit in Australia which flared up in the ’nineties and then died down to a smoulder, near extinction.

I am inclined to think that the predominance in Australia of overseas culture-propaganda is a result primarily of superior mechanics of marketing and superior salesmanship by the culture-importers and distributors.

If, in Australian bookshops far and wide throughout the Commonwealth, nine hundred and ninety-nine books and magazines of a thousand on show are English and American; if, in the cinema-theatres of every Australian city, suburb, town, township and hamlet, practically all the films shown are American and English; if, on the wireless stations cluttering every millimetre of the Australian ether, gramophone records of English and American origin are broadcast and rebroadcast ad nauseam; if, in the columns of the Australian press, a priority is given not only to “features” but also to news from overseas — in all these disseminations of overseas culture (and the cumulative effect of them is paralysing to the Australian idea), I detect nothing more sinister than a superior salesmanship, a superior marketing and distributing technique, on the part of the vendor of the ubiquitous overseas culture-stuff.

Education, both formal and informal, is therefore, for one reason and another, taken out of the area of Australian patriotic sentiment and control. It is the cumulative effect of the insistent and ubiquitous foreign adult-education media plus the un-Australian groundwork laid in our class-rooms, which has wrecked the spirit of the Australianism that set sail in the bright ’eighties and ’nineties.

Until we can restore some measure of respect for the Australian ideal, some of the lost prestige of Australian creativeness, we must as a nation continue to be culturally passive — recipients of culture-manna from Elsewhere.



Source:
P. R. Stephensen, The Foundations of Culture in Australia, W. J. Miles, Gordon (N.S.W.), 1936, pages 104-106

Filed Under: chapters Tagged With: P. R. Stephensen (1901-1965) (author), SourceIACLibrary, The Foundations of Culture in Australia (P. R. Stephensen 1936), year1936

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Australian flag, Kangaroo, Wattle, 100hThe Institute of Australian Culture
Heritage, history, and heroes. Literature, legends, and larrikins. Stories, songs, and sages.

Search this site

Featured books

The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses, by Banjo Paterson A Book for Kids, by C. J. Dennis  The Bulletin Reciter: A Collection of Verses for Recitation from The Bulletin The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, by C. J. Dennis The Complete Inner History of the Kelly Gang and Their Pursuers, by J. J. Kenneally The Foundations of Culture in Australia, by P. R. Stephensen The Australian Crisis, by C. H. Kirmess Such Is Life, by Joseph Furphy
More books (full text)

Featured lists

Timeline of Australian history and culture
A list of significant Australiana
Significant events and commemorative dates
Australian slang
Books (full text)
Australian literature
Rock music and pop music (videos)
Folk music and bush music (videos)
Early music (videos)
Recommended poetry
Poetry and songs, 1786-1900
Poetry and songs, 1901-1954
Australian explorers
Topics
Links

Featured posts

Advance Australia Fair: How the song became the Australian national anthem
Brian Cadd [music videos and biography]
Ned Kelly: Australian bushranger
Under the Southern Cross I Stand [the Australian cricket team’s victory song]

Some Australian authors

E. J. Brady
John Le Gay Brereton
C. J. Dennis
Mary Hannay Foott
Joseph Furphy
Mary Gilmore
Charles Harpur
Grant Hervey
Lucy Everett Homfray
Rex Ingamells
Henry Kendall
“Kookaburra”
Henry Lawson
Jack Moses
“Dryblower” Murphy
John Shaw Neilson
John O’Brien (Patrick Joseph Hartigan)
“Banjo” Paterson
Marie E. J. Pitt
A. G. Stephens
P. R. Stephensen
Agnes L. Storrie (Agnes L. Kettlewell)

Recent Posts

  • [The new stamps] [re the new Tasmanian postage stamps, 2 January 1900]
  • The Leading Lady [poem by “Stargazer”, 31 January 1917]
  • The Naval Contingent: With the Australians in China [17 October 1900]
  • Australia Day [26 January 1953]
  • Australia Day [24 January 1953]

Top Posts & Pages

  • Poetry and songs, 1786-1900
  • Australian slang
  • Dollars or rum: Early Australian currency [by J. H. M. Abbott, 1 April 1931]
  • The Man from Snowy River [poem by Banjo Paterson]
  • The Man from Ironbark [poem by Banjo Paterson]

Archives

Categories

Posts of note

The Bastard from the Bush [poem, circa 1900]
A Book for Kids [by C. J. Dennis, 1921]
Click Go the Shears [traditional Australian song, 1890s]
Core of My Heart [“My Country”, poem by Dorothea Mackellar, 24 October 1908]
Freedom on the Wallaby [poem by Henry Lawson, 16 May 1891]
The Man from Ironbark [poem by Banjo Paterson]
Nationality [poem by Mary Gilmore, 12 May 1942]
The Newcastle song [music video, sung by Bob Hudson]
No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest [poem by Mary Gilmore, 29 June 1940]
Our pipes [short story by Henry Lawson]
Rommel’s comments on Australian soldiers [1941-1942]
Shooting the moon [short story by Henry Lawson]

Recent Comments

  • Robert Buntine on No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest [poem by Mary Gilmore, 29 June 1940]
  • Laurie on The Geebung Polo Club [poem by Banjo Paterson]
  • rob buntine on No Foe Shall Gather Our Harvest [poem by Mary Gilmore, 29 June 1940]
  • Carol on Poetry and songs, 1786-1900
  • Annie Crestani on Under the Southern Cross I Stand [the Australian cricket team’s victory song]

For Australia

Copyright © 2023 · Log in