Sophie Gee

It's the city of the Monopoly board.

And so the cultural cringe in Australia and New Zealand and other colonial places is this feeling that the local culture, the culture that's been created by the combination of white settlement and indigeneity isn't adequate, that it's a kind of vulgar, new world, inferior version of culture.

Oh, I'm so glad.

I love your list.

Love that.

That's such a good point.

And a perfect point for us to take a break as we reflect on our cultural cringe, Jonty.

As you've been speaking, I realise you and I have never explicitly talked about this before.

But for me, I think the identity of being an Anglo-Australian, i.e.

being born in a milieu where there's still this sense of kind of being in the colonies, not being in the centre of

where London is still the kind of metropolitan heartland.

It's extraordinary the extent to which I'm realizing it has shaped my sense of self and actually shaped my sense of my relationship to English literature.

And I'm sure that part of my fascination with literary texts is

is because I grew up in Australia reading these texts that I intuitively recognised and identified with because, you know, my heritage is English, but I didn't really have true or what I thought of as kind of authentic access to them.

And I'd be actually really interested to hear, very briefly, of course, how your sort of Anglo-Australian identity has shaped you.

That's so fascinating.

And, you know, we don't often do kind of deep personal dives in this way, but it feels completely relevant to this book that we're reading today, because ultimately that's what Marsha is writing about.

She's writing about the relationship of the colonies to Englishness, or as Clive James put it in, I think, the second volume of his book.

memoirs, maybe it's the third, falling towards England was the kind of identity of white people who'd grown up in the colonies.

That feels like a great spot to take a break, Jonty.