From Australia’s Jewish past

Angell Arthur Phillips – a dedicated teacher and writer

Angell was born on 15 August 1900 at Armadale, Melbourne.  He was the younger son of Victorian-born parents, Morris, a solicitor, and his wife, Rebecca and his brother, Phillip David, was written about in August 2024.   Arthur’s father and grandfather were lawyers with a literary bent, and his mother, in addition to the usual social preoccupations, wrote pseudonymously for the weekly press and published a novel. It was an urbane household with Jewish traditions, rather than with religious practice.

After attending Melbourne Church of England Grammar School, Angell followed the family path (including that of his elder brother, Sir Philip Phillips in studying law at the University of Melbourne.  He switched courses, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1923 with first-class honours in English and then travelled to the University of Oxford, where he began a Bachelor of Letters.  He was not very satisfied with this course, and he was rescued by the Master of University College, Sir Michael Sadler, who tutored him in a special reading course leading to a diploma in education.  Angell did not care much for Oxford, regarding it as a ‘colonial oddity’, and later distanced himself from the experience.

In 1925, Angell returned to Melbourne and began teaching at Wesley College. He brought more of Oxford with him than he realised: a trim moustache, the accent, and a tendency to dismiss wrong answers as ‘Tosh!’—his nickname for the forty-six years he remained at the school. The boys treated him mercilessly at first, for his slight build only seemed to emphasise his lack of experience, but acute intelligence and quirky humour soon earned him their respect and affection.  In the latter years, he would enter matriculation English with a walking stick and cushion, place himself comfortably, make a few announcements, and then proceed to talk to members of the class singly or in small groups. A rigorous teacher and a great encourager, he coached sporting teams, but his real aptitude lay in imparting techniques of debating (then new in schools) and producing plays. On 8 January 1935, at All Saints Church of England, Geelong, he married a schoolteacher, and the couple had three daughters and a son.

Teaching was Phillips’s prime activity, and much of his early published work consisted of anthologies and textbooks. His 1932 anthology with Ian Maxwell, In Fealty to Apollo, was the first that added Australian verse to the standard English fare. In 1937, he joined the Dolia Ribush Players as business manager and acted in the first performance of Douglas Stewart’s Ned Kelly in 1944.  He singled out this period as one of the most stimulating in his life, both intellectually and for the enduring friendships made.

In 1945, Clem Christesen arrived in Brisbane. He was the founder and editor of Meanjin – formerly Meanjin Papers and Meanjin Quarterly, and one of Australia’s longest-running literary magazines.  Angell helped to give the magazine a distinctive Australian voice. The short essay was his métier: erudite, terse, and enlivened by a wry wit. Over the years, Meanjin published most of his important pieces, including ‘The Cultural Cringe’ in 1950 – a term which was quickly taken to summarise Australian deference to English taste. Literary criticism, however, remained incidental to his teaching. He also reviewed new books in newspapers and for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.

Angell’s first published collection in 1958 was The Australian Tradition, and it was widely acclaimed. ‘I was deliberately flying a skull-and-crossbones’, he said of the title, challenging the view that no such heritage existed.  In 1970, his monograph on Henry Lawson appeared—an author for whom he was not under any obligation to either like or dislike the work, but whom, along with Joseph Furphy, Australian author and poet, was best expressing a distinctively Australian democratic, egalitarian, even proletarian perspective. Despite his exposition of this tradition, late in life he owned to having wanted to write a book on George Bernard Shaw.  Reading widely and always aware of the broader context, he was once struck by the apt suggestion that his being Jewish in a Gentile society might have helped him to articulate what was particularly Australian within a broader Anglophone culture, showing influence and characteristics.

He retired from Wesley College in 1971 and joined the Meanjin editorial staff.   He was widowed in 1968 and lived with Rosa Ribush, the widow of Dolia from the Ribush Players.  He was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature in 1975 by the University of Melbourne, made a patron of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature in 1978 and awarded an Order of Australia in 1980.  Although frail, he was still sharp and writing.   Angell died on 4 November 1985 and was survived by his children. He is commemorated by a Victorian Premier’s literary award and another from ASAL.

The AJHS acknowledges the following references in the preparation of this story:

Australian Dictionary of Biography – Jim Davidson; National Library of Australia; University of Melbourne

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