‘THIS IS A load of fucking crap’ is ‘Oz critical-speak in its purest form’, writes Angela Bennie in the swashbuckling introduction to her 2006 anthology, Crème de la Phlegm. ‘The critical sport in this country is to compose piquant variations on its theme to show that at least some intellectual effort has been made.’ Subtitled ‘Unforgettable Australian Reviews’, Bennie’s anthology is devoted to vitriolic expressions of Australian criticism, all of them published between 1956 and 2005. To classify this half-century of reviews as negative evaluations is to sanitise them. These are hatchet jobs and professional flayings. Dunks, pans, roasts, smears and skewers, puerile denunciations and all manner of righteous, poisonous, highly anxious savagery. 

Bennie borrowed that ‘load of fucking crap’ line from opera director Barrie Kosky, who was first enraged by the reluctance of Australian critics to condemn what he saw as mediocre work, and then again by the responses of those same critics to the glorious excesses of his productions. Such behaviour conforms to the general pattern observed by Gideon Haigh in his 2010 Kill Your Darlings jeremiad against the timidity and fecklessness of Australian critics: ‘Everyone is in favour of frank and fearless criticism, up to the point where a work of theirs might come off the worse for it.’ Bennie, Kosky and Haigh each convey perennial anxieties about Australian criticism: that critics are inconsistent in their application of the scalpels; that Australian audiences and artists prefer critics to confirm rather than to challenge their prejudices. We want brutal, honest critics, and we want them to tell us that the work we love is world class. This tension is, for Bennie, highly revealing.