‘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.

Twenty years after publication, Crème de la Phlegm is a kind of time capsule. A reviewer and literary editor for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, Bennie witnessed what may seem like the heyday of arts writing in Australian newspapers, that golden period during which more than a handful of journalists on the culture beat were paid a living wage. To read it in 2025, however, is to perceive the crumpling of one of the persistent narratives about Australian critical writing: that it’s a load of fucking crap, and always getting worse.

FILM AND THEATRE critics bicker for attention in Crème de la Phlegm, along with a few TV writers, visual arts critics and music reviewers – but it is the book reviews that are most interesting to me, because I’ve been working as a literary critic and editor since about the time that Crème de la Phlegm was released. Of the hundreds of reviews I published while editor of the Sydney Review of Books between 2015 and 2023, the ones that kept me up at night were the take-downs. What are they for? I know, I know, aesthetic judgement is vital to any society that values culture on its own terms, and aesthetic judgements formed through close reading are becoming rare indeed. Negative reviews are a bellow of independence, an art unto themselves, and we’re all the better for them. 

The most durable section of Crème de la Phlegm is Bennie’s long introductory essay, which is notable for the equivocal attitude she adopts towards her seventy-odd contributors: ‘our critics are despised for their lack of intellectual rigour, their perceived partisanship and their mediocrity’; ‘Mediocrity is the Australian critics’ hallmark, everyone agrees’. Those ‘piquant variations on the theme of “fucking crap”’, writes Bennie, ‘echo down the years of Australian criticism like a drum roll, a cacophony of self-congratulatory, self-regarding, self-righteous prose’. 

Bennie’s outright refusal of the critic-as-hero trope remains a tremendously useful intervention. Commentators on criticism tend to bolster a heroic discourse about the craft: critics keep the culture honest. And then they go on, as Haigh did, as numerous others have, to bemoan the fall in standards perpetrated by today’s gutless imposters. Kerryn Goldsworthy termed such commentaries ‘decline polemics’ in 2013 during the period of reinvigorated discussion of Australian criticism that followed the publications of Bennie’s book and Haigh’s spray. In 2012 the Stella Count was inaugurated, which prompted an uneasy and overdue reckoning with the gender imbalance of Australian criticism. Indigenous critics and critics of colour, along with their allies, called for new forms of accountability around the whiteness of Australian criticism. As Emmett Stinson observed of Haigh’s piece, these conversations about criticism were proxies for larger literary debates about merit and inclusion. The Sydney Review of Books was launched in 2013 and included a section called ‘Critic Watch’, authored by Ben Etherington, which undertook to ‘read criticism against its critical object, and consider the plausibility of the judgements being made’. A 2015 academic symposium at Monash University, Critical Matters, was followed by a special edition of the Australian Humanities Review on literary criticism. Many of the contributors to these conversations took cues from the indispensable Gangland (1997) by Mark Davis, which excoriated the influence of a small coterie of boomer critics and public intellectuals on Australian cultural life, and especially took them to task for their exclusion of young people. Fellowships for young and emerging critics were established – even, eventually, by the newspapers. 

All up, there has been a great surge of activity and energy around Australian literary criticism in the two decades following the publication of Crème de la Phlegm. What, Bennie asked of her own anthology, can this litany of bitchery and drivel tell us about the culture we live in? We might pose an additional question of our own: after all this reflection, what has changed?

CRÈME DE LA Phlegm is a practical demonstration of the shiftiness of critical mores. If it opens a fascinating portal onto the cultural conversations that were taking place half a century ago, like most exercises in hindsight it’s quite an uncomfortable encounter. Yes, some of the reviews quiver with brio and sharp intelligence. The revolting title of the anthology was plucked from an object lesson in targeted invective, a 1998 review by none other than Gideon Haigh of Margaret Fulton’s I Sang For My Supper. ‘This is less a book than a book-shaped object, bleached and banalised for easy marketing rather than decent reading,’ he writes. ‘It’s a wonder they didn’t think of printing it on edible paper.’ I might harvest prescient judgements and zingers from a dozen or so other reviews, with honourable mentions to Alison Croggon, Gerald Murnane and Craig Sherborne. 

Yet a great number of the reviews printed in Crème de la Phlegm are difficult to defend. They are poorly written, obnoxious and, contra the book’s subtitle, quite forgettable. I admire Bennie for her willingness to represent the small-minded and wrong-headed constituents of Australia’s small community of critics, to hold a mirror to the worried provinciality and pedantry of Australia’s mid to late twentieth-century culture. Unreconstructed racists and homophobes flourish. Gross condescension is about the most favourable attitude taken to Aboriginal artists. Even a whiff of experimental practice is fair game, and so are non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality (Hal Porter calls Patrick White ‘vixenish’; Thelma Forshaw riffs on Germaine Greer playing King Kong or some other ‘recognisably gorilla character’). The cringe abides, and is especially evident in the earlier pieces Bennie gathers (‘Mr Boyd is simply not in the same class as those two latter-day Americans,’ writes Allan Ashbolt, comparing Martin Boyd to John O’Hara and John Marquand in 1963; in the same year, Dennis Hall lambasts Ruth Park for her lack of resemblance to Beatrix Potter). The bearing of reviewers, male and female, to women writers and artists teeters between unapologetic sexism and slimy misogyny. The humour is often nasty, and brings to mind the jokes that get delivered by men who like to tell women to lighten up a bit. 

In other words, the critical establishment we encounter in Crème de la Phlegm is in large part both politically and aesthetically conservative. Their negative evaluations tend to impugn authors for getting ahead of themselves and, worse, for trying to get ahead of the times. Tall poppies must be swiped, hubris must be denounced, ambition squashed. Though it’s dangerous to generalise, my sense is that contemporary critics are less concerned with policing experimentalism and ambition than with castigating the reproduction of old cultural norms by means of the same tired forms. This approach has its own clichés, blind spots and reflexes, no doubt, and there are legions of self-styled anti-woke warriors working in every media niche to exaggerate and debunk them. I’m not convinced that progressives have quite yet uprooted the deep conservatism of Australian culture, but what reading Crème de la Phlegm suggests to me is that certain decrepit norms, especially around race, gender and colonialism, are beginning to shift. 

What prevails, however, is this idea that negative reviews are nobler and bolder, more culturally valuable, than forms of critical equivocation. Readers love negative reviews – digital traffic statistics and social media engagement leave no room for misinterpretation. An earnest appreciation, no matter how beautifully researched and argued it may be, will find a cohort of readers and leave at least some of them suspicious and muttering about vested interests. A knifing will draw a crowd. This is why Crème de la Phlegm’s publisher, Miegunyah Press, commissioned an anthology of nasty reviews rather than a cornucopia of exultant praise.

Authors and publishers worry that bad reviews kill sales. I’ve seen no evidence that this is the case, but plenty that bad reviews distress and demoralise their subjects. Many people who care about literature endow criticism, and especially negative reviews, with magical powers. They hold dear the fantasy that if critics did a better job, if they were braver soldiers, the profound structural problems that bedevil Australian literature – books rushed to press, low pay, policy indifference, plummeting reading rates, crisis in higher education, not to mention the racism and the classism – might somehow disappear. A cracking review ennobles its subject with attention and consideration, but I’ve never seen one earn an author a higher advance on their next book or buy them more time for revision, let alone shift the federal arts budget. There is solace for many of the subjects of the vicious reviews in Crème de la Phlegm: posterity has showered them with prizes and subsequent book deals. We might well read the anthology as a monument to the futility of negative reviews. 

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not here to issue a call for more decorous or civilised behaviour from what’s left of the nation’s working book critics. We can’t possibly begin to talk about what’s valuable in our culture unless we are willing to confront that which is odious, ill-made, reactionary, ugly, incoherent and twee, and to contest the aesthetic and moral bases of these judgements. There is nothing so stultifying to a literary culture than consensus, and there’s too much of it on this continent, especially when it comes to those writers who have risen to the status of national treasures, the prize winners and the bestsellers. The best critical writing, whatever its evaluative conclusions, will model an independent attentiveness to books rather than arriving at the page with a set of ready-made judgements or, worse, a bunch of sales figures. Audience sizes, sales, social media reach, engagement, prizes, public appearances, newsletter subscribers: these metrics are useful for grant applications and query letters – but they make it harder to think of books as other than commodities. Good critics can assert different value systems than those laid down by the market and by the funding bodies. And for those more interested in selling books and building a brand, the pay is much better in PR. 

I am weary, though, of the tradition of self-congratulatory posturing around negative criticism in this place, the baying for blood and humiliation. No wonder readers form their own reception communities online. Spending time with the unrelenting contributors to Crème de la Phlegm left me less inclined to see hatchet jobs as a noble form of civic service, at least the ones written just to score a blow. A negative review should do more, surely, than make a spectacle of humiliating its subject or issue raps over the knuckles for infractions. The critic I envision stepping from the pages of Bennie’s anthology has a rule book in one hand and a whip in the other, a kind of colonial cop. If there’s one thing Australian culture does not need any more of, it’s cops. 

THE COMPLAINTS THAT Bennie curates about Australian criticism are recurrent: the logrolling and nepotism; the ignorance and timidity; the settling of scores and the feathering of nests; and, most of all, the lack of discipline and rigour. Twenty years ago Bennie saw the cumulative effect of these complaints as degrading the cultural authority of the critic. Let’s be clear though: when Bennie talks about the critic in the culture, she’s talking about the newspaper critic. 

Fewer than half of the publications from which contributions to Crème de la Phlegm are drawn are in print in 2025: The Bulletin, Nation Review, The National Times, The Sun – all gone to line the great birdcage in the sky. And with the exception of Australian Book Review, all the publications that are still in business have scaled back their arts coverage. The Australian continues to commission and publish reviews by Australian critics, but fewer than previously, filling the gaps with syndicated content. In the half-century covered by Crème de la Phlegm, state-based publications such as The Advertiser, The Courier-Mail, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald all commissioned and published new reviews. Now reviews in The Age and the SMH are published from the one desk, and there aren’t that many of them. 

If you only read about books in the newspapers, Australian literary criticism is in crisis – and probably has been for decades. But there have always been alternatives to the newspapers: a portfolio of late twentieth-century Australian criticism that sampled reviews from HEAT, Meanjin, Australian Humanities Review, Arena or the music press, all platforms for the vigorous contestation of the norms of Australian culture, would yield different points of emphasis to Crème de la Phlegm, especially on themes of empire, race and gender. In 2006, however, it was possible to treat newspaper criticism as the benchmark for the craft. For this reason there’s a certain poignancy to Crème de la Phlegm being published right at the end of the epoch of the Australian newspaper critic. Some of Bennie’s assessments now read as lines from a eulogy: ‘Newspaper critics carry enormous weight: they affect the national experience of art and they have an essential role to play in the artistic and cultural life of the community.’ 

Incredulity that useful criticism could be published online was a common theme during the years of discussion that followed, with honourable exemption status rightly granted to Alison Croggon’s groundbreaking Theatre Notes but rarely to John Tranter’s innovative, internationalist web magazine, Jacket. If there is a contemporary critical culture in Australia in 2025, however, it circulates online. The newspapers still publish reviews, though most of them are paywalled, and so does Australian Book Review, the publication with the greatest breadth of coverage of new Australian books. The Monthly, founded in 2005, and The Saturday Paper, founded in 2014, both circulate in print and commission reviews of new books. Guardian Australia has an expanding interest in Australian cultural criticism, as does The Conversation, and established journals such as Meanjin and Westerly publish more reviews than they once did. And then there are the many younger journals, which commission  long-form reviews of new works of Australian literature. Mascara was founded in 2007, followed by Kill Your Darlings in 2010, the Sydney Review of Books in 2013 and Liminal in 2016. None of these publications reaches the mass local audiences of the newspaper era, nor do they enjoy the subscription income. Some of them address international audiences and work with expat or itinerant contributors. The business models of online publications are, for the most part, precarious and depend on dwindling public arts funding. If it’s a more fragmented ecosystem, this critical culture is more diverse in every sense.

It’s myopic to talk about online critical culture without acknowledging the seismic influence of social media on public debate. Social media simply does not figure in Bennie’s 2006 survey on critical practice, nor do the extraordinary array of reading communities that now flourish online, whether on Goodreads and in the weeds of Amazon reviews, or on social media platforms. Who could have seen what was coming? In 2025 if anyone wants to make a public comment about a book, they can hop online and have at it. The audiences for BookTube and BookTok are vast. A canny critic can squeeze a capsule review into an Instagram caption and turn a string of hashtags into a pointed evaluation. The epoch of the newspaper critic is over.

FOR ALL THE platform upheaval and the fragmentation, the most startling difference between Bennie’s world and ours is who writes criticism. The overwhelming majority of the essays and reviews collected in Crème de la Phlegm are authored by, well, white dudes. There are no Indigenous critics in this volume, no critics of colour and few women. In large part Bennie’s selections confirm what we know: that until recently the gatekeepers of Australian culture were white men, and mainly conservative white men. 

I can’t summon any nostalgia for those days. I suspect some readers, especially those who insist, without evidence, that cancel culture has ruined the arts, will roll their eyes at my observations. The new decline polemic about criticism would have it that fixations on identity and representation have inhibited critics from making aesthetic judgements. Appeals for a more diverse literary sector are routinely dismissed as childish moralising – and yet the generational change in Australian criticism, this slow, contested demographic shift, signals a gradual broadening of our literary horizons. 

After reading Crème de la Phlegm, I find myself startled out of the rut of the decline polemic, and perhaps even slightly optimistic about our fragmented, ever-fractious critical culture, not simply because it’s somewhat more inclusive but because, at its best, it is intrepid and curious, willing to grapple with the many possibilities of Australian literature in this hot, cruel century. Doug Anderson, in his fond obituary for Angela Bennie, wrote that his friend used negative reviews as a prism to assay progress (or lack thereof) in Australian critical practice. We can put Bennie’s anthology to the same purpose today; it serves as an index of the profound conservatism, both aesthetic and political, that governed the era of the newspaper critic. 

I don’t want to blow the horn too loudly here. Outside our grant applications and press releases, it’s a risky move to express even cautious confidence in any aspect of Australian culture. We all know the rug can be pulled from beneath our feet. Over the two decades since the publication of Crème de la Phlegm, two decades during which criticism itself became the object of critique, and the material conditions governing the production of criticism were transformed, I see a trajectory that bends towards modest improvement. It’s not that all the mediocre philistines have been put out to pasture, or that a number of terrible reviews aren’t published in any given time interval, or that social media pile-ons for bad takes or other infractions particularly dignify the craft. The discipline of literary studies is on shaky ground. Many middling books are greeted as masterpieces. To assert that our critical culture might be undergoing a generational shift is to make no claims to perfection; it’s to break with the ingrained habit of cultural doomerism. 

‘Storytelling in our increasingly complex world is likely to become far more difficult, as storytellers grapple with all the complexities now shaking the world in quicker succession, and they will need to become far more innovative and imaginative,’ wrote Alexis Wright in 2019. This present historical moment, defined by climate crisis, genocide and war, by polarisation and the rising tide of authoritarianism, is not particularly hospitable to either storytelling or to criticism. Critics are, as ever, vulnerable to the intensifying precarity that circumscribes labour in the arts, media and universities. Few writers get paid more today per word than they would have in 2006. What is impeding our critics? Not timidity. More like the immiserating rates offered to freelancers and the cost of living.

In Australia new restrictions on protest and public speech are being institutionalised in the very places that should be protecting intellectual freedom. In late 2024 the Senate of Sydney University supported the adoption of the ominously named New Civility Rule for staff and students. The wording of the recommended rule is a directive against rhetoric: ‘The University should amend its policies and procedures to make clear that each person utilising a word or phrase is responsible at the time the word or phrase is used to identify to the audience the context in which it is used.’ Pity the poets, the ironists, the satirists. Pity the historians and pity the pro-Palestinian activists who are the real target of this nonsense. 

Sydney, the nation’s oldest university, also, incidentally, lists critical thinking as one of its lead graduate attributes. It takes little critical thinking to recognise that this appeal for civility is a fig leaf for restricting the right of students and staff to protest, as well as a defensive exercise in brand management (doubtless other Group of Eight institutions will eagerly follow Sydney’s lead). Calling a book or an artwork a load of fucking crap will always flout such rules. When Rebecca West called for a new school of harsh criticism in 1915, she wrote, ‘decidedly we shall not be safe if we forget the things of the mind’. If civility rules are a form of forgetting, criticism might be a way of remembering.

What I read when I’m online is the work of critics who have bold ambitions for Australian literature and our culture more broadly. ‘A literary culture that, in the name of safety, guards itself against the world will, almost by definition, descend into sterility,’ wrote Jeff Sparrow in late 2024. He was imploring writers to take a stand in defence of Palestinians, and in doing so to reassert the moral and political relevance of literature. This is no time to reinstall the tired trope of critic as vigilante hero, out to patrol our national literature and issue humiliating notices to those who break ranks. We need critics who are willing to pay attention to what is on the page, to look around at the world that we live in, to be innovative and imaginative, and, as Sparrow proposes, to take a stand. 

First Nations critics are reframing so-called Australian literature and asking all us settlers – critics, writers and readers – to pay attention to the deep histories of storytelling on this continent, to recognise that we’re making art on stolen land. The critics who matter are listening and know that any narrative of Australian literature begins eons before invasion. I’m encouraged by communities of attentive, rigorous critics who are figuring out new questions to ask of our national literature, and by the publications that give them space to answer. Often they are doing so by paying attention to other literary traditions and authorities than the ones transported to these shores at settlement. I am thinking of writers like Evelyn Araluen, Katie Dobbs, Max Easton, Elias Greig, Eda Gunaydin, Sally Olds, Oliver Reeson, Ursula Robinson-Shaw, Cher Tan, Isabella Trimboli and Alison Whittaker, to name just a handful, none of whom have ever made a habit of writing for the dailies. 

Of course I’m an interested observer here, up to my neck in conflicts of interest and attachments, not least because I was able to commission the critical writing that I wanted to read for several years and had the good fortune to work with all those writers I just mentioned. Be suspicious, dear reader, if it suits you. And, of course, remind me that the field is studded with conflicts, posers, mediocrities, lazy critics and opportunists, as it always has been, as if I didn’t already know, as if Angela Bennie didn’t know this when she was putting together Crème de la Phlegm. And isn’t this how so many conversations about Australian literature end, in self-negating recursion? As if it were a relief to be once more on the safe ground of acknowledging all that’s underfunded, inept and backwards, turning the knives on ourselves. Signposted by civility rules and rote complaints, this is the pathway to irrelevance, the zone where no one cares about art or justice or even the future, and hollow reputation is all we have left. 

^{Image by Anastasia collection courtesy of Canva}

References 

Doug Anderson, ‘Angela Bennie: actor, editor, critic and mentor’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 April 2018.  

Angela Bennie, Crème de la Phlegm: Unforgettable Australian Reviews. Miegunyah Press: Melbourne, 2006.  

Caitlin Cassidy, ‘University of Sydney review proposes ‘civility rule’ that requires ‘meaning of contested words’ to be made clear’, Guardian Australia, 27 November 2024. 

Mark Davis, Gangland: Cultural elites and the new generationalism. Allen and Unwin: Sydney 1997. 

Ben Etherington, ‘The Brain Feign’, Sydney Review of Books, 28 January 2013.  

Kerryn Goldsworthy, ‘Everyone’s a critic’, Australian Book Review, May 2013, no 351.  

Gideon Haigh, ‘Feeding the Hand that Bites: The Demise of Australian Literary Reviewing’, Kill Your Darlings, 1 March 2010.  

Jeff Sparrow, ‘A Future of Dust’, The Conversation, 5 December 2024. 

Emmett Stinson, ‘How Nice Is Too Nice? Australian Book Reviews and the “Compliment Sandwich”’, Australian Humanities Review 60 (November 2016), 108–26. 

Rebecca West, ‘The Duty of Harsh Criticism’, The New Republic, 6 November 1915.  

Alexis Wright, ‘The Ancient Library and a Self-Governing Literature’, Sydney Review of Books, 28 June 2019.