Man believed to be Ern Malley, Sydney-Melbourne night express, 29 April 1941, Sun Photo Archive. Photo courtesy David Perry.
Ern Malley Contents page
Ern Malley (1918–43) was a hoax poet concocted by James McAuley and Harold Stewart in 1943. In a single afternoon, they claimed, they wrote 16 poems in an incoherent parody of the style of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece and other modernist experimental poets, and sent them to Max Harris, the 22-year-old editor of Angry Penguins. Harris took the bait and published the poems in 1944, trumpeting them as the work of a recently-dead young genius. The hoax was soon exposed and the resulting world-wide publicity damaged Harris’s career. Malley’s work had a strong influence on many poets including the young John Ashbery, and has long been a focus of conflict and disagreement.
Material available on this site:
John Thompson — The Ern Malley Story: transcript — the full transcript of the radio documentary above; first published as an Appendix to Clement Semmler, For the Uncanny Man — Essays, Mainly Literary, 1963.
Letter from the Crown Solicitor A.J.Hannan to the solicitors representing Max Harris, Adelaide, 1944, listing the published material in Angry Penguins magazine which are alleged by the police to be an indecent advertisement.
The court typist’s transcript of the trial of Max Harris, an editor of Angry Penguins magazine, for the offence of publishing indecent advertisements. The trial was held in the Adelaide Police Court in September 1944. Mr Harris was convicted of the offence and fined. Edited by John Tranter in 2005, with emendations and notes.
Material available off-site:
There is a plethora of material relating to the Ern Malley hoax in Jacket magazine issue 17; the links below will take you to them.
Ern Malley Feature
Ethel Malley — Letter to Max Harris, 28 October 1943
David Lehman — The Ern Malley Hoax — Introduction
Max Harris — Introduction [his original Introduction to the Ern Malley poems in Angry Penguins magazine, Autumn 1944]
Ern Malley — The Complete Poems
Ern Malley’s recently discovered Last Will and Testament
Max Harris — Two pieces [immediately following the Ern Malley poems in Angry Penguins magazine, Autumn 1944]
David Lehman — A Note on Harold Stewart [written after a visit with ‘Uncle Harold’ Stewart in Kyoto in 1990]
John Thompson — The Ern Malley Story: audio — the 1-hour radio documentary in RealAudio, with the voices of all those involved in the hoax, made by the Australian Broadcasting Commission in 1959. You can download the free basic model of the RealAudio plug-in for your browser here: http://www.real.com/
John Thompson — The Ern Malley Story: transcript — the full transcript of the radio documentary above; first published as an Appendix to Clement Semmler, For the Uncanny Man — Essays, Mainly Literary, 1963.
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Press Clippings from 1944 [... with thanks to Nicholas Pounder for supplying Voices magazine (Vermont, USA): Contents page, Number 118, Summer 1944 Max Harris: ‘Commentary on Australian Poetry’, from Voices magazine, Number 118, Summer 1944 Michael Ackland — Damaged Men — ‘...one day it will be irrefutably proved that James McAuley and Harold Stewart were really figments of the imagination of the real-life Ern Malley and in fact never existed! ’ — a 50-page excerpt from the book about the brilliant hoaxers who created Ern Malley. Michael Heyward — ‘Indecent, Immoral, Obscene’: a 60-page excerpt, dealing with the obscenity trial and the public crucifixion of Max Harris, from Michael Heyward’s book The Ern Malley Affair. Max Harris, Detective Vogelsang, and others — ‘Indecent Advertisements’: photographic copies of five pages from the transcript of the trial of Max Harris charged with the offence of ‘Indecent Advertisements’ in the Adelaide Police Court, 5 September 1944, courtesy Philip Mead. McKenzie Wark — ‘Black Swan of Trespass’ — a postmodern response. See also John Miles — Lost Angry Penguins in Jacket 12: with the deaths of D.B. Kerr and P.G. Pfeiffer as young Royal Australian Air Force airmen during World War II, Australia lost two original and promising poets. They were also among the founders of the Angry Penguin movement.
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