James McAuley
Photo (detail) from Damaged Men, by Michael Ackland.

James McAuley Contents page

James McAuley (1917–1976) was born in the Sydney suburb of Lakemba, and attended Fort Street High School and the University of Sydney. He wrote an MA thesis on the topic of Symbolism and poetics, and was awarded a university Medal. In his own poetry he steered away from symbolism as he grew into his thirties. He enjoyed his university years, being noted for his skills as a jazz pianist at parties, and was active as a writer and editor, though he failed to get the academic appointment he had hoped for, and initially worked as a schoolteacher. Eventually he found work with the Australian forces administering New Guinea during and after World War II. His attachment to New Guinea was strong strand in his early life and he was noted for his skilled scholarly and administrative work in the Pacific. In 1943 James McAuley and Harold Stewart, then in Melbourne with the Army, concocted sixteen poems (or seventeen, if you count a coda as a separate poem) in the name of a fictional recently-dead poet, Ern Malley, and sent them to Angry Penguins, an experimental magazine edited by the 22-year-old Max Harris. Harris took the bait, published and praised the poems, and found his reputation as an editor wrecked when the hoax was exposed. [See Ern Malley on this site.]
    McAuley founded the anti-Communist political and cultural journal Quadrant in 1956, and worked on it tirelessly until his death. Like Encounter in Britain, the magazine was supported for many years by unacknowledged funds from the CIA channelled through the Ford Foundation. Quadrant’s energetic support for a bellicose role for Australian troops in the Vietnam war was central to the right-wing cause in Australia, and alienated many of the young Australian men who were liable for the military draft. Dozens of middle-generation and older poets protested against the war, including David Malouf and A D Hope, several young poets went to jail for their anti-conscription beliefs, including Alan Gould, and by the early 1970s an entire generation (and a majority of Australian voters) had turned against the values that McAuley and Quadrant exemplified.
    For most of his life McAuley suffered from dreadful nightmares and he sometimes claimed to fear for his sanity. The Catholicism to which he converted as a young man helped to calm his demons. Many of his middle-period poems, such as the lengthy “Captain Quiros”, about an early Pacific explorer, are rhetorically stiff and earnest, and seem to betray the promise of his early symbolist-influenced poems, which are vigorous and bright. His later poems, though, written during his losing battle with cancer, are restrained, bleak, cleanly-wrought and very moving.

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