This was most likely more true in Australia, as they were about two decades behind more internationally famous literary figures associated with modernism, such as Virginia Woolf or Dorothy Parker, both of whom found fame in the post-World War I era. Enter McAuley and Stewart, two writers who were more conservative in their approach to art. They derided the kind of literature and poetry that Harris and his gang published in Angry Penguins, which largely swept Australian literary culture, as far as influence went. Having recently had some of their own work rejected by publications, McAuley and Stewart joined forces to make a mockery out of Harris and Angry Penguins, if they could manage it. So, over the course of one day, they invented both a deceased fictional poet and his entire body of work.
Ernest Lalor “Ern” Malley was born in Liverpool in March 1918. His father died young, and his mother moved him and his sister Ethel to Sydney, Australia, thereafter. Unbeknownst to his family and friends, Malley wrote poetry in his spare time, having left school early to work as an auto mechanic, then an insurance salesman, and later a watch repairman. He was diagnosed with Graves’ disease in the early 1940s and, refusing treatment, died at the age of 25 in July 1943. After his death, his sister discovered a pile of unseen poetry in his belongings and, lacking any instruction as to what to do with them, was advised by a friend to send them to an expert, Max Harris at Angry Penguins. Pretty detailed for someone who never existed. McAuley and Stewart could have made up fake Wikipedia entries in another life.
Harris then received Malley’s poems — 17 in total, none longer than one page — in the mail, allegedly sent to him by his sister Ethel, wondering his opinion on her brother’s poems. Harris was immediately taken aback, believing Malley’s poetry to be excellent. He shared them with his Angry Penguins colleagues, who agreed with his assessment. Harris wanted to dedicate an entire issue of the magazine to Malley’s poetry and commissioned a painting based on the poems by the artist Sidney Nolan to use for the cover. He even wrote an introduction to accompany the poems, describing Malley’s short life as outlined by his sister and the impact he believed his poetry would have. “I am firmly convinced that this unknown mechanic and insurance peddler is one of the most outstanding poets that we have produced here,” Harris wrote. The poems would appear in the autumn 1944 issue of Angry Penguins, which was published that June. But although Harris and his cohorts firmly believed in Malley’s poetry, the public would soon have doubts.
Even though Harris would heavily promote the latest issue of Angry Penguins to literary circles across Australia, he didn’t find reactions to Malley’s poems as excited and passionate as he was about them. Within weeks of the issue’s publication, everything would go to hell in a handbasket. The first sign of skepticism would come from a literature professor at the University of Adelaide who questioned the validity of Malley’s poetry and publicly stated that he believed it was Harris who had written the poems himself. Soon, Australian newspapers like the Adelaide Daily Mail and the Sydney Sunday Sun were putting out headlines claiming that Harris wasn’t so much the liar but the one being lied to.
Students from the University of Adelaide were determined to prove that Ern Malley was in fact a hoax, and so the university’s student newspaper On Dit joined forces with the student newspaper of Sydney University. Together, they were able to uncover the address from which these supposedly genius, never-before-seen poems were sent. Ethel Malley had somehow sent the poems to Angry Penguins from the residence of poet Harold Stewart, which was pretty easy for her to do since neither she nor her brother ever actually existed. Days after the student newspapers filed their exposé, McAuley and Stewart came forward as the perpetrators of what would soon become Australia’s most infamous and influential literary hoax.
“We produced the whole of Ern Malley’s tragic life work in one afternoon with the aid of a chance collection of books which happened to be on our desk,” the writers said in their official statement. These books consisted of tomes like The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, a collection of Shakespearean works, and a dictionary of quotations. The poets declared that their only intention was to “carry out a serious literary experiment,” and that there was “no feeling of personal malice directed against Mr. Max Harris.”
They believed that Harris and others who wrote for Angry Penguins represented “an Australian outcrop of a literary fashion which has become prominent in England and America,” saying, “The distinctive feature of the fashion, it seemed to us, was that it rendered its devotees insensible of absurdity and incapable of ordinary discrimination. Our feeling was that by processes of critical self-delusion and mutual admiration, the perpetrators of this humorless nonsense had managed to pass it off on would-be intellectuals and Bohemians, here and abroad, as great poetry.”
Essentially, McAuley and Stewart were trying to expose the modernist writers published in Angry Penguins as “phonies,” a term that would enter the popular literary lexicon in just a few short years by way of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. And as it turns out, they weren’t all that unsuccessful in their plan. Just as news of Ern Malley being a hoax was catching fire in Australia, Harris would end up the subject of persecution by the South Australian police for publishing material considered to be obscene and immoral. Not only was Ern Malley a fake, but he was also generating censorship — the mark of a truly great literary figure, I suppose, real or not. Harris maintained that he was unaware that the published poems had been fabricated and that he personally did not find them obscene, but the Australian government disagreed. Although he had several witnesses testifying in his defense, Harris was found guilty and fined £5 (nearly £300 in 2026). As a result, Angry Penguins ceased publication in 1946.
McAuley and Stewart went on to achieve success in their careers as either writers or professors, but it was Harris who really had the last laugh. Undeterred by his guilty verdict in the Ern Malley obscenity trial and the loss of Angry Penguins, he founded a satirical literary journal with a university friend called Mary’s Own Paper in 1950. Two years later, he began another literary publication called Ern Malley’s Journal, followed by the literary journal Australian Letters, which showcased artists of all stripes in Australia and beyond. By 1961, he was a founder and co-editor of the Australian Book Review. Harris later became a long-running columnist for The Australian and contributed to The Bulletin, The Sunday Mail, and Nation for the remainder of his career. Of his time as a columnist, the Australian Media Hall of Fame remarked, “He attacked anything and anybody that would make good copy.” He died in 1995 at the age of 73.
While still a hoax that had some far-reaching negative effects, such as sending a magazine publisher to court, which indirectly resulted in the loss of said publication, the Ern Malley ordeal did result in some evidently thought-provoking poetry written by legitimate poets, even if they had written them in vain. While McAuley and Stewart did accomplish their mission of proving that Angry Penguins would fall for anything vaguely modernist and out of the ordinary, they in turn sparked a conversation about what constitutes good art vs. bad art, good poetry vs. bad poetry.
Malley’s poems, however fabricated, attracted attention first in Australia and then across the world, not only because they were fakes that fooled a magazine, but because they were actually interesting poems. Writing for The Washington Post in 1994, David Lehman stated, “It was the greatest hoax because the creation of Ern Malley escaped the control of his creators and enjoyed an autonomous existence beyond, and at odds with, the critical and satirical intentions of McAuley and Stewart. They succeeded better than they had known, or wished. Malley’s poems hold up to this day, eclipsing anything produced by any of the story’s main protagonists in propria persona.”
English (US) · 