The Ern Malley hoax

JUN 1944

The conservative poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart invented a dead mechanic-poet, Ernest Lalor Malley, and wrote seventeen poems in a single afternoon in 1943 by splicing lines from whatever books were at hand, intending to expose modernist credulity. Max Harris published them in the Autumn 1944 issue of Angry Penguins, and the hoax was revealed in the press within weeks. Harris was then prosecuted for obscenity in South Australia and fined £5; Angry Penguins folded in 1946. The poems are now widely anthologised on their own merits.