
Art as a means of self-perfecting
2020, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper
“For lucid Ern, ye penguins, weep no more:
Henceforth he is the genius of the shore”
James McAuley
‘The True Discovery of Australia’, 1944
The Ern Malley hoax, also called the Ern Malley affair, was Australia’s most famous literary hoax. Its name derives from Ernest Lalor “Ern” Malley, a fictitious poet whose biography and body of work were created in one day in 1943 by conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart in order to hoax the Angry Penguins, a modernist art and literary movement centered around a journal of the same name, co-edited by poet Max Harris and art patron John Reed, of Heide, Melbourne.
Imitating the modernist poetry they despised, the hoaxers deliberately created what they thought was bad verse and mailed sixteen poems titled ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’ to Harris under the guise of Ethel, Ern Malley’s surviving sister. Harris and other members of the Heide Circle fell for the hoax, and, enraptured by the poetry, devoted the next issue of Angry Penguins to Malley, hailing him as a genius. The hoax was revealed soon after, resulting in a cause célèbre and the humiliation of Harris, who was put on trial, convicted and fined for publishing the poems on the grounds that they contained obscene content.
In the decades that followed, the hoax proved to be a significant setback for modernist poetry in Australia. Since the 1970s, however, the Ern Malley poems, though known to be a hoax, became internationally celebrated as a successful example of surrealist poetry in their own right and are now more widely read than those of his creators.

How to overcome the lesser man - 1
2020, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

How to overcome the lesser man - 2
2020, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

The gap between the ideal & the fallible
2020, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

Father of Modernism in the Australian Arts
2020, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

Culture as exhibit
2020, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

The native "malleefowl"
2020, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

Ode to Eliot
2020, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

The consequences of a wonderful Jape
2020, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

Australian Modernism on Trial
2020, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

Decay of Meaning
2020, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

Which is the genuine article?
2020, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

Traditionalists on the one hand and the moderns on the other
2020, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

No young Australian poet ever
had a more auspicious launch for his work
2020, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

The fidgety ghost might not have been visible but he was always there, clanking his chains off - stage
2021, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

The thing was a dignified experiment, not a hoax; no malice was intended - it was all in the cause of enlightenment
2021, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

Malley Who?
2021, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper

What might not X have done if he had lived?
2021, 76x76cm, Digital collage on fine art paper
