UA31316 Lumen Spring 2024 Final Digital - Flipbook - Page 14
Your stories
Ern Malley
and the Angry
Penguins
There was something strange about that handsome old
sideboard. Years rolled by, but its bottom doors were never opened.
It was decidedly odd. I don’t remember anything being said, but I
knew I was not supposed to open them.
They called him Ern Malley, assembled diverse lines from
random books, styled them to resemble the new wave of verse, then
submitted them to Max and his Angry Penguins magazine. With the
poems came a letter purporting to be from Ern Malley’s sister,
Ethel, who wrote that they had been found after her brother’s
death, and asking if they were worth publishing.
One day, however, as an only child alone in the house and at a
loose end, I dared to peek inside. It wasn’t hard. The doors were
not locked. The contents did not look particularly exciting. Just a
scrapbook and some yellowing newspaper clippings. But, oh what
glaring black headlines.
Max suppressed initial suspicion because he really loved the
poems. He and his team, which included the artist Sidney Nolan,
not only published the poems but made a fuss of their purportedly
deceased creator. A painting by Nolan adorned the cover and he
later went on to create a series of “portraits” of Ern Malley.
“Obscenity in advertising law…”And someone called Ern Malley.
Unwittingly, I had unearthed the record of a massive tabloid
scandal with my dad in the middle of it all. I was maybe seven on
the day that I opened the cupboard. I had never knowingly heard
the name “Ern Malley”. It was to follow me for the rest of my life.
Ern Malley was a hit. Then the hoaxers bragged to the media that
it was all a prank to show up modern poetry which, clearly, they
had found hard to understand.
By Samela Harris
“AND, SUDDENLY, OF ALL MADLY UNLIKELY THINGS, THE POLICE
WERE INTERESTED IN POETRY. THEY’D BEEN TIPPED OFF THAT
SOME OF THE LINES CONTAINED SEXUAL INNUENDO.”
And, suddenly, of all madly unlikely things, the police were
interested in poetry. They’d been tipped off that some of the
lines contained sexual innuendo. This was a time of censorial
conservatism. The police took Max to court as the publisher.
My father was a poet called Max Harris. He and Mary Martin
ran what was to become a wonderful, arty Adelaide bookshop
empire together. They had been best friends since their time at
the University of Adelaide when it was reputed that Mary steered
him around the campus so he could keep focused on his voracious
reading. Max, studying economics, was a gifted student, a literary
prodigy, a precocious young intellectual.
The media went wild, and poetry was now in the headlines.
Max was grilled mercilessly by police and prosecuted. He had
to explain and justify almost every line of the poems. He had to
defend the very soul of poetry. He was just 22.
The 1930s and ‘40s were fertile years for students at Adelaide
Uni. Creativity was in ferment. A group including Max had
produced the daring Phoenix literary magazine, which was to
become Angry Penguins magazine, even more wildly avant-garde
and cutting the modernist cultural edge of those excitable early
wartime years.
The glorious irony of it all was that those hoaxers accidentally
wrote the best poetry of their lives. Few remember their names,
but Ern Malley lives on.
As it was for my father, my identity became intertwined with
Ern’s. I carry the troublesome seed of the hoax’s creative impetus.
‘Please explain,’ asks the world. ‘Ok,’ say I. ‘Here’s the story.’ It’s as
if he’s become part of my DNA.
And the old school didn’t like them. Not one bit. They hated
them. Bad poetry, they said. One old traditional poet called A. D.
Hope became a secret ringleader of the opposition, inspiring a
couple of young poets serving military duty to ape the abstract
lyricism of the new modernist poetry and create hoax poems by
a faux poet.
I did not inherit my father's creative originality, however. Still in
his teens, Max already had written a pioneering surrealist novel and
had poems published in all directions. Not I.
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