In October of 1943, the Australian poet and literary editor Max Harris received in the mail a group of poems by Ern Malley, a Melbourne-based poet who had recently died, at age twenty-five, of Graves’s disease. The poems had been sent by Ern’s sister, Ethel. Thinking he had struck literary gold—Malley’s poems were written in the surrealistic style Harris liked and hoped to plant on Australian soil—he published the poems in Angry Penguins, his forum for surrealism and anarchism. Harris fancied himself an enfant terrible. He once gave a talk on “Surrealism, the Philistines and You,” and wrote a poem about the Spanish Civil War, the subtitle of which was “death is non-existent: death is bourgeois.”
But Ern Malley was a hoax. James McAuley and Harold Stewart, two poets of a more traditional bent, had written the poems one spring day in 1943 while posted at an army intelligence unit in Melbourne, and had sent them to Harris with Ethel Malley’s bogus letter. The hoaxers hoped to take down a notch, not just nascent Australian surrealism, but the twenty-two-year-old Harris, whose ego and credulity knew no bounds. Harris’s mission, announced at the age of eighteen, was “to spark a revolution in Australian literature.”
But Ern Malley was a hoax
The view of Harris’s defenders over the years—that the hoax was a deathblow to the Australian avant-garde—is rightly disputed by Michael Heyward, the Australian journalist who wrote The Ern Malley Affair. “An avant-garde in