Ern Malley was at the center of the most famous and controversial hoax in Australian literature. The hoax was carried out in 1943 and 1944. James McAuley and Harold Stewart, two young Australian poets, invented a fictional poet named Ern Malley. McAuley and Stewart pretended that Malley was the author of a series of poems they wrote to test the value of modern experimental poetry. They sent the poems, under the title “The Darkening Ecliptic,” to the literary quarterly Angry Penguins. The quarterly’s editors, John Reed and Max Harris, strongly supported modern poetry. Malley was described as an English-born mechanic and insurance salesman who had died from Grave’s disease, a disease of the thyroid gland, in 1943 at the age of 25.
McAuley and Stewart believed that the editors of the Angry Penguins could not tell authentic verse from “consciously and deliberately concocted nonsense.” Pretending to be Ethel Malley, the sister of the dead poet, they submitted 17 poems she supposedly found among her brother’s papers. McAuley and Stewart deliberately wrote poetry that had no coherent meaning or structure, and chose words haphazardly from many sources, including government reports, medical journals, and quotations from the English playwright William Shakespeare. The editors hailed the poems as works of merit and published them in 1944. Even after the two poets revealed the hoax nine months after publication, a few critics maintained that the poems had genuine literary value. The poems have been frequently reprinted and continue to appear in anthologies of Australian poetry.
