Writing Blog Number 2

20250723 Writing Scandals 1: Ern Malley & Angry Penguins

Writing Scandals 1: Ern Malley & Angry Penguins

Schnujo is failing 2 classes asked me about writing scandals. What a great topic!
         Now, I am not going to go and research any. These are ones I know about from university study or personal interest.
         I am going to start with my favourite one, because I have met one of those involved!

Ern Malley & Angry Penguins
Angry Penguins was a pretentious literary magazine that started in Adelaide and moved to Melbourne. In 1944 they received a pile of poems from one Ethel Malley, who said her labourer husband had written them, and now he was dead, she wondered if they were interested.
         Not only were they interested, but they dedicated a whole edition to Ern Malley.
         Problem: Ern and Ethel Malley did not exist. They were created by two men who hated the modernist school of poetry and wrote what they considered the worst poems of all time in that style and sent them off. This was a joke that got taken seriously.
         The University of Adelaide newspaper suggested Max Harris, the main editor (and the man I have met) had written these “awful” poems as a hoax. Harris was offended by this, and even hired a private detective to find out all he could about Ern and Ethel Malley.
         Then it got worse. The wowsers in the government (and this was in the last years of the war, quite a conservative time) decided that the poems were obscene and Harris was charged with publishing obscene material.
         The trial was a joke. The police officer who was prosecuting said he objected to two people meeting at night in a park because he knew what people did at nights in parks, and gave us the classic quote: “I don't know what ‘incestuous’ means, but I think there is a suggestion of indecency about it.” And yet Harris was still found guilty and fined five pounds.
         Then the hoax came to light and Harris was deemed the hoaxed, not the hoaxer.
         The biggest impact was it set back the modernist movement in all Australian arts by years, if not decades. One of the people who perpetrated the hoax went on to form his own literary journal and ended up teaching English in a Tasmanian university. Harris went on to publish a new journal called The Ern Malley Journal (he leant into his notoriety) and became a renowned columnist and arts critic.
         Interestingly, in later years some people actually came to consider the so-called “joke” poems as serious works and worthy of discussion in Australian poetry…

This is why I am confused by modern poetry...