AustLit

'‘It was a pretty idle afternoon in Victoria Barracks’, McAuley would later say. ‘I suppose we must have started about lunchtime.’ What followed is well known. In October 1943 two young poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart created the fictitious poet Ern Malley, whose slim manuscript of surreal poems, The Darkening Ecliptic, they sent to Max Harris and his magazine Angry Penguins. The idea was to ridicule this new movement of ‘garish images without coherent meaning and structure’. McAuley famously described how,'  (Introduction)