AustLit

Ern Malley is the fictitious author of The Darkening Ecliptic, a collection of poems first published in the Autumn 1944 issue of Angry Penguins. In an attempt to expose the infelicities of the modernist movement in Australia, poets Harold Stewart and James McAuley (qq.v.) created the author and his works in one afternoon of activity. Taking lines and words from various sources, including several dictionaries, a collection of Shakespeare's plays and an American report on the drainage of swamps, the two men worked to create poetry of poor quality.

Stewart and McAuley invented Malley's life, death and a concerned sister who promptly submitted the poems to Max Harris, editor of Angry Penguins. In her letter to Harris, 'Ethel Malley' provided the following biographical details: Malley was born in Liverpool, England on 14 March 1918. When his father died as a result of war injuries in 1920 the family moved to Australia where Malley's mother had relatives. Malley attended Petersham public school and Summerhill Intermediate high school in Sydney. When his mother died in August 1933, Malley left school and took up employment as a mechanic in Taverner's Hill. At the age of seventeen he moved to Melbourne where he worked as an insurance salesman and a watch repairer. When his health deteriorated due to Grave's disease, he returned to Sydney where he died on 23 July 1943.

Harris's acceptance of Malley's poems and his lavish praise of their quality attracted ridicule when the real authors were exposed in a newspaper article on 25 June 1944. To exacerbate Harris's embarrassment, he was convicted of distributing indecent material when a South Australian judge deemed several poems indecent.

Despite the hoax and the real authors' claim that the poems lack quality, they have been reprinted and anthologised many times, including an appearance of The Darkening Ecliptic in The Penguin Book of Modern Poetry (1991), edited by John Tranter and Philip Mead. While the Ern Malley poems continue to be reprinted and read, the Ern Malley hoax is often attributed with halting modernist tendencies in Australian poetry until the 1960s.