AustLit

'The second period is characterised politically by the increasing urbanisation of Australia, the Depression and the Second World War, and in a literary sense by The Jindyworobak Movement, Modernism, Surrealism, and the Ern Malley hoax. In 1934 Frank Wilmot (who wrote under the name Furnley Maurice) published Melbourne Odes, the first Australian collection to specifically focus on the modern city. The Jindyworobak Movement was founded in Adelaide in 1938 and was dedicated to producing a literature derived exclusively from what was indigenously Australian. Jindyworobaks in this selection include Flexmore Hudson, Rex Ingamells, Ian Mudie and Rowland Robinson. In contrast, the influence of European Modernism is obvious in Kenneth Slessor's Five Bells (1939). The forties produced a great deal of cultural and literary agitation; consider the anarchist maverick Harry Hooton's 'Psalm' (1941) with its anti-bush stance, or Max Harris's attempts at Surrealism in 'R.S.V.P, To Paul Eluard' (1942). The Ern Malley hoax was perpetrated on Max Harris in 1944 by the two anti-Modernists James Mcauley and Harold Stewart.'

(Source: PoeticA website, ABC Radio National, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/poetica/stories/s281149.htm)