Eighty years ago, an exciting new poet was published in the modernist literary journal Angry Penguins. Of course, we all know now that Ern Malley was a hoax, so it can be easy to overlook just how blindsided Max Harris, Angry Penguins’ precocious young editor, must have been.
I sometimes try to imagine how Harris felt that day in late October 1943, when he received a letter from Ethel Malley accompanied by two poems written by her recently and prematurely deceased brother, Ern. I imagine his exhilaration when he thought he had in his hands the works of a major new Australian poet – and a modernist poet: it was like nothing he had ever read before.
