Ern Malley - Biography of "Ern Malley"

Biography of "Ern Malley"

According to his inventors' fictitious biography, Ernest Lalor Malley was born in Liverpool, England on 14 March 1918. His father died in 1920, and Malley's mother migrated to Petersham, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, with her two children: Ern, and his older sister Ethel. After his mother's death in August 1933, Ern Malley left school to work as an auto mechanic. Shortly after his seventeenth birthday, he then moved to Melbourne where he lived alone and worked as an insurance salesman, and later as a watch repairman. Diagnosed with Graves' disease sometime in the early 1940s, Malley refused treatment. He returned to Sydney, moving in with his sister in March, 1943, where he became increasingly ill (as well as temperamental and difficult) until his premature death at the age of 25 on 23 July of that same year.

His life as a poet became known only after Ethel found a pile of unpublished poems among his belongings. The fictitious Ethel Malley supposedly knew nothing about poetry, but a friend suggested that she send the poems to someone who could examine them. Max Harris of Angry Penguins was to be that someone.