Ern Malley - Creating The Hoax

Creating The Hoax

McAuley and Stewart decided to perpetrate a hoax on Harris and Angry Penguins by submitting to the magazine nonsensical poetry, which they felt captured the worst of modernist tendencies, under the guise of a fictional poet. They came up with a fictional biography for the poet "Ern Malley", who they claimed had died the year before at the age of 25. They chose the name "Malley" as a pun on the word Mallee, denoting a class of Australian native vegetation and a bird, the Malleefowl. Then, in one afternoon, they wrote his entire body of work: 17 poems, none longer than a page, and all intended to be read in sequence under the title The Darkening Ecliptic.

Their writing style, as they described it, was to write down the first thing that came into their heads, lifting words and phrases from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a Collected Shakespeare, and a Dictionary of Quotations: "We opened books at random, choosing a word or phrase haphazardly. We made lists of these and wove them in nonsensical sentences. We misquoted and made false allusions. We deliberately perpetrated bad verse, and selected awkward rhymes from a Ripman's Rhyming Dictionary." They also included many bits of their own poetry, though in a deliberately disjointed manner.

The first poem in the sequence, Durer: Innsbruck, 1495, was an unpublished serious effort by McAuley, lightly edited to appeal to Harris:

I had often cowled in the slumbrous heavy air,
Closed my inanimate lids to find it real,
As I knew it would be, the colourful spires
And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back,
All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters –
Not knowing then that Durer perceived it too.
Now I find that once more I have shrunk
To an interloper, robber of dead men's dream,
I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still
The black swan of trespass on alien waters.

David Brooks argued in his 2011 book, The Sons of Clovis: Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette and a Secret History of Australian Poetry, that the Ern Malley hoax was modelled on the 1885 satire on French Symbolism and the Decadent movement, Les Déliquescences d'Adoré Floupette by Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire.