Ern Malley - Immediate Impact

Immediate Impact

Angry Penguins soon folded, although the magazine's demise had more to do with a libel case brought against Harris for an unconnected review and the emotional fallout from events in the open marriage of its backers John Reed and his wife, Sunday.

Most people, including most educated people with an interest in the arts, were persuaded of the validity of McAuley and Stewart's "experiment." The two had deliberately written bad poetry, passed it off under a plausible alias to the country's most prominent publisher of modernist poetry, and had completely taken him in. Harris, they said, could not tell real poetry from fake, good from bad.

The Ern Malley hoax had long-lasting repercussions. To quote the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, "More important than the hoax itself was the effect it had on the development of Australian poetry. The vigorous and legitimate movement for modernism in Australian writing, espoused by many writers and critics in addition to the members of the Angry Penguins group, received a severe setback, and the conservative element was undoubtedly strengthened."

Controversy over Ern Malley continued for more than twenty years. It spread beyond Australia when it was learned that the British literary critic Herbert Read had been taken in by the hoax. Modernist novelists like Patrick White and abstract painters found themselves tarred with the Ern Malley brush. Since both McAuley and Stewart and the left-wing nationalist school around Vance and Nettie Palmer disliked the Angry Penguins version of modernism with equal venom, though for different reasons, Ern Malley cast a long shadow over Australian cultural life.

In a 1975 interview with Earle Hackett, Sidney Nolan credited Ern Malley with inspiring him to paint his first Ned Kelly series (1946–47), saying "It made me take the risk of putting against the Australian bush an utterly strange object."