Writing Blog Number 2

20240829 Australian Poetry Problems

Australian Poetry Problems

I have explained in a previous blog entry what Australian Bush Poetry is - "20240127 Australian Bush Poetry"  – but, in general, until very recently, Australians have not taken any other form of poetry seriously. Sure, we have some poets like Bruce Dawe and Judith Wright (both very over-rated, in my opinion), but most Australians cannot take poetry that is not bush poetry seriously.

And that is because of Ern Malley, The Darkening Ecliptic and Angry Penguins.

First, Angry Penguins. This was a literary magazine coming out of Adelaide, but known as one of the highest regarded critically acclaimed magazines in the country. If your work was included in its pages, you were made… amongst a certain type of person who thinks they are cleverer than everyone else and talks a little too loudly at parties.

At this time, in the 1940s, its editor was a man named Max Harris, one of the more pompous members of the Adelaide Club. See, unlike the rest of Australia, South Australia, of which Adelaide is the capital, had no convicts. It was completely convict-free, and even had a ban on freed convicts settling in its borders for a few years. This is something which the state is still smug about (and is where I live, so I know).

As such, Angry Penguins was the sort of magazine that thought it was above everything else because they were capital-L literature and came from Adelaide.

Enter Ern Malley. Or, more to the point, enter Sydney-siders James McAuley and Harold Stewart. They adopted the name Ern Malley and went to a Melbourne publisher with a collection of poems called The Darkening Ecliptic, which was duly published.

The Darkening Ecliptic did minimal sales… until Angry Penguins stepped in and gave it the most amazing review. They had no idea that this work was, in fact, a complete hoax, a collection of, to quote the authors, “consciously and deliberately concocted nonsense.” However, a second edition was published with a forward by Max Harris himself, where he called this formerly unknown “mechanic and insurance salesman” one of the foremost poets in Australian history. He also dedicated an entire edition of the magazine to the works of “Ern Malley”.

And it might have remained a minor blip… but it did not end there.

See, South Australia’s capital, Adelaide, is known as “the City of Churches” because, until the 1970s, it was laughably conservative (despite being the second place in the modern world to give women the vote and first to allow them to stand for parliament). And so, in 1944, the police prosecuted The Darkening Ecliptic and, by extension, Angry Penguins under obscenity charges.

This is when the hoax came to light. The stated aim, according to court documents, was to embarrass Angry Penguins and Max Harris. But the case went ahead anyway, as, hoax or not, they had still published what was deemed obscene. The case was a joke. For example, Detective Vogelesang, for the prosecution, found the word “incestuous” indecent despite admitting “I don’t know what ‘incestuous’ means.” One other poem mentioned walking in a park at night; this was deemed obscene because the detective knew what people did in parks.

And yet, Max Harris was found guilty of obscenity, fined, and South Australia became a laughing stock for decades. Harris was involved in newspapers when I studied journalism, and I attended a lecture by him; he said he does not regret it as he considers some of the poems quite good (he died in the mid-90s).

It is said that the memory of being taken in by such a hoax, and the courts finding it obscene was what led to the state's cultural revolution of the 1970s, where South Australia was the first state to legalise homosexuality, elected a homosexual premier, and then saw the Family Killings, the Truro Murders, and, latterly, Snowtown. South Australia, Australia’s home of creepy and downright terrible crimes. But that is another story for another time.

They were also the first place in Australia to recognise Scientology as a real religion. Stupidity…

Anywho, this whole debacle some 80 years ago has resulted in the majority of Australians treating anything not bush poetry as a joke, even after all this time. After all, if Ern Malley was a hoax, why not other poets who don’t rhyme and don’t seem to make sense?