Ern Malley

Ernest Lalor Ern Malley was a fictitious poet and the central figure in Australias most famous literary hoax. He and his entire body of work were created in one day in 1943 by conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart in order to hoax Max Harris and his modernist magazine Angry Penguins, which he coedited with John Reed of Heide, Melbourne. Imitating the modernist poetry they despised, the hoaxers deliberately created what they thought was bad verse and submitted sixteen poems to Angry Penguins under the guise of Ethel, Ern Malleys surviving sister. Harris and other members of the Heide Circle fell for the hoax, and, enraptured by the poetry, devoted the next issue of Angry Penguins to Malley. The hoax was revealed soon after, resulting in a cause clbre and the humiliation of Harris, who was put on trial, convicted and fined for publishing the poems on the grounds that they contained obscene content. Angry Penguins folded in 1946.

According to his inventors fictitious biography, Ernest Lalor Malley was born in Liverpool, England, onMarch 1918. His father died in 1920, and Malleys mother migrated to Petersham, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, with her two children Ern, and his older sister Ethel. After his mothers 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 until his death at the age ofon 23160July of that same year.

Source: Wikipedia