The Darkening Ecliptic: Ern Malley and Sidney Nolan

 The fictitious poet Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley was the identity behind Australia's most notorious literary hoax, known as the Ern Malley hoax or the Ern Malley affair. Malley’s identity and the sixteen poems attributed to him, collectively titled The Darkening Ecliptic, were created in a single sitting in 1943 by the traditionalist writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart. Their intention was to convince affiliates of Melbourne’s modernist Angry Penguins movement, centred around the poet Max Harris and art patron John Reed of the Heide Circle, that they had uncovered a naive genius. Ultimately, they hoped the hoax would reach the English poet and critic Herbert Read who had greatly influenced the modern movement in Melbourne. “It was the egregious Herbert that we set as our mark, hoping to keep the thing going long enough to reach him, and knowing he would be a dead sucker for any gross rubbish that came his way. He is, at least in the publicity sense ‘bigger’ than the locals, and would give the thing less of an air of taking lollies from children.” (James McAuley, letter to Brian Elliot, 27 November 1944, quoted in Michael Heyward, The Ern Malley Affair, Vintage, 2003, p. 157.) 

Aping the avant-garde poetry they abhorred, McAuley and Stewart composed the poems using “[…] no coherent theme, at most, only confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning held out as bait to the reader; (2) No care was taken with verse technique, except occasionally to accentuate its general sloppiness by deliberate crudities; (3) In style, the poems were to imitate, not Mr. Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece and others.’ (James McAuley and Harold Stewart, quoted in Heyward, 2003, p. 173). 

McAuley and Stewart posted the poems to Harris using the name Ethel Malley, a second character of their own invention, reputedly Ern Malley's younger sister. Harris and other members of the Heide Circle including Sidney Nolan were enthralled  and dedicated the entire next issue of the Angry Penguins journal to Malley, hailing him a genius as McAuley and Stewart had intended. The identity of the true authors of The Darkening Ecliptic became public shortly after publication and the hoax revealed. Harris was fined for publishing obscene content and Angry Penguins folded a short time later in 1946.

The Ern Malley Affair significantly impeded the development and study of modernist poetry in Australia in the decades that followed. By the 1970s, however, The Darkening Ecliptic poems became recognised in their own right as important examples of early Australian Surrealist poetry. Now more widely read than the works of McAuley and Stewart themselves, the Ern Malley poems were a major influence on Sidney Nolan and are referenced either directly or indirectly in his work over five decades.

https://www.roomandbook.co.uk/fromthelibraryofsidneynolan/p/rb01047-ecliptic