In an age of artificial intelligence, it has become increasingly difficult to determine which pieces of art have been artificially generated, especially when the very process that trained the technologies to generate such art involved the theft of existing work by existing artists. With the rise of AI in recent years, it’s easy to think that now is the only time that the general public has been fooled by fake art. But that is far from the case. Hoaxes, more specifically literary hoaxes, have been around for centuries. And no such hoax was more influential in Australian literary culture than that of Ern Malley.
Malley, a lauded but fictional Australian poet, was dreamed up by the writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart in 1943. Why invent an author who doesn’t exist? Well, three years earlier, the poet Max Harris had established a literary arts magazine called Angry Penguins, which focused its content through a modernist lens. The publication became quite influential in a short time, aiding the rise of modernist literature in Australia. While modernism had already been well established in North America and Europe by the 1940s, according to author Stephen Orr, Australia hadn’t gotten there quite yet. “We’d continued writing poems about gum trees and so forth,” he said on an Australian literary podcast in 2021.
In fact, although Angry Penguins was the name of the magazine, it also became the name of a literary movement sparked by its very publication. Harris was a poet whose work was rooted in surrealism, a movement heavily associated with modernism in which artists express their unconscious mind, often resulting in work that features dreamlike states. These terms may not seem all that remarkable now, but in the first half of the twentieth century, modernist literature and its associates were seen as highly experimental and of a more liberal political leaning.
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