Literature courses at Adelaide University during the late 1930s offered a traditional curriculum steeped in the writing of well-known figures of the past. Students wishing to discuss contemporary fiction and poetry were left to their own devices. Frustrated by this institutional indifference to major developments in literature and art and prompted by the demise of the student magazine Phoenix, a small group of students, headed by the precocious young poet Max Harris, established a magazine devoted to modernism. Called Angry Penguins, the magazine was published as 'an act of defiance.'
The first issue of Angry Penguins, edited by Harris and D. B. Kerr, was funded by Harris's mother, according to popular belief. This is not correct, by the account of John Miles, who has specialised in a study of the main players; rather, the idea 'grew from the fact that Harris's mother paid to have copies of the first edition of Angry Penguins, and two subsequent editions, the last edition of Phoenix, and some Jindyworobak publications, all containing her son's poems, expensively rebound together.' The University of Adelaide Arts Association and faculty members such as C.R. Jury and J.I.M. Stewart bore the cost of launching Angry Penguins, and supported two further editions.
The name, Angry Penguins. was the inspiration of the journal's patron, Charles Jury and came from Harris's poem, 'Mithridatum of Despair':
We know no mithridatum of despair
as drunks, the angry penguins of the night
straddling the cobbles of the square
tying a shoelace by fogged lamplight
Jury thought the description of 'angry penguins' suited the young poets on their revolutionary literary quest and a quotation from the poem appeared on the title page of the inaugural issue.The first four issues of Angry Penguins were printed in Adelaide and appeared annually, restricted in part by war-time paper rationing. According to Max Harris, the magazine had a 'Europeanizing policy'. The editors looked to the French symbolists and German impressionists as major influences, printing translations and articles on a variety of French and German writers. In addition to Max Harris, writers whose work appeared in Angry Penguins included Peter Cowan and Geoffrey Dutton. In later issues, the visual arts were represented by reproductions of the works of emerging artists like Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd. Self-consciously modernist, the magazine was attracted to anything that presented itself as avant garde, drawing adverse comment from a number of magazines, including the Catholic Advocate and the Communist Tribune.
When the fourth number appeared in 1943, John Reed was the Collaborating Editor for the Arts Section. A striking James Gleeson painting appeared on the front cover, marking a change in format that included a greater number of reproductions. From 1944, Angry Penguins was printed in Melbourne where Harris and Reed had established themselves as publishers. Harris returned to Adelaide soon after, but he continued to edit the magazine from there.Angry Penguins began as a 50-page annual. It reached a maximum size of 182 pages in 1945, but the Autumn 1944 number has become best-known as the site of a sensational literary hoax.
Intending to reveal the aesthetic weaknesses of the modernist movement, the poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart playfully grafted a series of poems from various sources, including the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a collection of Shakespeare's plays, a Dictionary of Quotations, Ripman's Rhyming Dictionary and an American report on the drainage of swamps. Attributed to the fictional author Ern Malley, the poems were sent to Max Harris with a letter from the poet's 'sister'. When Harris heralded Ern Malley as an Australian genius in the Autumn number, he had set himself up for ridicule when it became widely-known that Stewart and McAuley had perpetrated the hoax. This was exacerbated when Harris was prosecuted by the South Australian police for publishing indecent material in the form of some of the Ern Malley poems and a story by Peter Cowan. As a result of the controversy, the modernist movement received a major setback in Australia and the more conservative elements were subsequently strengthened.
The last number of Angry Penguins appeared in 1946, but the debate over modernism and particularly the value of Ern Malley's poems continued. Harris and Reed published the short-lived Ern Malley's Journal in the 1950s, continuing their promotion of contemporary cultural and intellectual movements. And, despite the hoax, the Ern Malley poems have been collected in several editions. But, the continued focus on the Ern Malley poems has often diverted attention from the broader contribution that Angry Penguins has made to the development of Australian literature.
Phoenix
D. B. Kerr
(editor),
Molly Swan
(editor),
C. B. Ashton
(editor),
Herbert Piper
(editor),
Margaret McKellar Stewart
(editor),
Russel Ward
(editor),
R. A. Blackburn
(editor),
Margaret McKellar Stewart
(editor),
Victor C. Matison
(editor),
Maurice Finnis
(editor),
Margaret McKellar Stewart
(editor),
Russel Ward
(editor),
Helen Wighton
(editor),
Finlay Crisp
(editor),
Margaret Hubbard
(editor),
Adelaide
:
Adelaide University Union
,
1935-1950
Z976657
1935-1950
periodical
(4 issues)
Angry Penguins Broadsheet
Max Harris
(editor),
James McGuire
(editor),
Sidney Nolan
(editor),
Harry Roskolenko
(editor),
Melbourne
:
Reed and Harris
,
1946
Z917288
1946
periodical
(10 issues)
Because of war-time restrictions, Angry Penguins
(without a periodical licence) could only be published annually. As an alternative, the Angry Penguins Broadsheet appeared for ten issues during 1946, edited by Max Harris, James McGuire and Sidney Nolan. The Angry Penguins Broadsheet published work by foreign authors such as Dylan Thomas, Henry Miller and Jean-Paul Sartre, asserting the same international focus that appeared in the annual. Supporting the avant garde modernist stance of Angry Penguins, the aim of the broadsheet was strongly stated in the first issue: 'It is . . . the function of this broadsheet to attack bad art on the one hand and to attack those debased values in the community which demand and perpetuate bad art.' To achieve this aim, each issue contained reviews of books, theatre, cinema, visual arts and music sometimes gathered under the title 'The Critical Eye'. The selections of poetry were dominated by overseas authors, but Harris and McGuire made several contributions. When war-time restrictions were lifted on 1 March 1946, Angry Penguins was to appear quarterly, but the July issue of 1946 was the last. The Angry Penguins Broadsheet also faltered, ending its run in December 1946 (this issue edited by Harris and Harry Roskolenko) after issues failed to appear in October and November.
Ern Malley's Journal
Max Harris
(editor),
Barrett Reid
(editor),
John Reed
(editor),
1952
Heidelberg
:
National Press
,
1952-1955
Z923236
1952
periodical
(4 issues)
The Autumn 1944 issue of Angry Penguins celebrated the poetry of the deceased Ern Malley, discovered when the poet's sister forwarded a clutch of poems to the editor Max Harris. The poems were later discovered to be a hoax perpetrated by the poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart to expose the aesthetic weaknesses of Australia's modernist movement. Despite the humiliation of the Ern Malley hoax and the subsequent prosecution for publishing indecent material, Harris continued to argue the literary merit of the poetry McAuley and Stewart had intended to be inferior. Most notably, he used the name of the poet for his 1950s extension of the Angry Penguins program, Ern Malley's Journal.
Edited by Harris, John Reed and Barrie Reid, the first number appeared in November 1952, containing poems from Harris, Reid, Joy Hester and others. The journal also supported the short story, initially including contributions from Peter Cowan and Dal Stivens. Most of these writers contributed to later numbers with other contributors including Judith Wright. While not as vigorous as its predecessor, Ern Malley's Journal continued to promote a modernist aesthetic; and like Angry Penguins, Ern Malley's Journal promoted modern art, including reproductions of the work of Charles Blackman, Bob Dickerson and Arthur Boyd.
Ern Malley's Journal survived for only six numbers. The first signs of trouble appeared when the fourth number was published in November 1954, many months overdue. The editorial for that number directed blame outward at what the editors saw as a weak literary culture: 'it is fairly obvious that at the moment there is simply not the volume of creative writing in Australia we had hoped to unearth, nor is there the type of public interest and enthusiasm which best encourages the development of talent.'
The final two numbers appeared during 1955. Without subsidies or a strong subscription base Ern Malley's Journal could not survive. This was Harris's last attempt at a modernist 'little magazine', but he continued to produce magazines, founding and editing, with Geoffrey Dutton, Australian Letters and the Australian Book Review.
'This article reconsiders A. D. Hope’s cutting appraisal of the group of young poets and artists from the University of Adelaide who have come to be known colloquially as “the Angry Penguins”. Setting aside the influence of the Ern Malley affair on the Penguins’ perceived importance, the article proposes that Hope has contributed fundamental misrepresentations about the identities of the Penguins cohort and their aspirations for Australian literary identity. Contrary to Hope’s opinion, the Angry Penguins—at least in the initial phase of their development—were not purveyors of an impenetrable brand of Australian surrealism, but were, rather, a group of diverse young poets advocating for the internationalisation of Australian cultural identity.' (Publication abstract)
'This chapter discusses the importance of periodicals in the development of Australian poetry. It discusses the centrality of the Bulletin to an emergent nationalist tradition, before considering the Vitalist movement through Vision and the encouragement of modernism in Stream and Angry Penguins. It argues that the academic journal Southerly reinforced an early canon of Australian poetry in the 1940s while the establishment of Overland and Quadrant represented differing political poles in the 1950s. It maps a growing sense of regional diversity through magazines like Westerly, Island, and LINQ, which would supplement Meanjin’s early focus. The chapter then outlines the support of a new generation of writers in the 1970s through Poetry Magazine, later New Poetry, and Poetry Australia. While arguing for Scripsi’s crucial role in the 1980s, the chapter points to the emergence of specialist little magazines around work, multiculturalism, and feminism. The chapter discusses how this diversity would be strengthened in the 1990s, while the emergence of online journals like Jacket and Cordite Poetry Review provided renewed vibrancy and global recognition for Australian poetry.'
Source: Abstract.
'Eighty years ago, an exciting new poet was published in the modernist literary journal Angry Penguins. Of course, we all know now that Ern Malley was a hoax, so it can be easy to overlook just how blindsided Max Harris, Angry Penguins’ precocious young editor, must have been.'
'At 3:30 in the afternoon on Tuesday, 1 August 1944, Police Constable C Cameron Smith visits Max Harris, one of the editors of the literary magazine Angry Penguins, at his office in Grenfell Street, Adelaide. Smith questions Harris about his involvement in the publication, and then about the meaning of several poems in the ‘Ern Malley’ section of a recent issue. When asked if one poem, called ‘Boult to Marina’, has a suggestion of indecency about it, Harris replies: ‘If you are looking for that sort of thing, I can refer you to plenty of books and cheaper publications—with worse than that in them. Our publication is intended for cultured minds, who understand these things, and place ordinary thoughts on a higher level.Smith remains unconvinced.' (Introduction)
'In a famous study, The Australian Legend, first published in 1958, Russel Ward argued that the bush legend was the central foundation story that explained the evolution of Australian character and nationalism. Ward's version of the legend explained how from convict times onwards itinerant bush workers had created and adhered to an ethos that encompassed mateship, anti-authoritarianism (including hostility to Britain and its empire), egalitarianism, and adaptability. Although the bush legend allegedly originated with and was nurtured by a bush proletariat, Ward proposed that this regional ethos became a national creed at the turn of the 20th century, transmitted from rural to urban Australia through conduits that included the trade union movement, periodicals like The Bulletin, and the work of writers like Lawson and Paterson. (Publication abstract)
