Australians were chuckling last week over a literary hoax as fantastic as a duckbilled platypus. Editor Max Harris, of Adelaide's long-haired little review, Angry Penguins, had introduced the work of a new poet named Ern Malley with a 30-page rhapsody explaining, with deadly and Dadaistic earnestness, why Malley was "one of the two giants of contemporary Australian poetry."
Then Australian Army Lieut. James MacAuley (who fought in New Guinea) and Corporal Harold Stewart revealed that they were "Ern Malley." Forced to kill an afternoon's leave, they created Poet Malley by leafing through The...
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