Malleycoota?
Whilst preparing a Malley-related item for my Mallacoota Musings on this website, I discovered that a Malley event is scheduled for this week’s South Australian History Festival. Inspired by yet more Malley activity, I decided to include my latest Mallacoota Musing as a separate Malley posting. Here it is. MALLEYCOOTA? Mallacoota’s link to verse is well known courtesy of E. J. (Ted) Brady with his many books of poetry and his writer’s camp up on Captain Stephenson’s...
Read Morewith reason, without rhyme: a Max Harris biography
Max Harris was many things to many people: poet, journalist, critic, bookseller, publisher, newspaper columnist, husband, father … and much more. He can be thought of as one of the great catalysts of Australian letters. He sped up the reaction – he made things happen. His footprints are certainly all over the territory covered by this website: Malley, Nolan, Heide and Comment. It was Max to whom Ethel Malley sent her dead brother Ern’s poems; it was Max who in 1945 visited...
Read MoreErn Malley: The Hoax and Beyond
Ern Malley first visited Heide in the late spring of 1943. He returned 66 years later in July 2009 to read his poems during an exhibition which examined the genesis, reception and repercussions of the hoax through a range of art works and archival material. The exhibition included a selection of remarkable images by Sidney Nolan, Douglas Robert’s satirical portrayal of Max Harris’ trial, facsimiles of surrealist collages by hoaxer Harold Stewart and works by contemporary...
Read MoreSidney Nolan interviewed by Michael Heyward, London, 5 April 1991
Interviewed endlessly, Sidney Nolan became the consumate interviewee. Apparently relaxed and in his element, he deftly handled questions to reveal as much or as little of himself as he chose, or to cast on events and people alike the emphasis he wished. Listening to the tapes, reading the transcripts – it is he who sets the pace, the interviewer who follows. This trend is much less evident in a late interview with Michael Heyward in May 1991 just eighteen months before he died –...
Read MoreBeyond is Anything
The book Beyond is Anything by David Malley purports to tell the story of a “real” Ern Malley – although Malley was not his real surname – who had a “real” sister Ethel, and who with his “real” wife Lois had a son David who perhaps wrote the book. The story goes that Ern grew up with Jim McAuley and that the poems published in Angry Penguins were actually written by Ern, who left them with Lois during the war asking her to give them to McAuley to get...
Read MoreErn Malley – an overview
The mysterious Ern Malley first visited Heide in the late spring of 1943. More visitation than visit, his presence took the form of sixteen modernist styled poems – the entire corpus of his brief and tragic existence. Ernest Lalor Malley was born in England in 1918, came to Australia after his father died in 1920, and went to school in Sydney. His mother died and he left school in 1933, worked as a mechanic and went to Melbourne in 1935 where he lived in a room by himself and sold insurance...
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