''Angry Penguins'' was an art and literary journal founded in 1940 by

surrealist Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to l ...

poet Max Harris, at the age of 18. Originally based in

Adelaide Adelaide ( ) is the capital city of South Australia, the state's largest city and the fifth-most populous city in Australia. "Adelaide" may refer to either Greater Adelaide (including the Adelaide Hills) or the Adelaide city centre. The dem ...

, the journal moved to

Melbourne Melbourne ( ; Boonwurrung/Woiwurrung: ''Narrm'' or ''Naarm'') is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Its name generally refers to a met ...

in 1942 once Harris joined the

Heide Circle The Heide Circle was a loose grouping of Australian artists who lived and worked at "Heide", a former dairy farm on the Yarra River floodplain at Bulleen, a suburb of Melbourne, counting amongst their number many of Australia's best-known modernis ...

, a group of avant-garde painters and writers who stayed at

Heide Heide (; Holsatian: ''Heid'') is a town in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It is the capital of the ''Kreis'' (district) Dithmarschen. Population: 21,000. The German word ''Heide'' means "heath". In the 15th century four adjoining villages decided ...

, a property owned by art patrons

John John is a common English name and surname: * John (given name) * John (surname) John may also refer to: New Testament Works * Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John * First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John * Second ...

and

Sunday Reed Sunday Reed (born Lelda Sunday Baillieu) (15 October 190515 December 1981) was an Australian patron of the arts. Along with her husband, Reed established what is now the Heide Museum of Modern Art. Personal life Reed was born on 15 October 1905 ...

. ''Angry Penguins'' subsequently became associated with, and stimulated, an art movement that would later be known by the same name. Key figures of the movement include

Sidney Nolan Sir Sidney Robert Nolan (22 April 191728 November 1992) was one of Australia's leading artists of the 20th century. Working in a wide variety of mediums, his oeuvre is among the most diverse and prolific in all of modern art. He is best known ...

Arthur Boyd Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd (24 July 1920 – 24 April 1999) was a leading Australian painter of the middle to late 20th century. Boyd's work ranges from impressionist renderings of Australian landscape to starkly expressionist figuration, ...

Joy Hester Joy St Clair Hester (21 August 1920 – 4 December 1960) was an Australian artist. She was a member of the Angry Penguins movement and the Heide Circle who played an integral role in the development of Australian Modernism. Hester is best known ...

and Albert Tucker.

Origins and ethos

''Angry Penguins'' was a magazine first published in the

South Australia South Australia (commonly abbreviated as SA) is a state in the southern central part of Australia. It covers some of the most arid parts of the country. With a total land area of , it is the fourth-largest of Australia's states and territories ...

n capital of

. The title is derived from a phrase in Harris' poem "Mithridatum of Despair": "as drunks, the angry penguins of the night", and its use as a magazine title was suggested to Harris by C. R. Jury. The magazine's main Adelaide rival was the

Jindyworobaks The Jindyworobak Movement was an Australian literary movement of the 1930s and 1940s whose white members, mostly poets, sought to contribute to a uniquely Australian culture through the integration of Indigenous Australian subjects, language an ...

, a nationalist and anti-modernist literary movement promoting

Indigenous Australian Indigenous Australians or Australian First Nations are people with familial heritage from, and membership in, the ethnic groups that lived in Australia before British colonisation. They consist of two distinct groups: the Aboriginal peoples ...

culture and the Australian

bush ballad The bush ballad, bush song or bush poem is a style of poetry and folk music that depicts the life, character and scenery of the Australian bush. The typical bush ballad employs a straightforward rhyme structure to narrate a story, often one of ...

tradition. According to ''Angry Penguins'' poet

Geoffrey Dutton Geoffrey 'Geppie' Piers Henry Dutton AO (2 August 192217 September 1998) was an Australian author and historian. Biography Dutton was born into a prominent pastoralist family of Anlaby Station near Kapunda, South Australia in 1922. His grandfat ...

, "we stayed with

Yeats William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish litera ...

, Eliot and Auden, ... and left Lawson and Paterson to the Jindys." In 1942, Harris gained the patronage of

and

, and the magazine subsequently moved to the couple's home at

(now the

Heide Museum of Modern Art The Heide Museum of Modern Art, also known as Heide, is an art museum in Bulleen, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Established in 1981, the museum houses modern and contemporary art across three distinct exhibition buildings and is set ...

). The Angry Penguins artists were early Australian exponents of

surrealism Surrealism is a cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists depicted unnerving, illogical scenes and developed techniques to allow the unconscious mind to express itself. Its aim was, according to l ...

and

expressionism Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...

, and included

John Perceval John de Burgh Perceval AO (1 February 1923 – 15 October 2000) was a well-known Australian artist. Perceval was the last surviving member of a group known as the Angry Penguins who redefined Australian art in the 1940s. Other members include ...

, Guy Gray Smith,

Danila Vassilieff Danila Vassilieff (22 March 1958) was a Russian-born Australian painter and sculptor. He has been called the "father of Australian modernism". Life Danila Ivanovich Vassilieff (Данила Иванович Васильев) was born in 1897 ...

, Albert Tucker and

The Ern Malley hoax

Their interest in Surrealism led

James McAuley James Phillip McAuley (12 October 1917 – 15 October 1976) was an Australian academic, poet, journalist, Australian literature, literary critic and a prominent convert to Roman Catholicism. He was involved in the Ern Malley poetry hoax. Life ...

and

Harold Stewart Harold Frederick Stewart (14 December 19167 August 1995) was an Australian poet and oriental scholar. He is chiefly remembered alongside fellow poet James McAuley as a co-creator of the Ern Malley literary hoax. Stewart's work has been assoc ...

during their time at the

Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs The Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs (DORCA) was a mysterious and difficult-to-categorise think tank and possibly intelligence organisation within the Australian Army during World War II. Set up and headed by the charismatic Alf Conlon, ...

to create the group's most famous event, the Ern Malley hoax and the subsequent trial for indecency. James McAuley and Harold Stewart submitted a group of poems that fitted in with the typical submissions featured in the magazine's 1944 autumn number, and attributed them to a recently deceased young poet named Ern Malley, who never actually existed. These poems were constructed as a pastiche of fragments pasted together nonsensically; McAuley and Stewart were critical of Modernism, and wanted to prove that it has no inherent value. The poems were received and published enthusiastically by the creators and patrons of the magazine. When it was revealed to be a hoax, the publication received negative backlash, and the affair tarnished the image of the magazine.

Criticism

The

Communist Party of Australia The Communist Party of Australia (CPA), known as the Australian Communist Party (ACP) from 1944 to 1951, was an Australian political party founded in 1920. The party existed until roughly 1991, with its membership and influence having been i ...

publicly criticized ''Angry Penguins.'' In the August 1944 issue of the ''

Communist Review The '' Communist Review '' is a defunct Australian magazine that was published in varying frequencies and formats from 1934 to 1966, in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. History The ''Communist Review'' was first published on 13 March 1934, ...

'', to support his assertion that the magazine "has nothing to offer to Australian art, and that its effect will be to destroy, not raise Australian standards"O'Connor, Vic. "A Criticism of Adelaide's 'Angry Penguins.'" The Communist Review. August 1944. https://www.marxists.org/history/australia/comintern/sections/australia/1944/adelaide.htm Vic O'Connor writes that editors of cultural publications are responsible for fostering cultural development as a part of the overall advancement of "standards of social and economic life in Australia", and that the editors of ''Angry Penguins'' are "completely indifferent" to this.

Legacy and influence

The Angry Penguins art movement was surveyed in the 1988 exhibition ''Angry Penguins and Realist Painting in Melbourne in the 1940s'', held at the

Hayward Gallery The Hayward Gallery is an art gallery within the Southbank Centre in central London, England and part of an area of major arts venues on the South Bank of the River Thames. It is sited adjacent to the other Southbank Centre buildings (the Roy ...

in London. In the exhibition's catalogue, English novelist

C. P. Snow Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow, (15 October 1905 – 1 July 1980) was an English novelist and physical chemist who also served in several important positions in the British Civil Service and briefly in the UK government.''The Columbia Encyclope ...

is quoted as saying that the Angry Penguins movement "was probably the last flowering of a 'national' modernism that a completely internationalised world of the arts was likely to see".

Cultural references

* ''

My Life as a Fake ''My Life as a Fake'' is a 2003 novel by Australian writer Peter Carey based on the Ern Malley hoax of 1943, in which two poets created a fictitious poet, Ern Malley, and submitted poems in his name to the literary magazine ''Angry Penguins''. ...

'' is a 2003 novel by Peter Carey based on the

Ern Malley The Ern Malley hoax, also called the Ern Malley affair, is Australia's most famous literary hoax. Its name derives from Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley, a fictitious poet whose biography and body of work were created in one day in 1943 by conservativ ...

hoax. It is a

first-person narrative A first-person narrative is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from their own point of view using the first person It may be narrated by a first-person protagonist (or other focal character), first-person re-teller, ...

from the point of view of a young woman editing a

literary magazine A literary magazine is a periodical devoted to literature in a broad sense. Literary magazines usually publish short stories, poetry, and essays, along with literary criticism, book reviews, biographical profiles of authors, interviews and letter ...

who encounters the perpetrator of the hoax (called Bob McCorkle, not Ern Malley, in the story) after many years. Carey is more interested in the idea of "

magical thinking Magical thinking, or superstitious thinking, is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of any plausible causal link between them, particularly as a result of supernatural effects. Examples include the idea that ...

" than a literal recount; the Ern Malley character is a flesh-and-blood person who haunts his "creator." * In

Richard Flanagan Richard Miller Flanagan (born 1961) is an Australian writer, who has also worked as a film director and screenwriter. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel '' The Narrow Road to the Deep North''. Flanagan was described by the ''Washing ...

Booker Prize The Booker Prize, formerly known as the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a Literary award, literary prize awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United King ...

-winning novel ''

The Narrow Road to the Deep North ''Oku no Hosomichi'' (, originally ), translated as ''The Narrow Road to the Deep North'' and ''The Narrow Road to the Interior'', is a major work of ''haibun'' by the List of Japanese language poets, Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, considered one ...

'' (2013), the main character, Dorrigo Evans, meets the love of his life at the launch of ''Angry Penguins''.

References

External links

cultureandrecreation.gov.auThe Angry Penguins
{{italic title 20th-century Australian literature 1940 establishments in Australia 1946 disestablishments in Australia Australian art movements Defunct literary magazines published in Australia Literary collaborations Magazines established in 1940 Magazines disestablished in 1946