Australian Poetry

Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley (April 14, 1918 - July 23, 1943) was a fictitious poet and the central figure in Australia's most celebrated literary hoax. He has become one of the best-known names in the history of Australian poetry.

Culture as Exhibit

“Swamps, marshes, borrow-pits and other
Areas of stagnant water serve
As breeding-grounds ...” Now
Have I found you, my Anopheles!
(There is a meaning for the circumspect)
Come, we will dance sedate quadrilles,
A pallid polka or a yelping shimmy
Over these sunken sodden breeding-grounds!
We will be wraiths and wreaths of tissue-paper
To clog the Town Council in their plans.
Culture forsooth! Albert, get my gun.

I have been noted in the reading-rooms
As a borer of calf-bound volumes
Full of scandals at the Court. (Milord
Had his hand upon that snowy globe
Milady Lucy’s sinister breast . . .) Attendants
Have peered me over while I chewed
Back-numbers of Florentine gazettes
(Knowst not, my Lucia, that he
Who has caparisoned a nun dies
With his twankydillo at the ready? . . .)
But in all of this I got no culture till
I read a little pamphlet on my thighs
Entitled: “Friction as a Social Process.”
What?
Look, my Anopheles,
See how the floor of Heav’n is thick
Inlaid with patines of etcetera . . .
Sting them, sting them, my Anopheles.