Ern 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...
Read MoreSidney Nolan – an overview
Sidney Nolan is one of the best known Australian artists, and needs no introduction. Creator of the iconic Ned Kelly helmet emblem, for sixty years his paintings and his life have been scrutinised, sanitised, scarified and sensationalised in countless monographs, biographies, catalogue essays and weekend magazines. From the artistic truancies of his St Kilda ‘kitsch heaven’ and the lyrical palettes of his Heide years with their magical Kellys; through his central Australian landscapes, his...
Read MoreHeide – an overview
Heide, the home of John and Sunday Reed, is an iconic landmark in Australian cultural history. The role of Heide and the Reeds has been extensively dissected, analysed and discussed, with flavours of the many accounts ranging from portrayals of intellectual flowerings in an antipodean Bloomsbury, to deflowerings more carnal than intellectual amidst the predations of a most disquieting muse. Heide is perhaps best known as the place where Sidney Nolan’s landmark first Ned Kelly series was...
Read MoreThe Sons of Clovis – a new book on Ern Malley
An article by David Rainey. A new book on literary hoaxes, with new things to say about the Ern Malley hoax, is due for publication in late August. Researching literary hoaxes has been a twenty year quest for Associate Professor David Brooks of the Department of English at the University of Sydney. Publicity for his new book The Sons of Clovis promises that it will be a scholarly tour de force, establishing previously unrecognised connections between the Australian scene...
Read MoreErn Malley: an introduction
An introduction by David Rainey. One Saturday afternoon in October 1943, two young Sydney poets on war service in Melbourne found themselves at Victoria Barracks with time on their hands. Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart held rhyme and metre somewhat sacred and wrote verse more traditional and classic in style than that of modernists of the period like Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece and T S Eliot and their Australian champions such as Adelaide poet Max...
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