Angry Penguins

Angry Penguins. An Australian avant-garde quarterly journal (1940–6) devoted to art and literature, published first in Adelaide and then from 1943 in Melbourne. It was founded by the poet and critic Max Harris (1921–96), the title coming from a line in one of his poems. Harris was joined in Melbourne by John Reed (1901–81), a solicitor and art patron, and his wife Sunday Reed (1905–81). The magazine encouraged and provided a focus for a group of young painters who worked in an Expressionist vein and were attempting at this time to create an authentic Australian art free from European dominance; among them were Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, and Albert Tucker. They were opposed by a group of Social Realists, including Noel Counihan, Victor O'Connor (1918– ), and Yosl Bergner (1920– ), an Austrian-born painter who moved to Australia in 1937 and settled in Israel in 1950. The debate waged between the two factions helped to make Melbourne a lively artistic centre in the early 1940s. Nolan later recalled that ‘For the preceding seven years, I'd been building up a stock of knowledge and impressions about modern art and modern writing, and Angry Penguins was the chance to put all this into practice, to have poems published and articles written. We felt we were a kind of Paris in Melbourne; we were like James Joyce or Rimbaud or Lorca.’

In 1944 Angry Penguins was the victim of a celebrated hoax when it devoted its autumn issue to the poems of the non-existent ‘Ern Malley', whose works were ‘consciously contrived nonsense’ put together by two fairly traditional poets who thought the journal was pretentious and wanted to test the critical judgement of the editors; the sources from which they drew quotations included an army report on mosquito control. In their defence, the editors contended that the hoaxers had created better poetry by this Surrealistic method of relinquishing conscious contol (see AUTOMATISM) than they had ever done before; certainly, some of their efforts would easily pass muster in any anthology of modernist verse. However, the magazine never really recovered from the bad publicity caused by the hoax.

John Reed is described in the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (1985) as ‘one of the most influential proponents of modernism in Australian art'. He was president of the Contemporary Art Society, Melbourne, 1940–3 and 1953–8, and he founded and directed the Museum of Modern Art and Design of Australia, Melbourne, which existed from 1958 to 1966. Its collections formed the nucleus of the Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Bulleen, Victoria, established in 1981.