The Angry Penguins movement in 1940’s bohemian Melbourne
The Angry Penguins movement was as wild as its name—a swirling creative rebellion, a frenzy of paint and words breaking open a dreary, war-weary Australia. Fronted by a defiant group of young artists, poets, and thinkers in the 1940s, the Angry Penguins set out to shake the dust from Australian art, to reject the prim conservatism that loomed over cultural circles, and to cultivate something rich, chaotic, and undeniably modern.
But theirs was a tale of art and illusion, one that pushed the boundaries of expression, flirted with scandal, and bore the fateful stain of the Ern Malley hoax.
At the heart of it all was the Heide Circle, an informal, electric gathering of artists and intellectuals at Heide—a farmhouse owned by John and Sunday Reed in Melbourne’s outer suburbs.
Heide became a bohemian mecca, a hothouse where creativity could thrive.
The artists and writers who gathered there sought to create a new aesthetic language, responding to surrealism, psychoanalysis, and European modernism.
Their collective work redefined Australian art, embodying the tension and tumult of a world at war and at odds with itself.
Important Australian & International Art auction in November 2024 featured two Angry Penguin’s works of Luna Park – by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker. Both artworks were exhibited prior to the auction, at Menzies Gallery, 1 Darling Street, South Yarra.
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Ern Malley Hoax: The Scandal That Shook Australian Art
Perhaps no moment in Australian literary history was as explosive—or as absurd—as the Ern Malley affair. In 1944, Angry Penguins published what it believed to be the avant-garde poetry of an enigmatic writer named Ern Malley.
The poems, filled with surrealist images and cryptic fragments, struck a chord with editor Max Harris, who championed them as masterpieces.
Sweet William by Ern Malley
I have avoided your wide English eyes:
But now I am whirled in their vortex.
My blood becomes a Damaged Man
Most like your Albion;
And I must go with stone feet
Down the staircase of flesh
To where in a shuddering embrace
My toppling opposites commit
The obscene, the unforgivable rape.
One moment of daylight let me have
Like a white arm thrust
Out of the dark and self-denying wave
And in the one moment I
Shall irremediably attest
How (though with sobs, and torn cries bleeding)
My white swan of quietness lies
Sanctified on my black swan’s breast.
But Ern Malley never existed; he was a fabrication concocted by conservative poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart to ridicule Harris and the Angry Penguins.
They had deliberately crafted poems of nonsense, intending to expose what they saw as the pretensions of modern art. The scandal was immediate and widespread, turning Harris and the Angry Penguins into targets of public outrage and amusement.
“We produced the whole of Ern Malley’s tragic life work in one afternoon with the aid of a chance collection of books which happened to be on our desk— the Concise Oxford Dictionary, collected Shakespeare, dictionary of quotations, etc,” McAuley said in 1959.
Yet, in a strange twist of irony, Malley’s work found acclaim beyond the prank, cementing its place in the canon of Australian surrealism.
The scandal ripples through Peter Carey’s 2003 novel My Life as a Fake, a darkly comic riff on the Ern Malley hoax. In Carey’s hands, the story becomes a meditation on art, truth, and deception, with the fictitious character of Malley taking on a twisted life of his own.
My Life as a Fake imagines what might happen if art’s greatest fraud were to spring to life, mirroring the uncanny and often unpredictable spirit of the Angry Penguins themselves.
Key Figures of the Angry Penguins Movement
The Angry Penguins weren’t just about scandal; they produced some of Australia’s most celebrated artists, whose work continues to resonate with the public and shape Australia’s cultural identity.
Sidney Nolan:
Known for his raw, bold depictions of Australian folklore, Nolan’s art was electrified by a sense of movement and myth.
His most famous series, depicting the life of bushranger Ned Kelly, captured a hauntingly modern vision of Australian identity.
Sidney Nolan was a founding member of the Angry Penguins and a lover of Sunday Reed, whose emotional and intellectual influence was integral to his work.
Arthur Boyd:
A painter and printmaker of profound emotional depth, Boyd’s art explored themes of human suffering, love, and redemption. His landscapes and figurative work married myth with everyday life, confronting audiences with the timeless nature of human struggle.
Boyd was a key player in the Heide Circle, blending the Australian landscape with the surreal and psychological, showing the inseparable link between environment and identity.
Joy Hester:
A fiercely independent artist known for her expressionist style, Hester’s work delved into themes of love, fear, and mortality. Her series Lovers remains a haunting examination of intimacy and isolation.
Joy Hester defied the expectations of her time, rejecting formal technique in favor of raw, emotive portrayals of human vulnerability.
Her connection to Albert Tucker and the Heide Circle informed her work deeply, adding a visceral, confessional quality to the Angry Penguins’ legacy.
Albert Tucker:
Tucker’s art captured a darker side of the Australian psyche. His paintings often depicted unsettling, nightmarish scenes, marked by distorted faces and ominous symbolism.
Through his works like The Image of Modern Evil, Tucker explored the inner workings of war-torn minds, contributing a vital psychological dimension to the movement.
His relationship with Joy Hester was as intense as his art, fueling his passion for expression that bordered on the obsessive.
The Angry Penguins were a movement born of rebellion and ambition, of a desire to stretch the limits of what art and literature could be in a fledgling nation still grappling with its identity.
They were poets, painters, lovers, and, yes, sometimes frauds—fiercely committed to upending convention, to breaking boundaries.
Their influence echoes through Australian art and literature highlights the strange alchemy that happens when creativity, ambition, and scandal collide.
Today, in hindsight, we see the Angry Penguins as pioneers of an Australian modernism that was bold enough to stand alongside the world, even as it played a mad dance of its own.
Angry Penguins at Melbourne’s Luna Park
Melbourne’s Luna Park, with its monstrous, smiling face and wild lights, has long been a muse for artists seeking to capture the clash of fantasy and reality at its core.
For the Angry Penguins, this amusement park embodied the tensions of modern Australian life—a chaotic blend of innocence and debauchery that held a mirror to society’s contradictions.
Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker, two key figures of the movement, found in Luna Park an irresistible symbol of the vibrant, gritty world they inhabited.
Nolan’s rare depictions of Luna Park from the mid-1940s, infused with childhood nostalgia, represent a release from Melbourne’s post-war monotony. Sidney Nolan’s Luna Park 1945 featured at the Important Australian & International Art auction on 20 November 2024, with an estimate: $90,000-120,000 but was passed in.
His brush captured both the joy and mystery of the park, elevating its whirling rides and haunted attractions to a dreamscape of color and movement, reflecting the transformative energy he saw in this space.
Albert Tucker revisited Luna Park in 1987, revising his Images of Modern Evil series to reflect a St Kilda steeped in both magic and menace. Albert Tucker’s Luna Park 1987 featured at the Important Australian & International Art auction, 20 November 2024, and sold for $180,000 with an estimate: $180,000-240,000
His portrayal of the park emphasized the gaudy allure of this seaside playground, capturing St Kilda’s contrasting worlds: sunlit beaches by day and a throbbing, shadowy underworld by night.
For Tucker, Luna Park was more than an amusement venue; it symbolized a decaying, postmodern landscape filled with haunted characters and distorted figures.
In his paintings, the park’s garish colors and looming structures reflect an almost apocalyptic vitality—a place where the ordinary turns sinister and the lighthearted masks darker truths.
This tension captivated Tucker, allowing him to reimagine Luna Park not just as a physical space, but as a symbolic landscape of a society teetering between liberation and moral ambiguity.
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