Angry Penguins

Angry Penguins was a modernist literary and artistic movement that sought to shake up Australia's entrenched cultural elite in the 1940s. The name came from an avant-garde journal of the same title published by the young poet Max Harris, and the movement centred on the circle around the collectors and patrons John and Sunday Reed near Melbourne. Some of the most important Australian artists of the century were associated with it—Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, and Joy Hester—who fused European Expressionism and Surrealism with an acute sense of modern anxiety, war, and the Australian landscape. The best-known episode in the movement's history is the "Ern Malley" hoax of 1944, when two conservative poets invented a fictitious author and sent Harris pseudo-modernist verse to ridicule the avant-garde; the scandal damaged the journal but paradoxically cemented the legendary status of Angry Penguins in the history of Australian modernism.