Angry Penguins

(1940-46), a quarterly journal of literary, artistic, musical and general cultural interest, was sponsored initially by the Adelaide University Arts Association but became an independent enterprise in its third number, published in Melbourne by Reed and Harris. Chiefly edited by Max Harris and John Reed, Angry Penguins was a self-consciously modernist magazine which coincided with a radical movement in Australian art and became a rallying point for artists and writers who had otherwise diverse interests; they included the artists Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, John Perceval, Danila Vassilieff, Joy Hester and Arthur Boyd and the writers Peter Cowan, Geoffrey Dutton and Harry Roskolenko. Nolan, Tucker and Roskolenko in particular were involved in the magazine's production and publication. Rejecting all political creeds and influenced by the anarchist theories of Sir Herbert Read, Angry Penguins and its 1946 monthly supplement, Angry Penguins Broadsheet, attempted to present art as an organic whole, producing articles on cinema, jazz, the visual arts and literature. At the same time it attempted to link the Australian writer and artist to the European modernist movement, often publishing work by contemporary overseas writers such as Karl Shapiro and Dylan Thomas. Max Harris, who contributed a large range of material to the magazine, was particularly opposed to the nationalist socialism of such magazines as Australian New Writing and attacked what he saw as 'the tired and mediocre nationalism which passed for poetry, the pedestrian bush whackery which gave Australia a novel of unequalled verbal dullness'. Subject to inevitable 'excesses and absurdities', as Harris later admitted, and fatally attracted to any writing which presented itself as avant garde, Angry Penguins failed to survive the Ern Malley hoax. Alister Kershaw has written reminiscences of Angry Penguins and the hoax in Hey Days (1991) and the journal's history and impact are extensively discussed in Richard Haese's Rebels and Precursors (1981), and in Michael Heyward's The Ern Malley Affair (1993).

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