THE received history of Angry Penguins is based on a simple story: two young poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, at odds with the aesthetic aims of Angry Penguins, together write a corpus of poems and offer it for publication in the magazine. The poems are attributed to a fictional author, `Ern Malley', whose work mimics the magazine's writing practice. On its publication by enthusiastic Angry Penguins editors, Max Harris and John Reed, the story of the hoax is revealed, bringing disgrace on the magazine and its characteristic forms of writing.

In a phrase that caught the imagination of reviewers of his book The Ern Malley Affair, Michael Heyward referred to Malley's Darkening Ecliptic as `the most decisive piece of literary criticism ever produced in Australia' (238). This way of characterising the Ecliptic is important in two ways. First, it affirms the central points of the `received history' by emphasising differences between the hoax parties. It does this by denying Angry Penguins literary value or interest, and by portraying the hoax as a dispute between ancients and moderns: on one hand a Sydney-based `anti-modernism' (45) -- on the other a `naive' Angry Penguins `pro-modernism', expressed as a `grandstanding, romantic surrealism' (23). These are the key elements of the dominant interpretation of the hoax, in which the meaning of the hoax is self-evident, and positions within the scenario - superior or inferior - are always clear and distinct. This amounts to an impasse in discussion of these affairs, blocked off by a discursive mechanism which produces one set of meanings.

Another way of seeing the Ecliptic as criticism lies in exactly the opposite direction. In his descriptions of the hoax, Heyward used one sense of the word `criticism' to great effect. However, it can be used in another way: that is, to describe a channel of dialogue between texts and, possibly, between people: a dialogue in which a variety of positions may be assumed, allowing exploration of areas which the received history cannot explain. And there is clearly a need to do this. Although Ern Malley's Darkening Ecliptic is arguably the most famous text of Australian cultural modernism, the state of knowledge about these poems is unsatisfying: we lack an account which can address the attributes of the work, and the status of the target material, while explaining the circumstances of the Ecliptic's advent. This article argues that in order to generate such an account we must adopt the relational view suggested by seeing the hoax as criticism. This allows us to investigate the fabric of differences and unacknowledged similarities between the two groups revolved.

One of these was the Sydney-based group which included the authors of the hoax poems - James McAuley and Harold Stewart - and their supporters and sympathisers. The other group was associated with the target, Angry Penguins, whose central editorial cell comprised Max Harris, Sidney Nolan, and John and Sunday Reed. Both of these were part of the little magazine milieu which suddenly developed in Australia...