'Ern Malley' was a fictitious poet created by conservative Australian writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart. Both men believed that modernism had gone too far, and they wanted to create a scandal.

In late 1943, McAuley and Stewart wrote a volume of poems by 'Malley' taking lines from a variety of sources including Shakespeare, dictionaries of quotations, and instruction manuals, and giving them a stereotypical modernist edge. The 17 poems - collected as "The Darkening Ecliptic" - were sent to the left-wing poetry journal 'Angry Penguins' with letters purporting to be from Malley's sister, who had discovered the poems after her motor mechanic brother's tragic death aged 25.

Angry Penguins editor Max Harris published the poems, with Malley's biography, in the Autumn 1944 edition of the magazine. The poems were quickly ridiculed and investigative reporters uncovered the hoax. Harris was prosecuted for publishing obscene material (Australian censorship laws were strict) and lampooned in the press.

The hoax gained attention across Australia as writers and thinkers debated whether modernism had gone too far if it could be so easily mocked and 'exposed'. Regardless, the scandal has remained famous in Australian letters, and excerpts from the poems continue to appear in literary anthologies. Ironically the poems, although written as an intended parody, are now highly considered and McAuley's and Stewart's works remains largely unread.