37. GARRY SHEAD

Young Prince of Tyre and Colloquy with John Keats, both painted in 2003, are two early key paintings in the Ern Malley series in which there is a specific reference to the verse of Ern Malley, details from the poets biography, as well as a general philosophical exploration of the idea that a creative person in this material world is almost inevitably a sacrifice.  

Ern Malley has been Australias most controversial poet since the 1940s.  To some he didnt even exist, but was invented as a literary hoax by two bored Sydney poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, who wished to deflate the egos of the pretentious literary avant-garde based in Melbourne. To others, he was one of Australias greatest modernist poets, where the creation has certainly become greater than his creators. McAuley and Stewart later claimed to have cobbled together the sixteen poems of The Darkening Ecliptic on a lazy Saturday afternoon in October 1943. They did it as a deliberate example of bad verse, at random, borrowing from disparate sources and for an author created the pseudonym: Ern Malley. They felt a general frustration with so-called modernist poetry and specifically with the efforts of the twenty-two year old Max Harris, known as comrade Maxie in some quarters, who was supported by his well heeled friends, John and Sunday Reed based at Heide on the outskirts of Melbourne. The Heide group published as their house journal Angry Penguins, something McAuley and Stewart viewed as a particularly pretentious modernist publication. They sent a couple of poems as bait to Harris, as the Adelaide-based co-editor of Angry Penguins, and then on his request, the whole anthology followed. He fell for the poems hook, line and sinker, enthused his fellow editors, John Reed and Sidney Nolan, and in 1944, the Autumn issue of Angry Penguins was published to commemorate the Australian poet Ern Malley. One of Ern Malleys poems was illustrated by Sidney Nolan on the cover. In June 1944 the literary hoax was exposed in the press and despite the various rearguard actions fought by the modernists, the Heide crowd emerged red-faced.  

The surrogate authors attempted to divorce themselves from their unwanted offspring, while it seemed like a good idea at the time and fun as a one night stand, but gradually the myth overwhelmed its creators. In an oedipal twist, Ern Malley proved a more resilient poet than either of his fathers ever intended and his acclaim and reputation started to cast a shadow over both of his parents. Many, if not most anthologies of Australian verse, include one or more poems from The Darkening Ecliptic, they are quoted in numerous books and no account of Australian literature, art or culture is complete without some reference to them. They have entered as an event in Australian popular culture and even occupy a modest episode in Australian legal history, when the poems were taken to court by the Adelaide establishment through the police as indecent advertisements. In fact, they have become some of the most famous and controversial poems to have ever been published in Australia and have received widespread recognition internationally.

Garry Shead first experimented with the Ern Malley theme in the early 1960s and then produced a large number of photographic collages in 2000-2001, however the images in the 2002 sketchbooks were the first coherent series of drawings that he devoted to Ern Malley. The theme subsequently has become one of the central concerns of his art and which has found expression in a major series of paintings, drawings, collages, three-dimensional ceramics and etchings.

Young Prince of Tyre, 2003, is a magnificent painting where the setting is recognisably Melbourne with its trams and terrace houses, where the naked poet hovers above his crucified personification (possibly the wrecked young Prince himself), touching with his hand the hand of the crucified figure. A pretty young woman offers a posy of wattle to the crucified poet on the cross, while on top of the cross sits a huge magpie, whose carol has dried upon his tongue. The sinister military poets lurk in the background, in this perhaps an indirect reference to the botched tribe of imperial poets whom Nero will burn like rafters, while sheets of Ern Malleys poetry are strewn across the road.

As in the other major paintings in this series, the imagery relates only indirectly to the Ern Malley poem Young Prince of Tyre, which in part reads:
Inattentive, suborned, betrayed, and shiftless,
You have hawked in your throat and spat
Outrage upon the velocipede of thriftless
Mechanical men posting themselves that
Built you a gibbet in the vile morass
Which now you must dangle on, alas.
The eyeless worm threads the bone, the living
Stand upright by habitual insouciance
Else they would fall. But how unforgiving
Are they to nonce-men that falter in the dance!
Their words are clews that clutched you on the post
And you were hung up, dry, a fidgety ghost.
The magpies carol has dried upon his tongue
To a flaky spittle of contempt. The loyalists
Clank their armour. We are no longer young,
And our rusty coat fares badly in the lists
Take it for a sign, insolent and superb
That at nightfall the woman who scarcely would
Now opens her cunning thighs to reveal the herb
Of content. The valiant man who withstood
Rage, envy and malignant love, is no more
The wrecked Prince he was on the latter shore.

Ern Malley is as much an idea as it is a series of quite remarkable poems with some of the most memorable lines in the whole history of Australian verse. In Garry Sheads art it is this mixture of lyrical inspiration and the idea of the new cultural hero in Australia the slightly tragic, soft spoken creative genius guided by his Muse. Socially an outcast and surrounded by a world which loves him not, Ern Malley became the symbol of the creative spirit at odds with a materialist world, a world in which he is always an itinerant, an outsider and a sacrifice. In Sheads art we encounter the image of the tragic poet wandering through a hostile society.

Although Garry Shead is an exquisite technician, who has spent forty years mastering the skills of the old masters, in the final analysis, he notes in his journal Ern Malley emerges from the blank page.¹ As Shead notes It becomes like a collaborative process with Ern Malley developing a life of his own over which I have little control.² The paintings, drawings, prints and the ceramics which have grown into Sheads Ern Malley series have developed intuitively, unconsciously and frequently as a surprise and revelation to the artist himself. Ultimately, this was also the secret of Ern Malley, the Muse was stronger than the petty jealousies and subversive intrigues of McAuley and Stewart. In the Young Prince of Tyre, as in all of Sheads Ern Malley series, ultimately there is a quiet and lyrical celebration of beauty and creativity which somehow, against all odds, survives within
a materialist world. There is an affirmation that indeed Ern Malley lives.

Footnotes
1. Garry Shead, Malley Book II, 2002, manuscript, no pagination, entry [November 2002]
2. Garry Shead, interview with the author, Bundeena, 18 May 2002

Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA