by Elizabeth Lhuede

Another in our series of works published in 1946 and the 1940s.

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Recently, when trying to find out-of-copyright poetry for 1946 proved difficult, I turned my attention to the journal Angry Penguins, of Ern Malley fame, which ceased publication that year. As I trawled through the nine issues, I began wondering about the gender balance among its contributors. In his 2024 article on “A D Hope and the Failure of Angry Penguins as a Modernist Literary Movement”, Wayne Bradshaw refers to Betty Snowden’s biography of Max Harris which identified “Misses M. Swan, A. Hogben and J. Murray” as being “assigned roles as subeditors for the first volume of the journal, hinting at a degree of gender equity remarkable for a publication based at a conservative university in the Australia of 1940” (Bradshaw, 2024).

Gender equity? If the ratio of contributions by women to the journal is anything to judge by, that’s a bit of a stretch.

The first volume of Angry Penguins, published in 1940, may have been sub-edited by women, but there were no females among the eleven contributors. The second volume, appearing in August 1941, had at best two women out of eleven contributors: H M (Hilda Mary or “Molly”) Swan with four poems and a prose piece (Poem Sequence, Sunday, Poem, Purity, and A Puff for a Penguin!) and an R Brewster Jones with one poem, Shearing. This latter poem AustLit attributes to a Rebecca Brewster-Jones. If this attribution is correct, Brewster-Jones would have been aged about 90 at the time – a surprising inclusion by the then 21-year-old editor Max Harris and his 23-year-old co-editor D B Kerr. A more likely candidate for the author is Robert Brewster-Jones, mentioned in an article in The News (Adelaide) in October 1931 after writing a play intended to “kick against our gum tree tradition”. He also published the poem, “At the corner“, in The Advertiser (Adelaide, SA) in 1935, and is mentioned for his blank verse titled “danse” appearing in a chapbook in 1936. Assuming there are no others of that name, he became engaged to a Dorothy Dunhill October 1936, and died in 1946 after serving as a captain in the army in WWII. Rebecca – who may well have been related – died in 1943, so, either way, it would seem Shearing is out of copyright, but it’s doubtful it was written by Rebecca.

The under-representation of women continued in Issue 3, published in 1942, with a possible two women among its twelve contributors: H M Swan once more, and possibly “C M Carter” whom AustLit lists as “gender unknown”. The untitled poem by Carter is the only listed entry for that poet. Swan’s contributions include a poem, “The Searchers“, and a prose piece, “The Drug“, pieces which Gavin Yates (2023) has described as a “rimbaudien poem sequence of accumulating imagery and [a] hallucinatory short story”. Bradshaw (2024) writes that Swan holds the dubious distinction of being, together with Harris, “responsible for the most impenetrable—and at times nonsensical—writing to be found in Angry Penguins”, providing “the strongest justification for the line of criticism the magazine received from its opponents”. The first stanzas of “The Searchers” gives a flavour of Swan’s work:

Very long ago they missed you
and went stumbling blindly on
not finding you hidden behind bushes
nor in the irrefragable darkness of wells
or the hush of love.

Where is he now they asked wringing
their tragic hands.
Dully silence answered ‘He is
gone, is shut behind the spheres
in the blue space’
(from The Searchers)

For Issue 4, 1942, of Angry Penguins, Miss Mary Martin is named as the “Business Manager”. The contents page also lists five female contributors among 18, an improving ratio. This coincides with what Bradshaw (2024) identifies as a shift in focus for the journal, away from Adelaide and a focus on literature, to becoming more of a combined literary and art journal. In this issue are two poems by young Tasmanian poet, Lola Van Gooch (The Iron Entering the Soul and Ascension); one by Queenslander, Marceine la Dickfos (Hobo Under the Poinciana), one by Elizabeth Galloway (Poem), as well as Sunday Reed’s Translations of Rimbaud’s poems and two pieces by Mary Williams: an essay on Baudelaire and a poem (Bat). William’s poem reads:

Before the light
I felt the suck at the throat
(lips but in dream might)
the blood appalled
clothing into its consciousness
the cry of a bat in the night

To readers steeped in the Aussie ballad tradition or the contemporary anthologies by the Jindyworobaks, such offerings probably seemed outrageously foreign.

The September 1943 issue features four females among its twenty-two contributors: Lola Van Gooch once more (The Clowns and the Birds Twittering and Poem), Elizabeth (sic) Lambert (Poem), H M Swan (Poem) and Joy Hester. Hester’s contribution isn’t identified in the journal, but may have been one of the illustrations. Van Gooch introduces a sexual element into her poetry, hinting at the freedoms of 1940s wartime young women:

I could be a drummer, beating mad blood,
Timing the steady sexual tread
Heavy with instinct …. but my wrists fail me.
(from The Clowns and the Birds Twittering)

The Autumn 1944 issue, infamous as the Ern Malley edition, lists three women among its 32 contributors, only one of whom, Elizabeth Galloway, contributed poetry (Lament, The Dear One, Inheritance and The Jealous Muse). The other female contributors were Ruth Speirs, with her Translations of Rilke, and Alice Brown, a music critic, who wrote a prose piece titled, The Leningrad Symphony. Galloway’s The Jealous Muse begins with the line, “Thoughts of you / Like open wounds” and ends:

And the caged hearts’ birds
Cry death’s name secret
To the sobbing wound
Cry war and peace
Cry for the living words.
(From The Jealous Muse)

For the most part, the poem is obscure, but given the war-time context, these lines tantalise.

The December 1944 issue of Angry Penguins had five female contributors among 29, most of whom wrote essays in defence of Ern Malley: Nettie Palmer, Dorothy Green, Elisabeth Lambert (with Harry Roskolenko), A Cumpston and Janet Neild (with husband Clive). Two of Lambert’s poems also appeared (Kings Cross and The Eternal Verity). Lambert’s poem Kings Cross is worth reading, not only for its play with language, but also for its evocation of the notorious nightspot in the 1940s:

But the snack-bar’s invitation
Missed at. O, missed! And the chemist’s
Invitation passed thrice in a block.
Take stock, buy lock-stock,
Buy barrel for beer-o,
Buy love, buy aspirin, buy laughter.

But a minute’s step from the room to the street
But minute’s step from the room to the street
Where lovers meet and feet assault the tired stairs.
Most meet the final meeting in the cheap street
Thrusting its toothpaste wares,
Its prophylactic love accompanies
Up the stairs
(from Kings Cross)

The 1945 issue had a woeful three, possibly four, female contributors out of 55: Mary Martin, one-time “Business Manager”, wrote an essay, “Hollywood or Art?” Elizabeth Galloway had four poems published (The Last Journey, Personal Note, Christmas Eve and Ondine). The third woman to contribute was a poet from the U.S., Beverly Baff (Flyer, Elegy and Irishman). Another possible woman was A E Hansen whose gender is listed as “unknown” by AustLit. Their prose-poem “Flame” is one of only two entries identified in the database, the other appearing in 1950 in The Bulletin. For readers anticipating a customary Christmas poem celebrating Christ’s birth, Galloway’s poem packs a few surprises:

The consummation of a prophecy
Held in its end beginning.
The tender child born in simplicity
Dies painfully upon the cross
Calling “Forsaken, O forsaken! … Why?”
And waits no lightening of the black eclipse
No answer to the culminating cry
(from “Christmas Eve“)

The final issue of the Angry Penguins, published in July 1946, continues the under-representation of women, with only three female contributors out of 25: Elizabeth Galloway (Acknowledgment), and two writers from the U.S., Dilys Bennet Laing (Who is not who? and Maidanek, Dachau, Buchenwald: A note for San Francisco), and Inez Cavanaugh, who wrote on the American Jazz Scene: 1945. Laing’s poem “Maidanek” is a fine example of American women’s WWII poetry, and still resonates powerfully. The first stanzas read:

At first they made me ill. At first they made me wish to die. Or kill. 
At first I wished to turn from them. To run. To hide.
I hated food, which being denied to them, became a measure of their death. 
So horror grew in me. So illness. So they lay, loathly, forsaken. 
So they were killed twice, once by their butchers, once by my guts’ revulsion 

You know of whom I speak. You too have turned aside 
shuddering. But the matter is too huge. 

Horror is over, by its own too-muchness overborne. 

Disgust is over. Only love remains.
(from Maidanek, Dachau, Buchenwald.)

So who were the Australian women writers among the Angry Penguins contributors, whose identities barely appear as a footnote to one of the most celebrated hoaxes in Australian literature?

With a total of 10 poems, the female poet with the most poems published in the Angry Penguins is Elizabeth Galloway. The biographical note to her 1944 contribution reads: “Pseudonym conceals sensitive and exciting personality who makes apocryphal claim to being a grandmother. Hails from Melbourne. Has brilliant distinction of not being in Australian New Voices session.” Hers wasn’t much of a pseudonym, Galloway being her middle name. According to her AustLit entry, the poet was born Elizabeth Galloway Watson in Melbourne, Victoria, in 1911, her parents were William and Christina Watson who emigrated from Scotland in 1907. Her father was a ships master and Elizabeth was their eldest, her brother Thomas being two years younger. Elizabeth attended Coburg High School and worked in a flower shop. In 1946, she married Graeme Bell, a jazz musician and went with him on tour to England where their daughter, Christina, was born in 1950. Galloway, now Elizabeth Bell, divorced and settled in Victoria where she raised their daughter. In subsequent years, she became a Buddhist, becoming chair of the Buddhist Federation of Australia in the 1970s and serving as editor of the federation’s magazine in the 1980s. In 1999, she received the Medal of the Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for her contribution to Buddhism. She has her own Wiki entry, which barely mentions her literary endeavours. AustLit lists 26 of her works, almost all of them appearing either in Angry Penguins or Comment and published before her marriage. I don’t know whether she also wrote under her married name.

H M Swan (standing far left)

The second most represented female poet appearing in Angry Penguins, with a total of seven poems, is H M (Hilda Mary or “Molly”) Swan. AustLit has no biographical entry for Swan but she is described in her Angry Penguins biographical note as: “Arts graduate and now social science worker. South Australian. Has published in Phoenix [publication of the Adelaide University Union], Angry Penguins, and Poetry. Influenced by Kafka, Rilke, and modern symbolists.” As mentioned, she was one of the sub-editors Harris’s biographer referred to. Her final poem in the journal appears in 1943, well before the Ern Malley hoax was perpetrated. There are references in Trove to a “Molly Swan” of Adelaide (sometimes “Mollie”), where she is sometimes referred to as a “Bethune girl”. Her name is coupled with fellow Angry Penguins sub-editor Alison Hogben and a photo appears of the two women taken during a dress rehearsal of a play, but it’s too dark to get a sense of the women’s ages. In 1943 Max Harris was apparently asked to compile an anthology for the American public and intended to include Swan’s work, along with other female Angry Penguins contributors, Marceine La Dickfos and Lola Van Gooch.

With four poems over several issues of Angry Penguins, Lola Van Gooch’s work is next best represented. As with Swan, Van Gooch has no biography in AustLit, but the 1943 Angry Penguins note for her reads: “A Tasmanian. Employed at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston.” A note in Examiner (Tas) in 1947 tells us Van Gooch worked at the museum from 1939 to 1947 as a scientific assistant and left to take a position in the biophysics department at the Tasmanian University: “She will be particularly missed by school children who attended art classes conducted by her at the museum every Saturday morning.” Elsewhere there is mention of a “Miss Lola Van Gooch (23)” being hit by a car in 1944, the age given making her born circa 1921 and the same age as Harris.

Next, with three poems published, is Elisabeth Lambert. English born Lambert, also known as Elisabeth Lambert Ortiz, has both an AustLit entry and her own Wiki page, the latter due to her subsequent career writing cookbooks after settling in the U.S. Her Angry Penguins biographical note for the December 1944 issue reads: “Reed & Harris representative in Sydney. Author of Poems. A contributor to Australian literary publications and well known for her radio verse-plays and dramatic work.”

Mary Christina St John, “Brisbane’s Doll Woman”

Both Mary Williams and Marceine La Dickfos had only one poem published each in Angry Penguins, though Williams also contributed an essay. Williams, who after a religious conversion changed her name to Mary Christina St John, also has an AustLit entry. Born in 1923 in Wales, like others among the female contributors to Angry Penguins, she was associated with Adelaide, and showed early promise as a writer: “She enrolled at the University of Adelaide as a cadet at the Barr Smith Library. She won the Tormore House prize for essays and contributed poems and articles to Angry Penguins and Meanjin Papers, and brought out two small volumes of poetry. In 1944 she left Adelaide and lived for a time in Brisbane, where she contributed to Barjai… In 1948 she left Brisbane for Melbourne before leaving Australia for good. She settled in London where she continued her writing and worked as a supply teacher in council schools.” [from Mary Williams’ AustLit entry]

One of the odd things my research has uncovered is a photo essay of Williams in Pix magazine in 1948. By then known as Mary Christina St John, she was celebrated as “Brisbane’s doll woman”, having collected 400 dolls and believing them to have souls. She also contributed a poem, Plea for Modernism, to the 1942 Jindyworobaks anthology.

The AustLit entry for Marceine La Dickfos, born in 1921, is brief and reads: “Marceine Dickfos was educated in Brisbane at Sandgate State School, Commercial High School and Teachers’ Training College. She taught in state schools for three years. In 1942 she married an American serviceman and left Queensland to live in California.” Biographical information on her husband, Wesley Duaine Sweetster, suggests the couple had at least one son, a Paul Bethune Sweetser, a veteran who died in 1992 and is buried, alongside his father, in Arlington. The papers of Marceine La Dickfos Sweetser are held by the National Library of Australia. Notes describing them say they comprise, among other items:

[B]iographical information and a photograph of Sweetser; letters to Sweetser, largely from the early 1940s, from writers and publishers regarding her poetry and published volume, Country dance and other verse (1941); unpublished poems by Sweetser and Peter Miles; and personal papers (documents relating to Sweetser’s passage to America in 1945 as a war bride). Correspondents include Clem Christesen, Flexmore Hudson, Peter Miles, Rex Ingamels, Brian Vrepont, Tom Dimes, Max Harris, James Picot, Robert Hillyer and Thomas Shapcott.

Another trove of information lies waiting for some willing researcher of Australian literature to explore.

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Elizabeth Lhuede has a PhD in Australian Poetry from Macquarie University. In 2012, she instigated the Australian Women Writers Challenge as a contribution to overcoming gender bias in the reviewing of works by Australian women. More recently she has focused on bringing to light the life and works of forgotten Australian women writers.