The Brisbane Years of Laurence Collinson

The autumn 1944 ‘Ern Malley’ edition of Max Harris's Angry Penguins was a defining moment in Australian cultural history for more than one reason. To add to the exposure of the Malley hoax in June 1944, Harris found himself in August having to defend charges of ‘indecent advertisements’ (Heyward, 184). Harris's partner in publishing Angry Penguins, John Reed, wrote in a letter of 5 September 1944 — the day the trial began in the Adelaide Magistrates Court — that the ‘indictment includes 7 of the Malley poems, all of Max's, the Cowan and Stivens stories and Collinson's poem’ (Reed, 367). The 19-year-old Brisbanite Laurence Collinson had conjured up a typically dramatic moment to announce his entry onto the national cultural stage — stumbling into a bit part in a drama that was both a crucial battle in the war between Australian literary modernists and traditionalists, and a worthy local precursor to Britain's Lady Chatterley trial of 1959.