In 1944 Australia’s greatest new literary genius was a 25-year-old auto mechanic who had died of Graves’ disease, leaving a stack of poems for his grieving sister to discover. None of it was real. This episode dissects the Ern Malley hoax, in which two conservative writers, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, spent a single afternoon mashing together random phrases from a dictionary, Shakespeare and a rhyming dictionary to produce The Darkening Ecliptic, then mailed it to Max Harris, the 22-year-old editor of the modernist journal Angry Penguins.

We look at the culture war between traditionalists and surrealist-influenced modernists, the psychology of apophenia that let Harris supply the meaning the poems lacked, the special issue with a Sidney Nolan cover, and the rapid unmasking by the Sydney Sun. Then the story turns absurd: police impounded the magazine as obscene, a detective testified he did not know what the word incestuous meant, and Harris was convicted and fined five pounds. The episode follows the phantom poet’s afterlife, from Harris republishing the collection in 1961 to John Ashbery’s classroom test in which students could not tell Malley from Geoffrey Hill, and asks what makes a work of art real.

• The engineered tragic biography of Ernest Lalor Malley and his sister Ethel
• How McAuley and Stewart wrote 17 poems in one afternoon using a literary blender
• Apophenia, Rorschach blots and why Harris saw genius in randomness
• The obscenity trial that helped sink Angry Penguins and Australian modernism
• Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, Peter Carey’s novel and a bar in Adelaide named after a ghost