Harold Stewart

[1] Leonie Kramer in The Oxford History of Australian Literature grades the literary quality of Ethel's (Malley's supposed elder sister) letters as equal to those of Patrick White, Peter Porter and Barry Humphries.

A subtitle honouring Claude Debussy in 'Prelude: On the Quay,' written in the last year of high school, demonstrates that music was a formative poetic influence and one that provided a sense of organisation for his later poetry, which is most apparent in the fugue-like thematic structure of his spiritual autobiography By the Old Walls of Kyoto.

The reference to Debussy also points to the significant influence the French Symbolists had on shaping the affective Gothic mood of his early poetry.

He got to know James McAuley at Fort Street and the budding poets shared a common interest in literature which provided the foundation for the exchange of ideas and the opportunity to develop a friendship.

His ambition to become a poet gathered momentum during high school and after completing his final year, and without university or full-time employment as a distraction, he embarked upon his chosen career path, spending many hours at the Sydney Public Library copying his favourite poems in long hand.

This period served as an apprenticeship of sorts, suiting his introspective personality, though he did not abandon his social life completely and continued to gather with university friends in coffee shops and bars around Sydney to discuss literature and listen as they read their latest works.

Despite his reserved social demeanour, and without the spur of alcohol as he rarely drank, he appeared forthcoming in conversation, though he had good reason to guard against revealing the more libertine details of his personal life.

In a letter to Michael Heyward, Stewart discussed this social life: "... back in the later 1930's, I had met Alec Hope and he along with Jim [McAuley] and other literary friends used to meet on Saturday afternoons at Sherry's Coffee Shop in Pitt Street Sydney to discuss literary topics and improvise light verse, usually of a satirical nature".

After his death Cassandra Pybus announced it in The Devil and James McAuley and Michael Ackland reiterated it in Damaged Men, though Sasha Soldatow was the first to publish the secret about Stewart's private life in 1996.

In 1943, while at the Army Barracks, he collaborated with James McAuley and invented Ern Malley, which aimed to expose the excesses of literary modernism.

In The Ern Malley Affair, Michael Heyward recounts the events of the hoax when Stewart conspired with friend and fellow poet James McAuley to dupe Max Harris, the young leader of the modernist movement, and his fellow Angry Penguins, into believing that Ern's sister, Ethel, had found an unpublished manuscript while sorting through her brother's personal belongings after his premature death at the age of twenty-five from the usually non-fatal hyperthyroid condition known as Graves' disease.

Stewart was sixty-three years old and obviously excluded from claiming to be part the younger generation when his youthful promise belatedly reached its potential with the publication of By the Old Walls of Kyoto in 1981.

Given Tovey would have been fifteen or sixteen at the time, it implies Stewart was a paedophile, which was never the case and demonstrates how dangerous it is for reputation when hazy memory parades as biographical fact.

He published two haiku volumes in the 1960s, which, although popular and reprinted for nearly twenty years, have recently been subjected to some excellent technical analysis by Greg McLaren, who is one of the first academics to examine Stewart's poetry by way of a dissertation.

How rarely is that magic world disclosed Where all His perfect poems are composed Already, waiting for some poet's ear To catch their wordless meaning, out of reach, Before the moment's wonders disappear!

He became fascinated with Japanese poetry and published two translations of haiku: A Net of Fireflies (1960) and A Chime of Windbells (1969) which proved popular with the reading public.

He also devoted a great deal of time to collaborating with his teachers, Shojun Bando and Hisao Inagaki, in producing English versions of Japanese Buddhist classics such as the Three Pure Land Sutras and the Tannisho.