Henry (Harry) Arthur Hooton (9 October 1908 – 27 June 1961) was an Australian poet and social commentator whose writing spanned the years 1930s–1961.
[1] Initially a socialist and "wobbly", he later professed anarchism and became an associate of the Sydney Push during the 1940s, with connections to many other Australian writers, film makers and artists.
[1] At the age of 16 he arrived in Sydney on 28 October 1924, on the ship Demosthenes as part of an Empire scheme, the Dreadnought Trust,[3] with fifty-nine other boys.
After humping his swag around much of New South Wales and Queensland through the Great Depression, in 1936, just as his first pieces of writing were being published, Hooton was introduced to the poet Marie E. J. Pitt living in Melbourne and carried on a correspondence with her for the next eight years.
Hooton's "Things You See When You Haven't Got A Gun" was reviewed by Max Harris in one line in the Ern Malley issue of Angry Penguins, "Our anarchist bull careers madly through his intellectual fog.
To a literary world influenced by people such as Joyce, Yeats, Pound and Eliot, Hooton decried them as anti-artists, philistines and charlatans.
[2]: p.30 Appleton explained: "Hooton held that polemic was an art form and that all poetry should be didactic", an obtuse view which, coupled with his paradoxical debating style, brought Hooton into conflict with Libertarians (who especially revered Joyce's Ulysses) and with more puristic poets such as Lex Banning, James McAuley and A. D.
Hooton had corresponded with counter-culture figures in California, and with Tuli Kupferberg who would later form the rock group The Fugs.
[2]: p.30 Hooton argued that man should have power over things, including machines, but never over other men, applying to himself the term "anarcho-technocrat".