Seventy five years ago, in mid 1944, two Australian poets in their twenties perpetrated—with gleeful malice aforethought—a hoax on a 21-year-old modernist whose star was rising faster than theirs. When it was revealed it went viral by wire from Sydney to London to New York and parts east and west.

The English modernist Herbert Read stood up for the poetic qualities of the doggerel and in retrospect it would be seen to have anticipated both sound and found poetry. Orson Welles recorded a recitation of it. Jazz musicians composed to it—James McAuley, one of the perpetrators, was himself a good jazz pianist.