Anne Bonny is recorded that Bonny had red hair and was considered a "good catch", but may have had a fiery temper; at age 13, she supposedly stabbed a servant girl with a knife. She married a poor sailor and small-time pirate named James Bonny. James hoped to win possession of his father-in-law's estate, but Bonny was disowned by her father. Bonny's father did not approve of James Bonny as a husband for his daughter and he kicked Anne out of their house. There is a story that Bonny set fire to her father's plantation in retaliation; but no evidence exists in
Ern Malley the Heide Circle fell for the hoax, and, enraptured by the poetry, devoted the next issue of "Angry Penguins" to Malley. The hoax was revealed soon after, resulting in a "cause célèbre" and the humiliation of Harris, who was put on trial, convicted and fined for publishing the poems on the grounds that they contained obscene content. "Angry Penguins" folded in 1946. In the decades that followed, the hoax proved to be a significant setback for modernist poetry in Australia. Since the 1970s, however, the Ern Malley poems, though known to be a hoax, became celebrated as a successful example