Mary Read practical clothing that solidified their working place on board the ship among the other seamen. When Bonny told Read that she was a woman (apparently because she was attracted to her), Read revealed that she too was a woman. To abate the jealousy of her lover, Rackham, who suspected romantic involvement between the two, Bonny told him that Read was a woman. Speculation over the relationship between Bonny and Read led to images depicting the two in battle together. A victim of the pirates, Dorothy Thomas, left a description of Read and Bonny: They "wore men's jackets, and long trousers,
Ern Malley letter, purported to be from Ethel, containing the poems, and asking for his opinion of her late brother's work. Harris read the poems with, as he later recalled, a mounting sense of excitement. Ern Malley, he thought, was a poet in the same class as W. H. Auden or Dylan Thomas. He showed them to his circle of literary friends, who agreed that a hitherto completely unknown modernist poet of great importance had been discovered in suburban Australia. He decided to rush out a special edition of "Angry Penguins" and commissioned a painting by Sidney Nolan, based on the poems,