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 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