Name Malcolm Ellis | Role Journalist | |
Died January 18, 1969, Mosman, Sydney, Australia Books Lachlan Macquarie: His Life, Adventures and Times | ||
Malcolm Henry Ellis, CMG (21 August 1890 – 18 January 1969) was an Australian journalist, historian, critic, reviewer and staunch anti-communist.
Ellis won praise during World War II for his column, 'The Service Man', which appeared under the pseudonym 'Ek Dum'. Using radio reports and his knowledge of terrain, he described military campaigns in a realistic manner so that it was assumed he was present. His series of anti-communist tracts, the most famous of which was The Red Road (1932), was lurid and divisive.
Due to his staunch criticism of the writing of Manning Clark, who in Ellis's view was a Communist fellow traveller, he almost subverted the launching of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. 'History without facts', his excoriating and now legendary review in the Sydney Bulletin of the first volume of Clark's A History of Australia, is for many the main legacy of his otherwise extensive works, which include we-researched biographies of key early Australian colonial figures, Francis Greenway, John Macarthur and Lachlan Macquarie.