It's fascinating that the term "black swan" was first credited to the Roman Poet Juvenal in the late 1st century
as something impossible or unknown. When Europeans finally sighted one in Western Australia in the 17th
century the term had to be slightly reworked and metamorphosed to the idea that a perceived impossibility
might be later disproven.

In 2001 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former Wall Street trader, introduced the notion of a Black Swan event and
in 2007 dedicated an entire book to his theory “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”.

“A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has
potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterised by their extreme rarity, their severe
impact, and the widespread insistence they were obvious in hindsight,’ writes Taleb.

And then there’s the Ern Malley Affair of 1943 from Melbourne. In an attempt to deceive Max Harris and his
modernist magazine, "Angry Penguins" the conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart
submitted what they considered nonsensical poetry capturing what they felt were the worst of modernist
tendencies under the guise of a fictional poet Ern Malley via his equally fictional sister, Ethel.

An entire Angry Penguin magazine was devoted to the poems. The hoax was revealed and caused Harris
humiliation but the final irony is that the poems are now celebrated as successful in their own right. My particular favourite is "Durer: Innsbruck, 1495"...

"I had read in books that art is not easy

But no one warned that the mind repeats

In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still

The black swan of trespass on alien waters”

Kate Bergin 2011