Ern Malley was an Australian poet and artist, the joint creation of writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart. McAuley and Stewart created Malley as a hoax aimed at editor Max Harris and his Melbourne-based modernist literary magazine Angry Peguins, which they considered pretentious.

(James Macpherson)

JGS Boggs is an artist known for making meticulously rendered drawings of currency. Instead of selling these one-sided "Boggs bucks" for money, Boggs attempts to use the art as money, in exchange for goods and services. He does not consider the artwork complete until such a transaction has taken place with one of his bills (or "notes", as he prefers to call them).