Malcolm Henry Ellis, CMG (21 August 1890 – 18 January 1969) was an Australian journalist, historian, critic, reviewer and staunch anti-communist. He usually wrote as M. H. Ellis. His wife, Jean Ellis, founded the Penguin Club of Australia in 1937. His younger brother Ulrich Ellis was also a journalist and historian.
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 biographies of key early Australian colonial figures, Francis Greenway, John Macarthur and Lachlan Macquarie.[1]
Ellis married Melicent Jane (Jean) Ellis in 1914. She had intended to be a nurse. Their first child was born in 1915. His wife was a excellent public speaker and in 1937 she and a friend founded the Penguin Club of Australia which taught women to have confidence when speaking in public. They divorced in 1939. In 1946 he married Gwendoline Mary Wheeler in Sydney.