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A useful background to John Tranter’s life and writing are the three interviews by John Kinsella, Ted Slade and Kate Lilley, available on John Tranter’s homepage: http://johntranter.com/00/interviewed.shtml
His early writing life is archived and available for study at the University of Sydney Library’s site at http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/tranter-j-e/.
This piece is about five printed pages long.
John Ernest Tranter was born in Cooma, New South Wales, in 1943. His father, Fred Tranter, taught at a one-teacher school in the village of Bredbo, some 36 kilometres (20 miles) north of Cooma, high in the southern highlands of New South Wales. His mother had been married before and had two teenage children (see photo below) when she married Fred; her first husband, partly in response to his distressing experiences in the First World War, became an alcoholic, and his wife left him in the late 1920s, taking the children.
When John was about four the family moved to the coastal town of Moruya, some 320 kilometres (200 miles) south of Sydney on the coast of NSW, where his father had spent part of his childhood, and where he now took up a job as a school teacher at the large public school. He eventually became deputy headmaster before resigning to take up farming and to establish a successful soft-drink factory. During his early school years John developed an occasional stammer which troubled him for decades.
John Tranter, left, circa 1947, with his older brother Peter Hellier and sister Barbara Hellier. Photograph copyright © John Tranter 2004
At the Intermediate Certificate exams in 1957 he did well enough to be selected to continue his high school education at Hurlstone Agricultural High School, a selective state farm school at Glenfield on the south-west outskirts of Sydney. He repeated his third year of high school there in 1958 to pick up Agriculture, a fruitless exercise, as he failed the subject dismally in the Leaving Certificate exams in late 1960. This was a great disappointment to his father, who for complex reasons of his own had wanted his only child to take over the farming business he had worked so hard to set up. John did get an honours pass in English, though: the first Hurlstone pupil to do so in a quarter of a century. A teacher, John Darcy, encouraged him to begin writing poetry, and one of the first two poems he wrote won a prize in the high school annual magazine.
John studied Architecture at the University of Sydney in 1961, where his drawing and composition teacher was the painter Lloyd Rees. For about a decade after this John made various attempts to become a serious painter, but finally abandoned the ambition. He didn’t take to the routine of Architecture studies, and withdrew in August. The next year, 1962, he started Arts, did some work on the student weekly newspaper honi soit, and became friends with its editor, Bob Ellis. John’s father died in August 1962.
At the end-of-year exams he passed only two subjects, Philosophy and Psychology, and failed Maths and English. The Commonwealth Scholarship which he had won in the Leaving Certificate exams, which had enabled him to go to university to study Architecture and which had been suspended while he studied Arts, was now gone for good. This was his third significant failure in three years. At the end of 1962 he left the university in a mood of depression, abandoning his academic hopes in the knowledge that he had disappointed his dying father and had made a complete mess of his life.
He worked at various menial jobs for the next few years and travelled to Britain by ship in 1966, where after struggling to find a job he liked for some months and going hungry once or twice he finally found work as a mail van driver for the Cycle and General Insurance company at Hendon in North-west London. Lyn Grady, whom he had met in the front bar of the Newcastle Hotel in George Street, Sydney in 1964, joined him there in late 1966, and worked as a secretary in the City. They returned to Australia in the autumn of 1967 via the overland route, travelling by bus, train and hitch-hiking, via France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. (see 1967 photo.)
Lyn and John married in March 1968. John began to publish poems in Poetry Magazine, Poetry Australia and other magazines, and set up his own magazine, Transit New Poetry. It lasted for two issues and folded in early 1969. Documents from this period are freely available on John’s archive site at the University of Sydney Library:
http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/tranter-j-e/.
A few months’ work as a cleaner in late 1967 convinced him of the value of completing his tertiary education, and he went back to the University of Sydney early in 1968, studying English I at night and working in the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s printing department during the day as a photo-litho darkroom operator and platemaker. Desperation gave his study an edge, and he got a good pass in English I and a Teachers’ College scholarship, which enabled him to complete the next two years of his BA as a full-time student, majoring in English and Psychology at the end of 1970. His first book Parallax and other poems was published as an issue of Poetry Australia magazine in 1971.
He was embarking on an English Honours year in 1971 — somewhat reluctantly — when he struck good luck in the front bar of the Newcastle Hotel for a second time: a friend, Bob Debus, offered him a job as a publisher’s editor in Singapore. In giving up his academic study he had to buy his way out of an obligation to work as a school teacher incurred because of the Teachers’ College scholarship for 1969 and 1970; his mother repaid the debt. He and Lyn left in early 1971 and John worked in Singapore as Senior Education Editor South-east Asia for Angus and Robertson Publishers until 1973. Their first child, a daughter, was born in Singapore in 1972. Sadly the Newcastle Hotel was demolished in the mid-1970s.
John took a job as Play Reader (an editorial position) with the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Radio Drama and Features Department in 1973, and resigned that to take up one of the first Literature Board grants for the calendar year 1974. He returned to Radio Drama and Features and a drama producer’s position in Brisbane in 1975, and worked there until 1977, producing more than forty radio plays and features and bringing full stereo drama production techniques to the Queensland branch, as well as producing one of the ABC’s first location stereo radio documentaries, Sideshow People, about the travelling sideshow workers at the 1976 Brisbane Exhibition, many of whom began their sideshow careers in the Depression. His second child, a son, was born in Brisbane in 1975.
In 1975 the ABC brought him to Sydney to design a book review radio program with (Mr.) Jan Garrett, who was to be its first presenter. Thirty years and several presenters later, the program they devised, Books and Writing, was still going strong with essentially the same format.
He returned to Sydney in 1977, living first in the inner-city suburb of Annandale, moving to nearby Stanmore in 1984, and to Balmain, a harbourside suburb, in 1995. He set up a small press (Transit New Poetry) and published four books by young poets in the early 1980s: Susan Hampton (her first book), Gig Elizabeth Ryan (her first book), John Forbes and Alan Jefferies. Publishing assistance grants from the Literature Board of the Australia Council supported the first three of these books; the Board (in an unwelcome editorial intervention) rejected the fourth, which put the project into unrecoverable debt, and no more poetry books were published. Since 1980 he has worked mainly in publishing, teaching and radio production, and has spent some years as a writer supported by grants from the Literature Board of the Australia Council (on the Internet at http://www.ozco.gov.au/boards/literature/). He has travelled widely, making many reading tours in Europe and North America. By 2004 he had made twenty overseas trips, including seventeen visits to New York.
Here’s a summary of some incidental events:
During 1987 and 1988 John Tranter was asked to take over the ABC Radio National weekly two-hour arts program Radio Helicon. He found a debilitated program with its budget cut in half, and managed in one year to bring it back to its former strength and a full budget. Working with one assistant, he sought out archival material, commissioned other producers to make new programs, produced programs himself, and presented introductions and links on-air.
Other work: SBS Television: 1981–86, casual basis, subeditor of subtitles and narration scripts.
Teaching, casual: Workers Educational Association: creative writing; Sydney College of the Arts: a five-lecture course on writing and the creative imagination; guest lectures and seminars at Macquarie University, Sydney University, Canberra College of Advanced Education, the Australian National University, and the (then) NSW Institute of Technology (now UTS).
Teaching, contract: 1983 at Canberra CAE (now the University of Canberra) teaching audio technology, professional writing and script-writing in the B.Comm degree course; 1982-83 at NSW Institute of Technology (now UTS) teaching radio production and script-writing in the B.Comm degree course; 1983-84 as editor, External Course Development section, NSW Department of Technical and Further Education.
He compiled a fifty-page Australian poetry feature supplement for the Chicago magazine New American Writing (No.4, 1989). In 1990 he persuaded the Sydney news magazine the Bulletin to re-introduce a regular poetry segment after a twenty-year gap, and acted as their poetry editor until 1993.
He has received several senior fellowships and other grants from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. In 1981 he was a Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the Australian National University. He has also received a three-year Australian Artists Creative Fellowship, as well as four writer-in-residencies including one at Rollins College in Florida in 1992 and another in the English Faculty at Cambridge University in 2001.
John Tranter has travelled widely, making reading tours of the USA, England and Europe in 1985, 1986, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996, and 1997, and presenting papers and readings at many bookstores and at the Academy of American Poets, St Mark’s Poetry Project, La Maison des Ecrivains in Paris, New York University, Stanford University, California Institute for the Arts, Wesleyan University, the East-West Centre at the University of Hawaii, Poetry International in London, North London Polytechnic, and the universities of Stockholm, Gothenberg, Aachen, Heidelberg, Wuppertal, Regensberg, Nottingham, Stirling, St Andrews, Loughborough, Exeter, Cambridge and Oxford.
He has published twenty books of poetry and four anthologies of other writers’s work.
He has also published widely in British and US literary magazines including the Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Grand Street, New American Writing, Conjunctions, Boulevard, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, _PMC_ (Post-Modern Culture, on the Internet), Verse, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and Poetry Review (UK).
He is the editor of the free Internet magazine Jacket, at http://jacketmagazine.com/
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