John Tranter

Poet and editor extraordinaire John Tranter died on 21 April 2023, after a few cruel years of illness with Lewy body dementia. Friends and family gathered at his funeral in the inner Sydney suburb of Rozelle on what would have been his eightieth birthday (29 April) to celebrate John’s remarkable life and mourn his loss. I was honoured to be one of the speakers: what follows incorporates what I said there. 

The ups and downs of biography

Hazel Rowley is the 2007 Australian Book Review/La Trobe University Annual Lecturer. That title is quite a mouthful (the acronym doesn’t bear thinking about), but one that Dr Rowley will handle in her stride, as those who recall her appearances on Australian literary stages will attest.

Dr Rowley – born in England and educated in Australia – taught for many years at Deakin University before moving to the United States. In 1993 she published Christina Stead: A Biography. In her review in The Independent, Doris Lessing said, ‘Christina Stead has long needed a good biographer, and here she is.’ Miegunyah has just issued a revised edition of the biography, in time for Dr Rowley’s Annual Lecture – and her appearance at the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

In my dream I was surrounded by seraphs
wearing morning suits, looking at me
quizzically in the crowded Parliament. Then I was being chased
by a Russian mountain lion who drooled a lot

B, brave brown, C, icicle
pendant, D, dun though pale,
F for faint mauve, fish and bicycle,
G, gothic paint in a green pail

When I was young I tried different things: drawing, painting, music, poetry, short stories, journalism, reviewing, but poetry turned out to be what I was best at.

With the recent focus on new anthologies in the Australian poetry community firmly placed on UNSW Press’s Australian Poetry Since 1788 (edited by Geoffrey Lehmann and Robert Gray) and the publication of two anthologies dedicated to the work of younger poets (UQP’s Thirty Australian Poets and ...

The ice-cream headache has you seeing double
as Goody Twoshoes calls by your table to arrange
some kind of smooth-talk conference full of limitless
possibilities, lots of cocktails, two naked men and naturally

John Tranter has published more than twenty books since 1970. They include long dramatic monologues, a type of verse novel (The Floor of Heaven, 1992), prose poems and traditional verse forms. Starlight, his new collection, continues his ‘evisceration’, as he calls it, of other poets.

Given the Howard government’s recent proposal to include the compulsory study of selected aspects of Australian history for secondary school students, perhaps it is time for more educators to follow the lead of Nicholas Jose and others in urging that Australian literature occupy a more prominent place in the school curriculum. Literature – and poetry in particular – does not have the political buzz that history possesses (especially since the recent ‘history wars’ have worked their way into public discourse), but there is a need for some healthy consciousness-raising about the flourishing state of Australian writing, which is often better understood beyond our shores than it is at home.

This new and selected poems reminds us, if we needed reminding, just how powerful John Tranter’s cumulated work is. There is a density, an intensity, and a many-sided explorativeness that probably cannot be matched in Australian poetry. Surprisingly, at 210 poems, it is a comparatively small book and has been pretty ruthlessly selected, but there is no doubting the size of its author’s achievement.