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Parallax index

The June 1970 issue of Poetry Australia magazine consisted of Parallax and other poems, the first published book by John E.Tranter. For some background information relating to the publication of this book, see the note at the foot of this page.
    The book is available here for viewing or downloading in the form of an Adobe Acrobat Portable Document File titled parallax.pdf. To view the file you will need the free Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader, which you may obtain from http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html
      The book is also available here as an HTML file made up of HTML text and linked photographic images of each page of the original printed book, with images of the front and back cover, together with recordings of the author reading sixteen of the poems. An "image" or "text" link at the top of each page allows you to alternate between the photographic image and the HTML text version of the same page. Some browsers have a "View Image" command which will display the page images greatly magnified. Click on the appropriate button in the index list below.

A note from John Tranter on the publication of Parallax:

Grace Perry (b.1927) published her first book of poems (Staring at the Stars) very young, in 1942, a year before I was born. She was the editor of Poetry Magazine, organ of the Poetry Society of Australia, from 1961 to 1964, when she quarrelled with the Society and set up Poetry Australia in direct competition. The quarrel had to do with Grace's wish to publish poetry from overseas in the magazine. She was an admirer of the American poet William Carlos Williams, also a general medical practitioner. In 1964 she also set up South Head Press, a poetry publishing press, and published a number of poetry volumes, among them books by Rodney Hall and Bruce Beaver, a lifelong friend of hers.

Front Cover of Parallax

I published a number of poems in the magazine, as did many young poets in the late 1960s, and helped out with the publication of the magazine by stuffing copies into envelopes and doing general office work at Grace's surgery in Five Dock. My recollection is that Grace was a cheerful, confident, energetic and somewhat bullying person, who always knew what was good for you.
      By late 1969 I had written about three hundred poems, and had placed about seventy of them in various Australian journals, and I felt I finally had a book ready for publication. Grace offered to publish it through South Head Press. She needed a subsidy to do that, and duly applied for one to the Commonwealth Literary Fund, which was the precursor to the Literature Board of the Australia Council. The CLF (unlike the Australia Council) was notorious for its lack of independence, particularly for having being under the personal control of conservative Prime Minister R.G.Menzies during his term of office, and I doubt things had changed much by 1969. In any event, my manuscript was rejected.

Parallax, back cover

Grace was furious,and promptly offered to publish it as an issue of Poetry Australia magazine. I happily agreed: she would print two thousand copies (at a dollar each!), which was many more readers than I could expect to find if the book had been offered for sale in the shops.
      When the book appeared, Grace told me that the Commonwealth Literary Fund, which also subsidised the production costs of Poetry Australia, had written her an angry letter: how dare she use CLF money to publish Parallax as an issue of the magazine, when the same manuscript had been rejected by the Fund?
      "What did you say?" I asked anxiously. She laughed aloud.
      "I asked them if they wanted me to write a letter to the papers," she said, "explaining how the CLF was now directly censoring the content of the literary magazines it subsidised. That shut them up!"
      Where bullies are concerned, I agree with President Lyndon Johnson: it's better to have them inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

A note about my name: In 1964, the year Grace stormed out of the Poetry Society, taking the magazine's subscription list with her, a novel appeared in London titled The Livin' is Easy, by a young Australian writer called John Tranter. There had never been a published writer of that name in English, as far as I know, and I was dismayed; the novel wasn't mine. I found out, years later, that it was by a writer named John Taylor Tranter. I felt obliged to use my middle initial (E for Ernest) to distinguish my work from his. As it happened, he never published another book, and eventually I dropped the initial.

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http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/tranter/parallax.html