John Tranter
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When Martin died in June 1990 at the age of forty-two we suffered a real loss: his writing had grown and matured, and in the last decade his best poems had developed a haunting intensity. What he left unwritten is sad to contemplate. What he bequeathed us, though, is as much as many writers achieve in a lifetime: a generous and varied body of writing that speaks in a distinctive voice, and articulates a dedication to the creative life. With its deeply-felt doubts, its joy in learning, and its relish in the exercise of an ancient craft, it is a project worthy of a scholar-poet of the Renaissance. |
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In November 1954, when Martin was just seven, his parents broke away from their life of London journalism to make a fresh start as serious writers in Greece. They were to remain there for a decade. First they lived on the barren island of Kalymnos, where the mainstay industry of sponge-diving was in decline. Nine months later they moved to the island of Hydra, forty miles from Athens. Martin’s brother Jason was born there in 1956, without the services of doctor or hospital. |
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In 1955-56, when Martin was eight, violence broke out in Cyprus, which was fighting for its independence from Britain and for union with Greece. On Hydra as elsewhere throughout the country there was strong anti-British feeling. Martin had spent three years in England, and the family had many friends there; he was torn between the two loyalties. Charmian Clift sketched these stresses in her book Peel Me a Lotus: Damn my own naïvete in believing for a minute that one was going to dodge labels and categories even on this small grey rock in the Mediterranean. I though of my son, who had stood up behind his desk at school in all the eight-year-old’s agony of tears and conspicuousness to refute his teacher’s assertion that the English were beasts and bloody butchers. I thought of my wild little daughter whooping through the lanes with her yellow hair flying, playing at revolutions. I thought of my baby, born a stranger in a strange land who would probably have to learn his mother tongue as a foreign language.
The cultural shifts Martin was put through as a growing child and adolescent were cataclysmic: Australia in the late 1940s, London, a Greek village, a different Greek village, an English country town, Greece, Australia in the 1960s. The psychological dislocation that accompanied these successive deracinations must have been painful, and I think an anxious sense of being cut off from his roots followed Martin all his life. His efforts to surround himself with his well-thumbed books, old friends and familiar routines and surroundings very likely stemmed from those experiences. |
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The children were often left to the housekeeper to mind, or left to their own devices, as many of the Greek children on the island were. As Martin said in 1989, “The way my parents lived has perhaps been disastrous for me in the long term, in that what they did was, they wrote very hard. . . they wrote from say seven in the morning till midday, and then, then went down to the waterfront and got pissed. And I suppose that’s a pattern of life that I’ve followed ever since. . .” |
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But this time he was luckier with his education. He won a place at North Sydney Boys’ High, a top selective school with a good reputation, where he quickly adapted to the different educational system. He was able to develop his interest in music, literature and chess, and he made many friends among the other boys. In his final exams he did very well in Ancient Greek and English, though he failed Mathematics. |
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Martin was in his early twenties, and beginning to stretch his wings. He joined the editorial board of New Poetry for one year, from the August 1971 issue to the June 1972 issue. His poem “The Blood Aquarium” was published in the April 1971 issue of the magazine, and won respect from many poets of his generation, though it baffled others. It was a long piece, full of complex philosophical allusions from a dozen cultures and periods. Around that time other young poets were essaying long sequences of poems, each in very different styles: Robert Adamson’s “The Rumour”, Alan Wearne’s “Out Here”, my own “Red Movie”. |
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They settled in Khania on the island of Crete, and set up a routine of writing solidly six days a week. Later they moved to Astros, then back to Crete. In 1977, worn out by the three-monthly struggle to obtain Greek residency permits and wishing to find English publishers for Martin’s poems, as well as decent bookshops, they took a bus to London via Yugoslavia. In the northern summer of 1978, after visiting Ireland, England and Scotland, they returned to write and travel some more in Greece, then home to Australia. |
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Photo: Martin in Greece: the long road home. |
During the next three years he made three visits to Europe with Roseanne. Through the late 1980s his liking for alcohol became a problem, and he found he was not producing much poetry. He decided to take a full year’s leave from his job at SBS in 1988 in order to live in Europe and devote time to his writing. He made it a productive period, moderating his drinking and working steadily at his poetry and the novel based on the life of General Makriyannis in the Tuscan farmhouse he and Roseanne had rented. The house was poorly heated, and in late August the isolation, the primitive conditions, and the thought of another freezing winter led them to move to the Greek island of Lesbos. Early in 1989 he returned to Australia. — J.T., Sydney, 1992 |
Jacket 1 — October 1997
Contents page This material is copyright © Roseanne Bonney
and Jacket magazine 1997 |