A couple of years ago a friend asked me to select a poem to read at her wedding. She was marrying her beloved girlfriend and there was no way I was going to sully the occasion with a hetero standard. I reached for Dorothy Porter’s Love Poems (2010), a posthumous collection of her most lustful and obsessive love poetry. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for (the song lyric Taking You On) but then I couldn’t resist reading the whole delicious book.
As the late poet’s sister Josie McSkimming aptly puts it, Porter was that “unicorn” in Australian literature — a successful poet. On any random page of a Porter poetry collection or verse novel the reader is bound to find a potent sentence or stanza that leaps right out at them. One of the pleasures of reading McSkimming’s genre-straddling new memoir-biography Gutsy Girls: Love, Poetry and Sisterhood is revisiting the dazzling brilliance of Porter’s poetry weaved through a distinctly sisterly account of her tragically abbreviated life. Porter died of cancer in 2008, aged fifty-four, at the height of her powers.
McSkimming was — is — Porter’s youngest sister in a trio that also includes Mary. As the eldest, Dorothy — or “Dod” or “Doddle” as her sisters called her — dispatched the nicknames and shaped their peculiar sibling vernacular. To Dod, Josie was forever “Brattle,” Mary “Mordie.” As children growing up in a weatherboard house on a bush block in 1960s Mona Vale on Sydney’s northern beaches, the sisters were routinely left in the dubious care of various neglectful “overpaid housekeepers” while their parents went birdwatching. Dod labelled these women “Goodistoom,” a malleable term, roughly equivalent to what younger people call “randoms,” that endures in the wider family’s lexicon.
The title of Gutsy Girls is fittingly a nod to Porter’s lyric “Gutsy Girl,” part of a musical collaboration with musician Tim Finn. McSkimming celebrates Porter’s “heartbreaking bravado” while recognising herself and their childhoods in the words. Dod, Mordie and Brattle, the gutsy girls, grew up captive to their father’s unpredictable moods and under the looming threat of his rages. Chester Porter was a prominent barrister, a “well-known, highly regarded public figure” whose “personal demons emerged and erupted in his private life.” The “radars” of his daughters and loving wife Jean, “became finely tuned to any change in tone or voice that signalled an imminent explosion.” The girls learnt early what “a child from a violent household learns” — that “what is said at home, stays at home.” Such passages will surely, sadly, have wider resonance.
From other angles, their early years were blessed, as Porter acknowledged in interviews when she expressed gratitude for “lively eccentric parents” who allowed her to be “an odd kid” during “a numbingly conformist time in Australia.” The antithesis of today’s ubiquitous “helicopter parents,” Chester and Jean provided a home full of animals and books and nurtured in their children a love of the natural world. Under these conditions, Porter’s creativity blossomed, starting with her first “book” My Poket Book of Prayer, “replete with idiosyncratic Dod-prayers,” which she presented to her mother when she was about six years old.
Throughout, McSkimming charts and honours Porter’s free-range imagination, which was matched by an ever-flowing creative output (apparently Porter could compose verses while “half-watching” the cricket). The chapter titles are taken from, and mark, Porter’s developing oeuvre, including her first “proper novel” Me and The Beatles, written when she was ten. “Not a vanilla tale,” the band members were depicted as “sadomasochistic pigs” and Porter apparently enthralled her school mates by reading chapters aloud.
Delightful details shared by McSkimming include the fact that the twenty-one-year-old Porter revelled in her “new celebrity status as the poet who became a bus-conductress” (as she appeared on the cover) after her first book Little Hoodlums was published in 1975. Later, when her breakthrough verse novel The Monkey’s Mask (1994) became a major sensation, spawning film and theatre adaptations, Porter embraced her reputation as a “sex-crazed” poet.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given that those were the years when the lives of the sisters were closely entangled, the most vivid chapters in Gutsy Girls are the early ones. From the vantage point of a pint-sized little sister, McSkimming charmingly evokes what it was like to have a “wildly talented big sister” who was also her protector. The seeds of her own struggle to find her own place, first in her family and then in the world, are also planted, setting up the dynamic for the second half of the book in which the sisters go in sharply different directions without ever severing their ties. McSkimming becomes and remains for many years an evangelical Christian. Mary marries an abusive man and for a long stretch becomes co-dependently yoked to her parents. Porter comes out as a lesbian, vacillating between deep commitment and wild abandon in her romantic relationships.
McSkimming, a psychotherapist, is well aware of how childhood shapes us. This knowledge infuses her story-telling while also, at times, constraining or compromising it. Here and there, I wondered whether the reader needed to know, for instance, about Porter’s life-long fear of public toilets. Therapists can be better at observing or narrating others — as McSkimming is of Porter — than exploring their own situation. McSkimming’s story is woven in with Porter’s, but more elusively, coming alive in flashes rather than sustained focus. When words seem to elude her, she turns to other writers for a quotation, and some of the choices (C.S. Lewis, Rebecca Solnit) are predictable ones.
Where Gutsy Girls most succeeds is an intimate and tender tribute to Porter, offering insights and context that can’t be found elsewhere. McSkimming had access to Porter’s archive and inner circle, but this is no conventional literary biography. Reading Gutsy Girls is to be reminded how rare and special it is to have sibling relationships at the core of literature and life stories. As the eldest of three sisters, and as a huge fan of Dorothy Porter, I was left in a puddle of tears — then went straight to my bookshelf to re-read the poems with fresh appreciation. •
Gutsy Girls: Love, Poetry and Sisterhood
By Josie McSkimming | University of Queensland Press | $34.99 | 288 pages
