Twin peaks: A sister pays homage to a great poet’s life cut short
The late poet Dorothy Porter was brilliant, enigmatic and much loved – as a memoir by her sister makes abundantly clear.
When the iconoclastic and brilliant Melbourne poet and writer Dorothy Porter died from breast cancer at the age of 54 in 2008, Australian literature lost one of its finest contemporary voices.
But psychotherapist and writer Josie McSkimming lost something even more personal and precious – her much-adored older sister, lifelong friend and confidante.
In her heartfelt and resonant memoir, Gutsy Girls: Love, Poetry and Sisterhood, McSkimming interweaves the story of Porter’s life and career with her own, intertwining their experiences growing up in a loving but fraught household, emerging from childhood into adulthood and forging their own lives while living with the legacy of their emotionally difficult past.
Across 280 clear-eyed, beautifully articulated pages, theirs are twin narratives, as much intertwined as they are distinctly separate and as individual as they are inescapably interwoven.
Bound by blood and childhood experience, the two sisters lived lives that were at once the same and yet incredibly different.
Josie was – is – Porter’s youngest sister in a trio of girls that also includes Mary. Dorothy – or “Dod” or “Doddle”, as both her sisters called her – christened Josie “Brat” or “Brattle” and Mary was forever known as “Mordie”.
The three girls were raised in a small house in Mona Vale, on Sydney’s northern beaches, by their parents – high school science teacher Jean and successful barrister Chester – surrounded by books and animals.
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the fragile family dynamic was dictated by Chester’s emotional instability and his volatile mood swings
Though their parents loved them, the fragile family dynamic was dictated by Chester’s emotional instability and his volatile mood swings. Jean and her daughters lived their lives held hostage by his emotional unpredictability, walking on eggshells and forever preparing themselves to deal with one of his “rages”.
All three sisters, McSkimming writes tellingly, “became finely tuned to any change in tone or voice that signaled an imminent explosion”.
For much of her childhood, McSkimming was belittled by her overbearing, unpredictable father and consequently quite afraid of him.
Reliant on the physical presence and emotional support of his wife, Chester would often rage at his young daughters, putting the perspicacious Dorothy in the position, as the eldest, of having to defend her younger sisters from his verbal assaults and physical attacks.
Chester’s extreme emotional volatility persisted until his death at the age of 95 and profoundly shaped his life-long troubled relationships with Dorothy, Mary and Josie. As a teenager, Dorothy began to find respite from her often-difficult home life in the world of words and language, eventually completing her high school studies then going on to study arts at Sydney University.
When Dorothy left home for uni, Josie remembers herself as being utterly in thrall to her older sister. Dorothy resurrected the student poetry society and began publishing her first poems in the Sydney University student newspaper, Honi Soit. Josie would clip these poems from the publication to collect in a scrapbook. She was in perpetual awe of her “wildly talented big sister” and “eternal protector”.
As Josie grew up she found respite from the difficulties of home in organised religion, a prescriptive and domineering realm that would come to dictate and characterise the confines of her life for many years to come. As a high school student she falls in with a group of conservative Christian fundamentalists, a church collective whose ways become her own.
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Writing with the benefit of hindsight after leaving the fundamentalist church, McSkimming recognises with painful clarity how, for many years, her religious fervour, zeal and conservatism negatively affected her relationship with Dorothy, particularly where Dod’s lesbian sexuality was concerned.
Dorothy felt judged and unaccepted by her little sister, a misconception that Josie set right in a long overdue conversation the pair shared before Dorothy’s death.
‘locked in my prison of ideological compliance, my transgressive big sister cracked the door open for me to see everything differently’
Indeed, McSkimming writes open-heartedly and non-judgmentally about her sister’s romantic relationships. She describes, with particular beauty, the profound connection Dorothy shared with her long-time partner and wife, novelist and writer Andrea Goldsmith.
In exploring and explicating Dorothy’s bold, fearless, adventurous life as both a queer woman and a poet, McSkimming paints an engaging and vivid portrait. While Dorothy’s fascination with pagan cultures and beliefs were alien to her own life within the Christian church, she was nonetheless deeply intrigued and even impressed by them.
McSkimming writes about Dorothy’s interest in Egyptian mythology and spirituality, as well as her dedication to warmly reading runes, respecting what she sometimes admittedly struggled to understand, noting that “while I was locked in my prison of ideological compliance, my transgressive big sister cracked the door open for me to see everything differently”.
The contrast between Dod’s interest in ancient cultures and pagan spirituality and Josie’s Christian zealotry is handled with honesty and delicacy, coming as it does in a time of post-zealotry, from a woman now living a life that is no longer prescribed by “the greatest fear of hell and the loss of my own salvation”.
At its heart, Gutsy Girls is an aching paean to the passionate, expansive life of a sister and an unpacking of the childhood the two sisters shared. It’s an unravelling of the life lived by an older sister, as seen and told from the unique perspective of a younger sibling.
Though Josie and Dorothy were long separated by the vast chasm of their spiritual beliefs, they were always united by blood ties, shared experiences and familial bonds.
One suspects that McSkimming would find comfort in novelist Toni Morrison’s observation that: “A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves – the most special kind of double, even where inconsistency and difference abounds.”
Gutsy Girls: Love, Poetry and Sisterhood by Josie McSkimming. University of Queensland Press. $34.99. Josie McSkimming will be in conversation with Carody Culver at Avid Reader on March 24, from 6pm.