Josie McSkimming’s memoir Gutsy Girls is a unique perspective on her sister, poet Dorothy Porter
Australia lost a literary icon when poet Dorothy Porter died. Josie McSkimming lost a beloved sister. Dorothy had fought breast cancer since 2004 before she died of pneumonia in December 2008, aged 54.
Josie thought Dorothy would recover – right up until 24 hours before she died.
“I was totally bereft when she died,” Josie tells PL. “She was the one who really understood how precarious I felt in the family, and I felt like my protector and my confidante had gone. It was like a table where one of the legs had fallen off.”
Chester and Jean loved birdwatching
The three Porter sisters (eldest Dorothy, Mary and youngest Josie) grew up in an unassuming weatherboard cottage on Waterview Street in Mona Vale surrounded by a menagerie of animals – their father Chester (who was a well-known barrister) had only once refused a pet request, when it was for a donkey.
Dorothy’s first day at school 1959
Chester and their mother Jean had bought three blocks of land in the early 1950s and lived in the cottage for 67 years. Below the cottage was a patch of rainforest which the sisters called the flats/ mangroves and spent hours as children exploring the waters of Winnererremy Bay.
Josie was bereft when Dorothy died
“There was an extraordinary amount of wildlife,” recalls Josie. “It was wonderful to have so much space, but Mona Vale was very far flung. There wasn’t a supermarket or a clothes shop; we had to do our shopping at Warringah Mall. I think Waratah Court opened when I was a kid and that was considered very stylish.”
The sisters grew up at the mercy of their moody father, and were fine-tuned to the tone of his voice and could predict an oncoming rage. Even his beloved cocker spaniels weren’t safe from his angry outbursts.
“Chester had a savage temper and that was enacted upon the dogs as much as it was upon us,” recalls Josie. “The dogs and the children were vulnerable members of the household. He didn’t grow up in a loving house and I don’t think he experienced tender-hearted love until he met my mother. He showed love by giving us money.”
The girls attended Queenwood school in Mosman – quite a trek from Mona Vale. Chester dropped them off on his way to work when they couldn’t face the long bus ride and Jean took them when she began teaching science at Queenwood.
“Queenwood was a very different in the 1970s,” says Josie. “It wasn’t flash or the most expensive (school). It didn’t have a library, or a playground and we used to have to walk down and swim in the baths at Balmoral. Now it’s beautiful and has lovely facilities.”
Dorothy thrived at Queenwood, with a progressive headmistress Violet Maude Medway at the helm, and her creativity flourished.
“Dorothy learned in her teens that the passion of love and relationships could fuel the most potent work,” says Josie, explaining that ‘she looked for passionate, wild and erotic experiences’ to inspire her writing.
Dorothy forged a path as a successful poet, winning awards such as The Age Book of the Year and a National Book Council Award for her verse novel The Monkey’s Mask, and Josie turned to the church for a sense of purpose. She then went on to become a clinical social worker and psychotherapist. Although on different paths, the sisters remained close.
Chester and Jean loved birdwatching which the girls found tedious until adulthood.
Josie says Dorothy found birds spiritual and said she was going to come back as a cockatoo and ‘shriek above everybody’s head.’
Josie McSkimming
It was an encounter with a kookaburra that resulted in Gutsy Girls. “I distinctly heard the kookaburra say to me in the voice of my sister, ‘Write my story,’” says Josie, who now lives in Coogee. “When writing the book, I was always looking for more kookaburras and more messages from my sister just to fortify me because writing it was difficult. But I think it changed me in that I felt as though I could understand myself, Dorothy and the family better.”
Gutsy Girls: Love, Poetry and Sisterhood was published by University
of Queensland Press in February.
