Dorothy Porter and Josie McSkimming. Image: UQP / Josie McSkimming.
‘To speak the name of the dead / is to make them live again.’ This ancient Egyptian wisdom is quoted in Dorothy’s Porter’s first published verse novel Akhenaten (1992). Josie McSkimming, the Australian poet’s youngest sister, begins Gutsy Girls, her memoir about her famous sibling, with this epithet and proceeds to bring her sister back to vivid life by invoking her many names.
Porter was a blazing Australian literary figure who brought poetry into the mainstream with groundbreaking verse novels like the bestselling lesbian detective thriller The Monkey’s Mask (1994), later made into a feature film, and What a Piece of Work (1999) and Wild Surmise (2002), both of which were shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Her prolific output included children’s books, essays, performances and librettos.
Drawing on a deep knowledge of the classics and favouring grand themes like death and sex, Porter’s work was defiantly populist: colloquial, sensual and playful. She did, after all, give us the lyrics to the song ‘Ballarat’ (written with Tim Finn), celebrating her first night of passion with her longtime partner and fellow writer Andrea Goldsmith: ‘Will Ballarat ever be the same? / Will our first time / Be its claim to fame?’
Gutsy Girls is a complex, loving and sometimes reverent portrait.
McSkimming’s memoir is cleverly structured with each chapter corresponding to the time of one of Porter’s works, which luckily stretch back to unpublished juvenilia and forwards to posthumously published collections like The Bee Hut (2009). Drawing on unprecedented access to Porter’s diaries and letters, as well as reminiscences from those who knew her intimately, the book is also generously interspersed with Porter’s potent verses.
But the memories and perspective here are necessarily Josie’s. Her earnest, self-aware voice dominates this account of the two sisters (and to a lesser extent, their third) jostling for position and moving in and out of each other’s orbits as decades pass and value systems clash.
The story begins with three little girls: Dod, the protective eldest; Mary, the middle one; and baby Josie (‘Brat’ or ‘Brattle’). They grow up in ramshackle middle-class comfort in Sydney’s ‘undesirable’ northern beaches suburb of Mona Vale. The family has pets galore and a holiday shack in the Blue Mountains. There’s bushwalking, birdwatching (a recurrent motif and lifelong passion) and close family friends who are almost like cousins.
The father is prominent Sydney barrister Chester Porter and the loving mother, Jean, is a science teacher. Six years younger than Dorothy, Josie feels the constant sting of being the little one, left out and unrecognised, though later she wonders if perhaps they all felt displaced in a family where the father’s dark and threatening moods created a ‘walking on eggshells’ atmosphere.
While not a case of overt domestic violence, this portrayal will resonate with anyone who’s grown up in an emotionally abusive household, ‘where we quaked with fear when he lost his temper’ and ‘the price of peace was an advanced level of skill in de-escalation and retreat’—and never a word of apology or acknowledgement after the storm passed. These damaging dynamics shaped the sisters, fuelling Porter’s creative fire and feminist rebellion, as well as driving McSkimming’s internal conflict as she became more and more involved with an evangelical Christianity adopted during early teen years at a school camp.
The memories and perspective here are necessarily Josie’s.
McSkimming is now an accomplished social worker, activist and psychotherapist. She’s clearly been engaged in the deep and difficult therapeutic work of breaking free from the ‘magical thinking’ religious dogmas that ruled most of her life and put her at odds with her sister’s ‘worldly’ paganism and lesbian relationships.
McSkimming writes that while she was in thrall to religion her greatest fear was ‘of hell and loss of [her] salvation’, and she now laments the time she lost to ‘such a hideous damaging lie’. The bitterness around the fundamentalist ideology is still evident. Sometimes the clichéd language of hardcore Christianity persists alongside distancing ‘therapy speak’. I would have liked more concrete details about this core aspect of the author’s spiritual experience, but perhaps it remains too raw.
What shines through, however, is the strength of the sisterly bond across a chasm of diverging beliefs. We see their tolerance for each other’s drama, their shared humour and love of poetry. They offer each other ongoing mutual support, especially around the ageing of their difficult father and then Porter’s four-year battle with cancer. The poet herself emerges as a fascinating and contradictory character, seemingly fearless yet so scared of death that according to McSkimming she wouldn’t speak of it even at the end. Her destructive patterns are well-explored in the book, yet as McSkimming demonstrates, watching those we care about do the wrong thing, again and again, to everyone’s great cost, is a part of love’s patient work.
Gutsy Girls offers a moving and unique insight into a remarkable artist. For those seeking an intimate look at the intersections of family, art and identity, it’s a rewarding read.
Gusty Girls is our Debut Spotlight book for February.
Debut Spotlight is a paid partnership with Australian publishers designed to promote the critical discussion of new authors’ work to a wide audience. Titles are selected by KYD, and all reviews have editorial independence.
