How my brave and brilliant sister rocked Australia to its core

In Sisters, the writer Drusilla Modjeska remarks that female siblings may define each other “against the definition made of herself in a complex dance of inclusion and exclusion”. Our triad often meant one of us was excluded, and who more likely than me, the grizzling baby sister?

There were six years between Dod and I, so she saw me as no competition. I don’t believe we ever argued as kids, although maybe we should have, because over the years some things were not said that should have been.

Growing up, I was intensely in awe of Dod: her talent, her remote big-sister status, the closed bedroom door behind which she created the stories I wasn’t allowed to read. She was in charge of all my adventures as a small child, and I either went along with them or was left out. She was brave and creative while I was plodding, intensely competitive and conscientious. I was on edge, fearful, full of doubt about how to be someone who mattered – so I looked to Dod.

Dorothy Porter in her captain’s hat in 1963.

For both Mary and me, Dod was our champion. Like her own hero, Emily Brontë, who was nicknamed “The Major” by her family, Dod seemed brave and fearless, especially when protecting the people and animals she loved from being hurt. When she was 11, she wore a naval captain’s hat almost constantly, her two plaits hanging down her back, assuming a military air of authority and leadership: our very own Major.

Many years later, when Dod would visit us in Sydney from her home in Melbourne, she would always spend a few days with each of us. I had begun training in psychotherapy, and had finally started to allow my curious, inquisitive self – as well as my professional life – some oxygen to breathe.

… Take/the terrifying medicine/and vomit yourself/free (from The Stars in Other Worlds.)

This new path generated a shift in my relationship with my big sister. In the evening over a glass of wine, Dod and I would analyse whatever was happening in the family. Dod could now watch us all from the safety of Melbourne, and she enjoyed giving commentary and advice. She also loved to talk at length about her friends’ love lives, luxuriating in the gossip and minutiae, and being sincerely interested in my conclusions. Then she wanted my assessment: What the f--- was going on with our father, Chester?

From left, Dorothy Porter with her sisters Mary and Josie in a family photo from Gutsy Girls.

How could I begin to answer that? At one lunch, when Chester was particularly rude and monosyllabic, Dod concluded that he was a “profoundly deficient man when the charm is turned off”, and she feared she was not much better.

At a family barbecue, Chester bought champagne and invited us all to toast his legal success – he had managed “to have his priest with the wandering hands” acquitted.

As Dod wrote in The Monkey’s Mask, “Family barbecues/hit the nerve/like a drunk dentist” (Family barbecues).

Dorothy Porter on her first day of school in 1959.

On her many visits, my children grew to adore their Auntie Doddy. She was eccentrically entertaining, and we forgave her for her non-stop commentary through every television program. Dod’s lack of practical skill in household tasks became part of our family lore. She would ask for help with everything: locking the door, washing up, looking in the cupboard, turning on the computer. When Dod broke the coffee plunger and panicked, my daughter, Emily, who had just started school, cleaned up the glass. When Dod said to my son, Alex, that she “couldn’t find the ice cream anywhere”, he answered somewhat bewildered, “But Auntie Doddy, you’re looking in the fridge, not the freezer.”

I rang Jean to complain. “Mum. Do something. She’s driving me crazy.”

Jean’s answer was always the same. “I did my best, but there was only so much I could do,” implying the raw material did not lend itself to moulding.

From main: Dorothy Porter with her sisters, Mary and Josie, in the Blue Mountains in 1964; Josie has now written Gutsy Girls in tribute to her big sister.

But there was good news: her detective novel in verse, The Monkey’s Mask, had at last found a publisher who saw how original and groundbreaking it was. Her career would be launched in a spectacular way over the next two years: my big sister would become a public literary figure.

Dod said many years later: “The Monkey’s Mask – the book for which I couldn’t even find a publisher – suddenly becomes a film, a play, and the BBC has just done a radio dramatisation of it in London. I admit at times I have deliberately done things to make money. But The Monkey’s Mask I wrote for the sheer hell of it and that is God’s truth – to create one great shitstorm and rock the literary scene to its core.”

The novel’s formula is brilliant. A decomposing body turns up in the first few pages, with a tough, gritty, school-dropout private investigator on the case – who almost becomes fatally compromised before the grim mystery is solved. Dod described her anti-hero as an “incompetent private detective and lesbian mug”. Jill’s ongoing appeal is to audiences and readers who have also been “arses-in-love”. In other words, we can all relate.

In her perhaps most well-loved poem, Dod speaks for all our crushing insecurities: In love I’ve got no style/my heart is decked out/in bright pink tracksuit pants/it weaves its huge bummed way/through the tables to Diana/she’s reading something/with very fine print/she doesn’t need her glasses/to see me. (Style from The Monkey’s Mask.)

The Monkey’s Mask became one of the fastest-selling works of poetry ever published in Australia, and it has remained constantly in print. The accolades flowed in almost immediately. Dod was interviewed far and wide, telling one interviewer that she wasn’t a poet who would be happy with a “rather neurotic, moth-eaten little clique, who read my work and pick their pimples”. She wanted to be mainstream and that meant selling books. At last, she was not in the remainder bin of the bookshop or squashed between dusty books on breastfeeding and macramé. She was down the front, with posters in the window and multiple copies on display.

Dorothy Porter in the 2000s: “She simply revelled in being outrageous in her work, and I loved her for it,” writes her sister, Josie McSkimming.

She told another journalist that “poetry can be low or high; it can be about a vision of God or setting a fart on fire”. She simply revelled in being outrageous in her work, and I loved her for it.

My sister’s poetry changed my life. In her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson declares that poetry is not a plaything of the middle class, nor irrelevant to our daily lives: “It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.” As Dod developed her craft and power over the years, she created finding places for many others – especially me.

This is an edited extract from Gutsy Girls: Love, poetry and sisterhood by Josie McSkimming, published on February 4 (UQP).