Dorothy Porter 1954-2008
She died. Dorothy Porter did not pass away, she died. Dorothy Porter was too passionately in love with life and language to “pass away”. Nothing as mealy-mouthed or wishy-washy would have done for her. She died. Too young and already much missed.
It happened in Melbourne on Monday, 10 December through complications arising from breast cancer. She was 54.
Porter was Australia’s first star poet-performer. She was a charismatic stage presence whether as a speaker at conferences and literary festivals, or as a reader of poetry – her own and others.
She graduated from the University of Sydney in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English and history. Some thought she might follow her father Chester Porter QC to one form of performance theatre, but the woman who is most often described with words such as “feisty”, “independent” and “formidable” went her own way. She published poetry and first made people sit up with Driving Too Fast (1989).
After her novel Akhenaten intrigued readers (a verse novel about an Egyptian pharaoh?) she hit the poet’s jackpot (money and notoriety) with The Monkey's Mask. Not only was it a crime thriller in verse, but also its chief protagonist was a lesbian detective. It was also very good and won the Age Poetry Book of the Year in the year of its publication, 1994.
The Monkey’s Mask also won the Banjo – the National Book Council’s Turnbull Fox Phillips Poetry Prize – in 1995 and was short listed for other literary awards. It was published in the United States, Canada, Britain and Germany; and filmed in 2000 with Susie Porter and Kelly McGillis, directed by Samantha Lang.
In an interview last year she said, “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.”
Further explaining her motivation for writing The Monkey’s Mask in a paper delivered at the Tasmanian Readers’ and Writers' Festival in 1999, Porter had said“… far too much Australian poetry is a dramatic cure for insomnia.”
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Her humour and persistence paid off over the years. Two of her verse novels were shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award: What a Piece of Work in 2000 and Wild Surmise in 2003. She experimented and sought out new ways of expression: she collaborated with composer Jonathan Mills in writing the libretto for The Eternity Man, staged at the Sydney Festival in 2005.
Porter’s fifth verse novel, El Dor-ado, was published last year and shortlisted for the Dinny O'Hearn Poetry Prize (Age Book of the Year Award), the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, the Prime Minister's Literary Award for fiction and Best Fiction in the Ned Kelly Awards.
In 2001, she delivered the Judith Wright Memorial Lecture at the Australian Poetry Festival in Balmain Town Hall. She was speaking of Wright but could have been describing her own approach to poetry and language when she said:
“Lucid. What a lovely word. A word that forms a firm shape with the tongue right behind it – but feels full of light and expansion even as one speaks it – or writes it. Its meaning is multifarious – shining, bright, clear, transparent, rational, sane, leading to perception and understanding. For me it is also means a kind of carefully, even lovingly, chosen language where the light shines through – and in. An illumination
“Lucidity does not mean the reams of docile looking-out-the-window poetry that seems to be a staple of the Australian poetry diet. The ‘I am a poet and I will write a poem today’ school. Lucidity can write with a tongue of fire. Often it’s a sense of urgency, a sense of dire times that can make a poem searingly lucid.”
Dorothy Porter was a force for colour, passion, daring and love of life, friends and her work. She brought excitement and laughter into a room and was not interested in the mundane or merely polite. At the time of her death she was at work on another libretto with composer Tim Finn and had much, much more to give and explore in the world, which she enjoyed and shared with her partner of many years, Andrea Goldsmith.
