Your basket is empty.
Published April 2009
Become a subscriber
I’m watching a kookaburra with a small snake dangling from its mouth fly into a gum tree. The snake is no more than twenty centimetres long and as thin as a bootlace. The kookaburra has the snake’s tiny head pincered in its beak. The snake keeps kinking its body, trying to wriggle free. It looks like an ebony swizzle stick against the sky’s cocktail blue. When the bird finally flies off with the snake still uneaten, trailing from its mouth, I continue on my walk. It is December 31st, the last day of 2008, exactly three weeks after the death of Dorothy Porter. The scene has just reminded me of the song ‘If Snakes Could Fly’ which Dot wrote for Paul Grabowsky and Katie Noonan and which they performed at her memorial event at the Sydney Opera House. From the lyrics come these words:
If snakes could fly
I would hoola hoop
across a bright
and burning sky
if snakes could fly
I could with free
and generous heart
say an absolute and final
goodbye.1
There is certainly a bright and burning sky, a snake has flown, and I am here saying, not a final goodbye, but one of many that I will say to my dear friend, Dot. Today is the last day of her terminal year. Tomorrow, when 2009 arrives, it will be the first year for fifty-four years that will be without the physical presence of Dorothy Porter. This day marks a turning point and Dot would have known why I have chosen this day to come here. She would definitely have got the numbers, even though in one of her recent poems, she says: ‘I get magic…/ but I don’t get/ numbers.’2
As I’m walking down Paradise Avenue, the air is pulsing with cicadas. The noise is like an auditory pins and needles, but the screeching pitch doesn’t stop me from remembering and re-experiencing the ravishing beauty of this place. Paradise Avenue is the only access to a small run of sand, a little wharf and a netted baths known as Paradise Beach. It faces the sparkling channel of Pittwater and looks across to Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. Where the sand meets the embankment, I notice there are more racks of rowboats, and in the channel a great many more yachts and pleasure craft than there were twenty-three years ago. What has not changed is the little concrete pier that runs along the left side of the baths. When the tide is high, as it is now, the water laps and spills over the sides, just enough to wet the bottoms of one’s shoes. But I remember it mostly at low tide. Where it juts over the water, the concrete has broken and falls away to make a little, rocky step. It is hard to believe this place is almost exactly as Dot and I said goodbye to it in March 1986 after having spent so many evenings here during the summer. It became a ritual that we would walk down to the pier from our place in Trappers Way, bring two plastic wine glasses, a sachet of cheap white wine and a packet of peanuts. We’d sit on the end of the pier, drink, munch and talk. We adored the place and our time here cemented our friendship so that we became each other’s closest friend for another twenty-three years.
On our last evening, Dot placed a special stone that she imbued with blessings under one of the rocks at the end of the pier. It was to mark our exquisite time here and our friendship, and to wish for happy times ahead for each of us. Now, I stand on the edge with a small piece of sandstone in my hand, and I offer blessings and a goodbye, not to this place, but to Dot. With tears falling from my eyes, I toss the stone into the water.
Although we only spent four months together at Trappers Way, it was one of the most enjoyable and memorable times of my life. Before I moved in, Dot had been living in the house for a couple of months with Tiddy, a former partner, with whom she retained an extremely close friendship. Dot had recently left her boyfriend, Steve, with whom she had lived for a number of years in Bondi, because she had fallen madly in love with Lyn Hughes who had been one of her writing students from a community Arts Centre class. Lyn at the time was married and had two pre-adolescent children. My boyfriend of seven years, Chris, had left me a couple of months earlier and I was still feeling broken-hearted. Both Dot and I were in fretful emotional states during those few months at Trappers Way, but we were able to provide support and love for one another which became the touchstones of our friendship.
In October of 1985 when Tiddy moved out, Dot asked me if I would like to share the place with her. I jumped at the chance, and in November 1985 my brother drove a small amount of my furniture and myself in a truck all the way up to the backend of Avalon, up to Trappers Way, which has an extremely oblique and narrow access. This part of Avalon is over three kilometres from Barrenjoey Road where all the shops and transport are situated. It is isolated, but unbelievably beautiful. In 1985 I felt I had entered paradise.
Our house was almost at the top of Trappers Way. To walk to it from the shops or bus stop at Avalon took forty-five minutes. I did this regularly because I did not have a car. Dot had an old bottlegreen Beetle which had no reverse gear. Fortunately, at the top of Trappers Way there is a small turning circle around two tall gum trees which Dot would manoeuvre her car (‘Piggy’) around.
The house was a split-level affair with a big living room on the top level, two bedrooms on the lower and a third on the mezzanine level which Dot’s sister, Mary, used as her room when she moved in about a month later. The place was ridiculously cheap, probably because of its isolated location. Four months later, when I moved into a bed-sitter in Annandale, I found the seventy dollars per week stiffly expensive by comparison. The only furniture we had in the house, apart from our beds and desks, were some director’s chairs, a TV and a dining table. But the views towards Pittwater were magical.
At the time, Dot was only working a few hours on a Monday teaching writing at Long Bay Gaol. As it was summer, all her other teaching commitments had finished. I had quit my job a few weeks earlier to concentrate more solidly on finishing my first book of poems. In November of 1985 I had just been awarded a small writing grant for 1986, so I was living off my savings until the money came through.
In those early years money was always tight. Like many of us, Dot had made the decision not to work full-time, but to try and eke out a living mainly from seasonal teaching. When we first became friends in 1980, she was teaching writing in community colleges and also at East Sydney Technical College, as it was then known. During the particularly lean summer months, Dot always refused to go on the dole, and she refused any financial support from her father, who was in a fine position to help, should she have asked. I was working three days a week in an office, trying also to support my writing. I remember once discussing money with Dot and I was horrified when she told me that she always set aside twenty dollars a week for entertainment. My boyfriend Chris and I thought that this was extremely extravagant as we probably only spent about five dollars. What tight-wadded puritans we were! Dot always loved movies, music, books, the pleasures of popular culture, but at Trappers Way I only ever knew her to cook one dish – ‘The Dod Special’. (Dod was her family nickname). It consisted of a tub of tomato paste, a can of undrained mussels, pasta shells and a can of corn all simmered together. Dot loved this and was rather dismissive of my attempts to get her to eat a more balanced diet. I don’t think it ever occurred to her to cook lentils, or tofu, or chickpeas, and whenever I did at Trappers Way, they just never appealed to her. We had both been vegetarians for some time, but Dot was simply too uninterested in the effort it might take to prepare a proper vegetarian meal. I would often wonder where she got her intense, physical energy from – certainly not from her diet. Dot’s zest and gusto were one of her most distinguishing features, though her perkiness would tend to peter out by about nine in the evening. Dot’s culinary and domestic skills were always a source of amusement to her family and friends. Recently, her mother related how she had asked Dot to mash the potatoes, which she did dutifully, water and all!
It wasn’t until the great success of The Monkey’s Mask in 1994 that Dot ever made any money out of poetry. For years she lived on a financial knife-edge. She did not receive a grant from the Literature Board until 1994. She was on her own, unsupported by the public purse for nearly twenty years. Dot was very proud of the fact that since 1996 she had been able to support herself through her writing. For a poet, this was an extraordinary achievement. Dot never said no to an opportunity or a challenge. She was able to work with some amazing artists and creators, who all admired her professionalism, her honesty and her capacity for hard work and her extraordinary abilities.
Dot was always the consummate professional and her public performances were unfailingly polished, poignant and memorable. She despised sloppy, disorganised poets who went over their allocated time at readings, or poets who disrespected the audience by reading bad, self-indulgent poems. She was often very critical about the poetry scene, which she accused of being run by ‘conservative males’, and she did not take well to criticism, often holding grudges. Despite the self-confidence that she exuded, she also had a very fragile side, vulnerable to the pain of exclusion and rejection. Some of the remarks she made over the years about Australian poetry, especially to her students, did get my back up because I felt she disparaged a lot of people unjustifiably and out of self-defensiveness. A lot of the poets she bad-mouthed she had hardly even read. Poets she lauded were often those who liked her own poetry.
I think Dot often felt a little alone in her efforts at trying to break new ground for poetry. She believed that poets should be at the forefront of the public imagination, that poetry should achieve the edginess and frisson of the best rock music or film. So much of her work was aimed at trying to win a larger audience for poetry. She certainly achieved this with The Monkey’s Mask and the level of love, affection and regard that the reading public had for her was extra-ordinary.
The Monkey’s Mask gave her the confidence to set herself vastly ambitious projects and pull them off. She often said she got ‘her lucky break’ in meeting Andrew Wilkins from Hyland House, whose genius was to see the great marketing potential for a lesbian detective thriller in verse. Dot really believed that she could change the allegiances of the reading public and turn them forever on to poetry. She was dis-appointed that her subsequent verse novels, What A Piece of Work, Wild Surmise, and El Dorado – though much superior in the quality of their poetry and narrative structure – didn’t quite achieve the success of The Monkey’s Mask.
Many people have marvelled over the years about our unlikely friendship. It’s true that our personalities were vastly different. I sometimes wondered myself why Dot seemed to value my company so much. I could never give her what her vitality and inexhaustible imagination and intellect gave me. She was the funniest person I have ever known, not only for her penetrating and searing wit, but for her sheer exuberance and comic irreverence that could be both irritating and enchantingly winning. Part of what we found was perhaps a storm proof mesh which sealed and fortified us. Her restless, kinetic spirit found some grounding in my more quiescent nature. My slow, tread-water tarrying found lift and passage in her onrushing spirit. Yet, we both knew that implicit in our friendship was a confluence of values; we were friends because on an essential level there was a strong similitude, especially in our love of nature, birds and animals, and our devotion to the art of poetry. I knew there was a large part of me in her, and she knew that much of her chimed within me. It gave us pleasure to know that our natures were more partaking of each other’s than people might assume.
Although we had poetry in common, anyone who knows our work would know we are totally different kinds of writers. We used to laugh at the fact that when Dot wrote she would have earplugs streaming rock music into her ears, while whenever I wrote, I would wear industrial strength earmuffs to block out any sound at all. My room at Trappers Way was monkish, uncluttered; hers was a jumble of papers, books, pens, posters, ornaments, talismans. This was partly a reflection of our personalities, but also because I had only moved the barest essentials up to Trappers Way. What we did share, however, was a total commitment to poetry. There was never any doubt about what we both wanted to do with our lives, and that was to become the best poets we could possibly be. By the time I moved in, Dot had already published three volumes and was working on her fourth, Driving Too Fast.
During the course of our friendship we always showed each other poems that we were working on, though not obsessively. One of the best things about our friendship was that although we deeply respected each others’ work, we knew not to impose too much and become too dependent and demanding. However, we could always be certain that we would be totally honest with each other and say exactly how we felt about a poem, or a book. We loved to talk about the poets we admired and to introduce each other to poets the other may not have read. It was Dot who first introduced me to Cavafy, Emily Dickinson, Ovid, Lorca, Akhmatova and many others. I insisted she read Wallace Stevens, James Wright, Philip Levine, Cesar Vallejo, Charles Wright, Adam Zagajewsky. We did not always share the same poetic tastes, but were always interested in what the other was reading.
My first exposure to Dorothy Porter was through the literary magazines of the mid – to late – 70s, principally New Poetry edited by Robert Adamson. I first saw her at a poetry event held in 1976 at the Seymour Centre in Sydney. Dot shared the stage with two very respected poets, A. D. Hope and Robert Creeley, and held her own with great confidence and aplomb. She was only twenty-one and her first book Little Hoodlum had recently been published. Most of it would have been written when she was a student at Sydney University. I didn’t read Little Hoodlum until the late 70s, and I have always strongly admired it. Along with Akhenaten, Driving Too Fast, Crete, and Wild Surmise it remains one of my favourites among all her works. From very early on Dot had the skills of language and the imagination to write extraordinary poems, but it was probably not until Driving Too Fast that she also showed she had the concomitant life experiences to anchor her work in what would become her characteristic earthy manifestations of sensual life.
What was always apparent at the outset, however, was her passion for what she did and for who she was. Dot was never, nor ever would be, a wallflower or a shrinking violet – instead she approached life with a kind of bravado and swagger that I could only envy. She knew she was a peculiar talent and she did everything she could to realise her potential. She was blessed with enlightened parents who sensed her eccentricity and prodigality early and never tried to change or curtail her. She was never forced to live her imaginative life in the closet, or close it down because it was unconventional, and thus she lived in her wild, breakaway head happily and without guilt. She believed utterly in words and their magic – words that if put in the right hands could enchant and possess. This confidence was illustrated to me very poignantly during our trip to Medellin, Colombia, in 1999 where we had been invited to read at the Ninth International Poetry Festival. As we were flying in to Medellin, the plane, just before it was about to hit the tarmac, veered quickly upwards and then circled the airport for another forty-five minutes before it attempted its landing. While we were circling, Dot was convinced that something was horribly wrong and that the plane was going to crash. I told her I was not so worried about that, but that I was more worried about being kidnapped by members of a drug cartel when we were on our way to the hotel. Dot turned, and said with absolute surety, ‘Look, Jude, you can always talk your way out of being kidnapped.’ If anyone could have done it, Dot certainly could have. What else is certain is that she would have also bargained for my freedom, not just her own. If Dot loved you, she loved you utterly. The presence of her in my life was a great source of solace and reassurance because I knew that whatever might be going wrong with it, Dot’s love, support and friendship were always unconditionally present.
I have never known anyone who loved relationships, and ‘relationship gossip’, as much as Dot did. She talked endlessly and repetitively about the various relationships she had had during her life. In one of her interviews she has said: ‘I am interested in the situation where people are thrown together, where our molecules bump up against each other, and what happens. This is the most interesting thing about being alive – our relationships with other people.’3 It is true to say that she was a ‘love junkie’ in as much as even relationships which had ended years before still held a fascination for her, and she would recap and rehash memories and instances time and again, year after year. Dot always tried to maintain close friendships with former lovers and was often very dis-appointed if these faded away. Partly, it was a need to cling to the past, to keep tenacious hold on what had been important. Dot was obsessive by nature. Her way of understanding and grasping her life was to repeat and ritualise. Whenever she’d come up from Melbourne to Sydney and we would arrange to spend the day together, she’d only ever want to do the one thing. Over and again the same routine. Not that I minded, in fact I very much enjoyed the routine as it imbued our time together with an intensity and privacy that was exclusively our own.
I would pick Dot up at the airport and we’d drive out to Watson’s Bay. Watson’s Bay is the southern headland of the entrance to Sydney Harbour and the views are exquisite. The promontory faces Port Jackson on its west, and the Pacific Ocean on its east. This side of the bluff is also known as The Gap, a notorious venue for suicides. After lunch and champagne we’d walk up the bluff, and after we’d watched the flash-lit, turquoise view for a while, we’d each throw a stone from the top of the cliff down into the waves washing the rocks at the base of the precipice. Of course there were words, special words, to accompany this act, and like our little ritual off the concrete pier at Paradise Beach, we’d make blessings ‘to the Goddess, to our friendship and to poetry.
Watson’s Bay, over the years, was where we spent countless hours talking about our lives, our loves, our hopes and troubles, about people we knew and about poetry. In fact, so much had it become emblematic of Dot’s and my friendship, that when last August I took some American friends to visit, I felt as though I’d breached some contract by being there without her. We came to think of it so very much as ‘our place’ and Dot would have been horrified to learn I had been there with other people watching the fizzing waves and admiring the view.
This obsession to repeat and take possession of her past and the present moment often plays out in her poetry: in the repeated lines, in the talismanic use of birds and landscapes and in many of the characters’ dark obsessions with one another. It also came out rather humorously in small, everyday tasks. If Dot left the house she would systematically check, not just once, but five or six times that she had locked the door, doing a little ritualistic count and a laying on of hands before she could satisfy herself that she had left the house in a secure state. She was a pagan through and through, drawing on the power of objects, on birds and animals to give her strength, love and good fortune. She believed very strongly that nature was a source of sacred power and she constantly tried to tap into that source. Her partner, Andy (the novelist Andrea Goldsmith), deeply respecting this, insisted on putting her religion as ‘Pagan’ on her death certificate, despite the fact that the man at the funeral parlour said this was not one of the listed categories and would be highly irregular. Andy said that this was even more reason for putting it in, after all it was Dot we were describing!
Now as I walk from the pier and back up the beach towards Paradise Avenue, I can see one of the old gum trees that Dot and I loved so much. We loved it because the articulation of its limbs and the arrangement of its spots across its pale orange bark reminded us of a giraffe. Always part of the charm of being with Dot was the intense reverence and the worshipful attitude she had towards the natural world. To be with her was to share in a chthonic bewitchment to birds, animals, insects, trees. Dot loved amulets, and whenever she went away she would always bring back gifts purely for their talismanic value. I have a scarab, a wooden seal, a wooden giraffe, a wooden elephant, a piece of dinosaur bone, a rock with a small fossil in it, a key ring with a large iridescent beetle embedded in plastic, a photo of a penguin and many shells and stones. Dot loved objects which she could imbue with trans-cendent powers. My gift to her when we left Trappers Way was a bag of Celtic runes which she treasured and which she was still using up until she died.
We left Trappers Way in March 1986 because the owner was putting the place up for sale. We talked about getting another place together and were going to start looking when I returned from a trip to Adelaide. I phoned Dot from Adelaide and she told me that Lyn had decided to leave her husband and that they were going to rent a house in Lane Cove. I felt very sad that such a wondrous time was ending. I knew I would never live anywhere as beautiful again, certainly never under the extraordinary circumstances of that summer of 1985–86. But it is also true that while I loved Dot’s ebullient, sparkling company, I often found it exhausting and overwhelming. She could be un-abashedly self-centred and narcissistic. I remember one occasion when Dane Thwaites, who ran Black Lightning Press, which had published Dot’s third book, The Night Parrot, invited me up to his house in the Blue Mountains to discuss the publication of my first book. Dot came too, but so hijacked the conversation by talking incessantly about herself and her work, that nothing at all was worked out or organised about my book. To be with Dot was often to be sucked into her vortex of self-absorption and self-interest, but of course you forgave her because she was so funny and entertaining. She was quite aware of her own vanity, but was so seduced by her own potency and creative spark that she found it hard to keep a lid on it.
When she died on 10th December 2008, Dot was at the height of her powers. She had completed a new book of poems, The Bee Hut, a ten-thousand word essay called On Passion, for Melbourne University Press, and most of the songs and narrative development for a rock opera with Tim Finn, January. Who knows what extraordinary work she would have written during the next couple of decades, had she lived. To think that her unique talent and spirit are now gone makes me feel so sorrowful and bereft. What gives me comfort, however, is to know that the last four and a half years of her life, after her first bout of cancer, were among the happiest of her life: rich, productive and full of life, travel and love.
Andy recently sent me one of Dot’s favourite anthologies, Staying Alive, which Dot devoured and loved during 2004 when she was undergoing cancer treatment.4 Dot was a great annotator and in this book she has ticked and dated all her favourite poems. The final poem in the book is Raymond Carver’s famous ‘Late Fragment’; against this Dot has put three large ticks and the date 15/5/04. After its words:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved of the earth.
she wrote: ‘My experience – my most precious + illuminating experience – of this Plague Year.’ Dot was one of those people who deepened, who grew more caring, more loving and compassionate as she grew older. Many of those vanities and insecurities of her earlier years were replaced by greater maturity and generosity of spirit. Her cancer experience rocked her to the core. Because she was so passionately in love with life, she was terrified of death. She furiously wanted to live because she knew how much more she had to give, but her poetry is riddled with premonitions and piercing apprehensions about death. It’s a constant thorn in her side, a fear she cannot expunge.
When Dot was told in late July 2008 that the cancer had returned she became extremely anxious. However, we all felt that she would pull through, as the cancer was still low volume. This is the reason she told so few people. She believed she would recover and so there was no need for people to know. She underwent chemotherapy and seemed to be doing well, despite feeling very enervated. The breathlessness that she developed almost immediately she put down to anxiety and one of the side effects of the chemo. Although I was very concerned about her, I felt that she was going to be all right because I knew how strong her life force was and she had done so remarkably well in surmounting the challenges of the first bout of cancer in 2004.
My biggest regret is that I waited until so long to go to Melbourne to see her. I had such a full plate and felt so overwhelmed with commitments that I had put off going down until 8th December, when I was booked to give a talk at a conference, then I planned to stay with her for several days. I simply had no idea that my dearest friend had such a short time left. No one did. Dot had been taken to hospital on 24th November when her breathlessness became very serious and she was diagnosed with clots on the lung and an infection. She was transferred to the Intensive Care Unit at St Vincents Private Hospital on 28th November. For those sixteen days Andy stayed constantly at her bedside, only going home to sleep.
I went to the hospital on my arrival in Melbourne, and saw her on oxygen support and with all the tubes and machinery about her, but even then, I still thought she would get better. So did Andy. Dot also never gave up thinking she would recover. The following morning, less than twenty-four hours before she died, she said to me, ‘I’m getting better, Jude.’ She was certainly doing everything in her powers to do so, including drinking the boxes of Sustagen that the doctor said were essential. At no stage did Dot ever give up her will to live. As I stood by her bedside that first evening, she said, ‘Tell me all about your favourite birds, Jude.’ The next day she wanted me to tell her about the Buddha and to repeat a mantra for her. She was lucid and mentally alert until the end. She was still speaking intelligently to us eight hours before she died. Four hours before she died she went to sleep and did not wake. Her last words to me before she fell asleep for the final time were, ‘hello, angel.’
Dot died peacefully and easily with her partner Andy, her mother Jean, her father Chester, her sisters Mary and Josie, her old partner and friend Lyn, and myself around her. There’s a poem in Dot’s verse novel, Wild Surmise, called‘Dante’s Stars’. It is about Daniel, one of the main characters in the book who has been suffering from a brain tumour, and in the poem he finally dies. Here are the last twenty lines:
This is the highest climb
he has ever done.
Who would have thought
he would feel so light
or is it still Virgil
doing all the work?
He must make it up to him
later
when they get to the top.
For now
there’s this bottleneck
this last squeeze
Alex, his hand
breathes its last
suddenly he knows
just before knowing and seeing fuse
he’s climbed up
by climbing down
and once more saw
the stars
I love this poem for the beautiful, unadorned, yet flying death-moment. As I witnessed it, Dot’s death seemed as peaceful, as bare and as elegant as Daniel’s.
What also gives me peace of mind is knowing that Dot died having found a truly, meaningful and deeply grounded love with her partner Andy. Dot and Andy had been together since 1992, and while they had known some rocky times, Dot’s illness seemed to smooth away all the rough edges and they were able to have a relationship which was remarkable for its level of passion, devotion, fun and engagement with life. Given that Dot valued relationships above absolutely everything else in life, this was such a blessing and such a source of pleasure for her. She was also very deeply loved and appreciated by her family, as she loved and appreciated them. To know that she was at such a point of richness at the end of her life is very comforting.
I have made the one kilometre walk up from Paradise Beach, along the stunningly attractive Riverview Rd and up towards the top of Trappers Way, which after twenty-three years, still is very much as it was. I see the same houses, some modern and some just small prefab structures that must have been here for many decades when Avalon would have been a real backwater. I have nearly reached some elegant spotted gums which means that our old house is only a few metres further on. Whenever I did this walk with Dot it was never a lazy stroll, despite the steep incline. Dot walked at a furious pace and it was all I could do to keep up. As I reach the house, I see that it is almost exactly as it was when we lived there. The only difference is that the rickety front entrance has been partly concreted over to make a carport. There are the same chocolate brown beams, the same white walls. I think the street has changed so little because its oblique access and narrowness make it a nightmare for equipment and trucks. I can hardly believe that nearly two and a half decades have passed. I can still see Dot in the doorway calling out to her cat, Emma. I can see Mary at her window with her cat, Sambo. I can see my dog, Pooky, visiting for a few days, chase Emma onto the railing of the balcony at the back of the house and Dot nearly going mad thinking she would fall off. I can see Dot in her room writing her poem ‘Carmen’ in a white heat, the beauty of this place and the humidity getting into her lines:
Three days of heatwave,
A hot lid of dinning cicadas.
At night only a flock of bats lifts
and flies across a hot scrap of moon.
I can see Dot checking the door several times. I can see the wine and the peanuts we are carrying as we walk down to Paradise Beach. On the path outside the house, I spot a rainbow lorikeet feather. I pick it up, I say Dot’s name, I bless her and I blow the feather into the summer air and into the hot din of cicadas, knowing I will never ever say enough goodbyes to my most extraordinary friend.
Notes
1 ‘If Snakes Could Fly’ from the album Before Time Could Change Us, lyrics by Dorothy Porter, music by Paul Grabowsky, Warner Music Australia, 2005.
2 from ‘Numbers’, forthcoming in The Bee Hut.
3 quoted in ‘The Feral Poet’ interview with Dorothy Porter, from A Woman’s Voice: Conversations with Australian Poets, ed Jenny Digby, UQP, 1996, p 8.
4 Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, ed Neil Astley, Bloodaxe, 2002.
Photograph of Dorothy Porter, courtesy of Mark Tedeschi.
Judith Beveridge is one of Australia’s most acclaimed poets. Winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the New South Wales and Victorian Premiers’ Awards, she is a highly regarded critic, editor and teacher of poetry. She has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Sun Music: New and Selected Poems. She is a recipient of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal and the Christopher Brennan Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. She was poetry editor for Meanjin from 2005 to 2015, and co-editor of the anthology Contemporary Australian Poetry.
Read more