BOOK REVIEW
People in Sydney knew of the courtroom battles of the great Chester Porter QC. His colleagues in the law loved to regale each other, and clients, about Porter’s skill in the courtroom.
Newspaper readers, particularly Rupert Murdoch’s Daily Mirror, were treated to almost daily coverage of Porter’s court battles. The readers lapped it up.
Until now, his life at home was a complete mystery. Where did the great man live? How did he live? Did have any hobbies? What did he do at weekends?
Avid readers knew that the great Silk was called to the Bar at the age of 21 in 1948, a record in its time.
A tell-tale book has emerged from Mr Porter’s amazing household called Gutsy Girls by Dr Josie McSkimming, one of the daughters of Mr Porter and his wife Jean. The couple lived for 67 years in the same weatherboard house on three large blocks of land at Mona Vale.
Their eldest daughter, Dorothy Porter, was a self-declared lesbian and award-winning poet. Within the Porter family her nick-name was “Dod”.
Dorothy objected strongly to many of her father’s taunts about same-sex couples so she left Mona Vale and fled to Melbourne via the Blue Mountains.
Initially, she lived in Melbourne with her partner, and both wrote poems which were acclaimed by the critics.
Dorothy was born in Sydney on 26 March 1954 and lost her long battle with breast cancer in Melbourne on 10 December 2008. She was 54.
Dorothy faced cancer with the principles which she lived by, “stoicism and courage”.
The other sisters were Mary Porter who became a much respected vet and Josie McSkimming, a brilliant academic who wrote the book under review.
Mr Porter’s name is associated with some of the great murder trials in the post-war era. For example, he conducted the Kalajzich murder trial which entertained Sydneysiders, but perhaps not as much as the trial of Judge John Foord who was found not guilty of attempting to pervert the course of justice, although most people thought he was as guilty as sin. Outside the court, Foord warmly thanked his barrister, Chester Porter. Foord died on June 14, 2008. He was still smiling but his alleged judicial corruption had snared senior politicians like Lionel Murphy, Neville Wran and others.
Chester Porter appeared at the Voyager and Chamberlain Royal Commissions, the trials of numerous Catholic paedophile priests, and of Detective Inspector Roger Rogerson who was charged with attempting to bribe undercover police officer Mick Drury.
For a young reporter like me, it was mesmerising when the defrocked barrister Peter Clyne gave his description of being cross-examined by Chester Porter: “One moment you are cheerfully chatting away in the witness box. The next moment your head is rolling down the courtroom aisle. Your throat has been cut from ear to ear.”
Clyne was born in Vienna and died in Sydney after fighting the Australian Tax Office for more than 20 years. He was a tax evader all his life and travelled the world giving advice on how to avoid paying tax, and wrote 21 books which sold at an exorbitant price to his clients.
The ATO established a special squad to hunt him down. The investigators soon discovered that Clyne was spending money on a large scale. He had a collection of cars and yachts and lived like a king, staying at the best hotels and gorging himself at the finest restaurants. He died aged 60 and is buried in Sydney’s Northern Suburbs Memorial Gardens. A headstone reads: “Love is Best”.
While Peter Clyne was living the high life, Chester Porter was living the low life at Mona Vale. All of his life, he suffered from bowel syndrome and the pain tested his strength when he should have been relaxing.
Chester drove his three girls to school every day, dropping them off at 6.30am so he could avoid the morning traffic snarls and be in his chambers by 7am. Meanwhile, the girls would eat their lunches before school began. Dorothy Porter put up with her father’s occasional tantrums but as a sufferer from cancer she was best-placed to understand his pain.
Most fans of Chester Porter thought that he was a rip-roaring Labor man or an independent socialist. From Gutsy Girls we learn that he loathed both Bob Hawke and John Howard. Porter said that Howard was “a serial liar”. Which was a fair description after the “children overboard” and “Tampa affair” became public knowledge.
Porter wrote in his notebook: “It is the end of eleven years of shame, that we, as a nation, could even have elected such a bunch of cruel, incompetent creeps.”
Chester Porter was nicknamed the “smiling funnel web” because of his great courtroom charm, his politeness with witnesses and his forensic questioning.
After his retirement in 2000, the NSW Bar Council, then the closed shop for barristers, appointed him Honorary Life Member “for his exceptional service to the law”. He was also interviewed for the Bar’s Oral History Project.
In retirement, Porter became the author of three books on his life and the law:
Walking on Water: A Life in the Law
The Gentle Art of Persuasion: How to Argue Effectively
The Conviction of the Innocent: How the Law Can Let Us Down.
Until the late 1960s, Chester Porter QC was a member of the NSW branch of the Liberal Party. He was a founding member of the NSW Dickens Society, and Chester and his wife Jean were awarded the Percy Fitzgerald Award for the support they gave the society since its founding in October 2002.
Porter won Rostrum NSW “Speaker of the Year” in the 1986 competition. In his book, The Gentle Art of Persuasion, he attributed his improved speaking skills to the NSW Rostrum Club, writing that “one learnt a great deal” by becoming a critic of its methods.
Chester Alexander Porter died on 17 March 2021, survived by his wife Jean and two of his daughters.
He was aged 94. Some reputable references say 95. Is the difference explained by the fact that his body was laid out by his Mona Vale family, like Lenin, chairman Mao or Ho Chi Minh, before his body was taken to a funeral parlour in the city? Or was it that he in fact died on his birthday?
AS A TRIBUTE TO THE LATE CHESTER PORTER PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING, DEAR READER, AND THEN DISCUSS:
Are there any Chester Porters in the NSW Supreme Court today. If not, why not?
Would today’s Bar tolerate the unfashionable courtroom behaviour of Chester Porter? If not, why not?
As the NSW Attorney-General supposedly selects judges for the NSW Supreme Court, is he or she to blame for the timorous behaviour of defence lawyers?
Why has going to court become so extravagant that most civil litigants are priced out of the market? Has the price of law risen by over 60 % since Chester Porter’s day? Discuss.
Policemen carrying pistols and security cops in black uniforms and wearing vizors make the NSW Supreme Court the safest building in Sydney. Does their presence prevent justice being dealt safely?
Is it true that a senior MI5 officer arrives at daybreak to allocate trials to special courts that he deems are “safer’’ than others? Would Chester Porter tolerate working alongside MI5 officers?
- Gutsy Girls: love, poetry and sisterhood by Josie McSkimming, University of Queensland Press 2025
Alex Mitchell is a retired journalist.