Hilary McPhee, co-founder of a publishing house that put Australian writers at its centre, died on Thursday at age 85. McPhee Gribble began in 1975, when overseas publishers and imported books dominated the industry, according to one of its own successors. The company backed writers including Helen Garner and Tim Winton, then became part of Penguin.
“I published my first four books with McPhee Gribble. Hilary was a fine editor. I’ll always be grateful for that,” Garner said. Books and the people who made them weren’t separate from the question of who got to publish, or whose stories reached readers.
Building outside the old boys club
McPhee and Diana Gribble were trailblazers in Australian publishing’s “old boys club.” In her 2019 memoir Other People’s Words, McPhee recalled the advice “strong men in publishing” gave her: “stick to packaging, do horse books or ballet books … put together some recipes … get a good-looking, famous sheila to front them for you …” Their advice came with bottles of wine and a lesson about where women were expected to stay.
McPhee and Gribble built their own publishing house instead. Nikki Christer, a publisher who inherited Picador from McPhee, said publishing was “largely dominated by overseas publishers and imported books” when the two created McPhee Gribble. Their work, Christer said, helped create “a publishing culture that put Australian writers and therefore Australian stories at the centre.” McPhee Gribble published hundreds of titles, including books by young Indigenous authors, and helped develop editors and publishers such as Sophie Cunningham and Sue Hines.
The company published Kathy Lette, Dorothy Hewett, Kaz Cooke, Drusilla Modjeska, Jennifer Dabbs and John Misto. Its influential books included Winton’s Cloudstreet, Garner’s Monkey Grip and Lette and Gabrielle Carey’s Puberty Blues.
Winton was 24 when he first visited the publishers’ converted-factory offices in Melbourne’s Fitzroy. Allen & Unwin, his first publisher, didn’t want him to write a short-story collection, so literary agent Caroline Lurie referred him to McPhee Gribble. “I was excited and daunted,” Winton said of meeting McPhee, whose work he already knew through Monkey Grip.
Work shaped around writers and care
Much of McPhee and Winton’s decades-long partnership took place through letters while he worked from Western Australia. They kept corresponding until not long before her death. “Her handwriting is very familiar to me, it was always pencil on the page, and she was a sensitive and canny editor. She knew when to push, and she was someone you could trust,” Winton said.
The Fitzroy offices also had a crèche. McPhee and Gribble were young mothers, and McPhee remembered children sleeping in a nursery as a woman who had raised six children cared for them. It wasn’t always orderly: McPhee said children sometimes climbed out windows, appeared naked on the first floor and escaped from their childminder before the adults sent them to childcare. “But for quite a while, we did have children in the office, and it was wonderful having them there,” she told Kill Your Darlings earlier that year.
In 1979, McPhee, Gribble, Joyce Nicholson, Anne O’Donovan and Sally Milner founded Sisters Publishing, a mail-order feminist book club that published poetry and fiction “by women, for women”. It was a self-organized publishing effort in an industry whose gatekeeping McPhee had described firsthand.
When independence met the market and the state
A licensing arrangement with Penguin to publish the children’s series Practical Puffins helped McPhee Gribble through its early years. The series went on to sell three million copies worldwide. After recession hit the Australian publishing industry in the 1980s, McPhee and Gribble signed a co-publishing deal with Penguin, then sold McPhee Gribble entirely to Penguin in 1989. McPhee stayed for a few years before moving to Pan Macmillan, where she ran the Picador imprint until 1994.
That year, then prime minister Paul Keating headhunted McPhee to become the first female chair of the Australian Arts Council. She led a controversial restructuring of the council. After John Howard became prime minister in 1996, he attempted to close it. McPhee later said the episode embarrassed her terribly when she received an Order of Australia for services to literature in 2003.
Winton recalled McPhee turning up unexpectedly at a 2024 reading for Juice. “There was the great Hilary McPhee waiting for it to be signed,” he said. “And she wrote to me afterwards saying how proud she was and how pleased she was to be there.” McPhee is survived by three children, Sara, Rupert and John. Diana Gribble, her business partner and friend, died in 2011.