Hilary McPhee, the publisher who nurtured Helen Garner and Tim Winton and made room for Australian stories in a market run by overseas houses, died on Thursday at 85.
McPhee Gribble, the company McPhee founded with Diana Gribble in 1975, helped shape a generation of Australian writers. Its list included Winton’s Cloudstreet, Garner’s Monkey Grip and Puberty Blues by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey. It also published works by Dorothy Hewett, Kaz Cooke, Drusilla Modjeska, Jennifer Dabbs and John Misto. Over the years, the house released hundreds of titles, including books by young Indigenous authors.
“I published my first four books with McPhee Gribble. Hilary was a fine editor. I’ll always be grateful for that,” Garner said.
Breaking Into an “Old Boys Club”
McPhee and Gribble were trailblazers in a publishing world described as an “old boys club.” McPhee didn’t soften her account. In her 2019 memoir Other People’s Words, she recalled the advice that came with the wine. “The strong men in publishing liked to call in the late afternoons with bottles of wine and kindly advice: stick to packaging, do horse books or ballet books … put together some recipes … get a good-looking, famous sheila to front them for you …”
Nikki Christer inherited Picador from McPhee, along with writers including Winton, Lily Brett and Kate Grenville. Christer said that when McPhee and Gribble began, the industry “was largely dominated by overseas publishers and imported books.” McPhee, she said, “helped create a publishing culture that put Australian writers and therefore Australian stories at the centre.”
Winton was 24 when he first visited the company’s offices in a converted factory in Melbourne’s Fitzroy. Literary agent Caroline Lurie sent him there after his first publishers, Allen & Unwin, didn’t want him to write a short-story collection. “I was excited and daunted,” he said. Their partnership lasted decades, mostly through letters while he worked from Western Australia. They kept writing 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.
A Workplace Built for Mothers
Gribble and McPhee met through the women’s movement. Both were young mothers, and their Fitzroy offices had a crèche, unusual at the time. McPhee remembered children climbing out windows and arriving naked on the first floor. Still, she said, “it was wonderful having them there. We had a nursery that they slept in and a marvellous woman who’d raised six children looking after them.”
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.”
Money was tight. A licensing deal with Penguin for the children’s series Practical Puffins, which sold three million copies worldwide, carried the company through its early years. Recession hit the Australian publishing industry in the 1980s. McPhee and Gribble then signed a co-publishing deal with Penguin and sold McPhee Gribble entirely to the company in 1989. The house also helped develop editors and publishers such as Sophie Cunningham and Sue Hines.
Public Service and Political Fights
McPhee ran the Picador imprint at Pan Macmillan until 1994. That year, then prime minister Paul Keating headhunted her to become the first female chair of the Australian Arts Council. She led a controversial restructuring of the council during a turbulent period. 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.
She also judged the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Victorian Premier’s Award and the Melbourne Prize. Monash University awarded her an honorary doctorate of letters in 1998.
McPhee is survived by her children Sara, Rupert and John. Gribble died in 2011.
Why This Matters:
McPhee’s career shows how much publishing culture depends on who gets let in and who gets backed. When she and Gribble started, the industry relied on imported books and male gatekeepers who advised women to stick to recipes and ballet. Their company put Australian writers first. It built an office with a nursery, backed a feminist book club and published young Indigenous authors. Her time at the Australian Arts Council also shows how exposed public support for the arts can be to political change: a prime minister tried to close the body she chaired. The writers she published and the editors she trained remain part of her legacy.