McPhee Gribble, the independent publishing house built around Australian writers, sold its entire business to Penguin in 1989 after recession hit the industry. Its co-founder, Hilary McPhee, helped publish books including Cloudstreet, Monkey Grip and Puberty Blues. She died on Thursday, aged 85.
Helen Garner said McPhee edited her first four books. “Hilary was a fine editor. I’ll always be grateful for that,” Garner said. Tim Winton recalled that McPhee made room for his work after Allen & Unwin didn’t want him to write a short-story collection.
Building a publishing list
McPhee and Diana Gribble founded the company in 1975. Their authors included Kathy Lette, Dorothy Hewett, Kaz Cooke, Drusilla Modjeska, Jennifer Dabbs and John Misto. 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’s list included Winton’s Cloudstreet, Garner’s Monkey Grip and Lette and Gabrielle Carey’s Puberty Blues. In a 2022 interview, McPhee recalled Garner arriving by bicycle with two copies of the Monkey Grip manuscript in green foolscap folders. “Di and I each took a manuscript home, read it overnight and rushed in the next day and said we’ve got to publish it.”
A licensing arrangement with Penguin to publish the children’s series Practical Puffins helped the company through its early years. The series went on to sell three million copies worldwide, while the press promoted young Australian writers.
McPhee and Gribble were described as trailblazers in the “old boys club” of Australian publishing. In her 2019 memoir Other People’s Words, McPhee recalled men arriving with advice: stick to packaging, make horse or ballet books, and find a “good-looking, famous sheila” to front them.
Ownership and state power
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”. Recession hit Australian publishing in the 1980s. McPhee and Gribble signed a co-publishing deal with Penguin, then sold McPhee Gribble entirely to the company in 1989.
McPhee stayed in publishing for a few years before moving to Pan Macmillan, where she ran the Picador imprint until 1994. That year, then prime minister Paul Keating chose her as the first female chair of the Australian Arts Council. McPhee led a controversial restructuring of the council during a turbulent period.
After John Howard became prime minister in 1996, he attempted to close the council. McPhee later said the episode embarrassed her terribly when she received an Order of Australia for services to literature in 2003.
Writers and editors remember
Winton was 24 when he first visited McPhee Gribble’s offices in a converted factory in Melbourne’s Fitzroy. Literary agent Caroline Lurie had referred him after Allen & Unwin rejected the short-story collection he wanted to write. “I was excited and daunted,” Winton said of meeting McPhee, whom he already knew as the publisher of Monkey Grip.
Their partnership continued through letters while Winton worked from Western Australia. “She was a sensitive and canny editor. She knew when to push, and she was someone you could trust,” he said. At a 2024 reading for his novel Juice, McPhee waited for him to sign a copy, then wrote to say how proud she was and how pleased she was to attend.
Nikki Christer inherited Picador from McPhee, along with writers including Winton, Lily Brett and Kate Grenville. Christer called McPhee “curious”, “loyal” and “incredibly generous”. She said McPhee and Gribble built a publishing culture centred on Australian writers and stories when overseas publishers and imported books largely dominated the industry.
McPhee is survived by three children, Sara, Rupert and John. Diana Gribble, her business partner and friend, died in 2011.