Hilary McPhee, who helped build a publishing house around Australian writers and stories, died on Thursday at age 85. She co-founded McPhee Gribble with Diana Gribble in 1975. The company published Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey’s Puberty Blues.
The company gave Australian writers a publishing platform in an industry Nikki Christer described as “largely dominated by overseas publishers and imported books.” Christer, who inherited Picador from McPhee, said McPhee and Gribble helped put Australian writers and “therefore Australian stories at the centre.”
Australian stories, Australian publishers
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. Its authors included Kathy Lette, Dorothy Hewett, Kaz Cooke, Drusilla Modjeska, Jennifer Dabbs and John Misto.
Winton was 24 when he first visited the company’s offices in a converted factory in Melbourne’s Fitzroy. Literary agent Caroline Lurie referred him after Allen & Unwin didn’t want him to write a short-story collection. “I was excited and daunted,” Winton said of meeting McPhee, whom he already knew as the publisher of Monkey Grip.
Much of their partnership unfolded through letters while Winton worked from Western Australia. They kept writing until not long before McPhee’s death. Winton recalled her pencil handwriting and called her “a sensitive and canny editor” who knew when to push and was someone he could trust.
At a 2024 reading for his novel Juice, McPhee arrived unexpectedly and waited for Winton to sign a copy. He said she later wrote to tell him how proud she was and how pleased she had been to attend. Garner said, “I published my first four books with McPhee Gribble. Hilary was a fine editor. I’ll always be grateful for that.”
A business built, then sold
People described McPhee and Gribble as trailblazers in the “old boys club” of Australian publishing. In her 2019 memoir Other People’s Words, McPhee recalled male publishers advising them to “stick to packaging,” make horse or ballet books, assemble recipes and find a famous woman to front them.
The founders met through the women’s movement. Both were young mothers, and their Fitzroy offices included a crèche. McPhee said the children sometimes climbed out of windows or escaped from their childminder before they went to childcare. “For quite a while, we did have children in the office, and it was wonderful having them there,” she told Kill Your Darlings.
A licensing arrangement with Penguin to publish the children’s series Practical Puffins, which sold three million copies worldwide, helped McPhee Gribble through its early years as it promoted young Australian writers. Recession hit the Australian publishing industry in the 1980s, and McPhee and Gribble signed a co-publishing deal with Penguin before selling the company 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 selected her as the first female chair of the Australian Arts Council. She led a controversial restructuring of the council. After John Howard was elected prime minister in 1996, he attempted to close it; McPhee later said receiving an Order of Australia for services to literature in 2003 embarrassed her terribly.
An editor’s lasting record
Born in Melbourne in 1941, McPhee began in publishing as an editorial assistant at Meanjin while studying history and literature at The University of Melbourne. She later worked at Penguin Australia and at McKinsey management consulting firm as its first female writer before starting McPhee Gribble.
In 1979, McPhee, Gribble, Joyce Nicholson, Anne O’Donovan and Sally Milner founded Sisters Publishing, a mail-order feminist book club publishing poetry and fiction “by women, for women.” McPhee later wrote two memoirs, published Wordlines in 2010 and edited an annotated edition of Tim Burstall’s 1950s diaries, Memoirs of a Young Bastard.
McPhee is survived by three children, Sara, Rupert and John. Her publishing legacy includes Cloudstreet, Garner’s The Children’s Bach, which McPhee named as her favourite of Garner’s works, and the Australian writers whose stories McPhee Gribble brought to readers.