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Hilary McPhee, together with her business partner Di Gribble, established Australia’s first woman-owned publishing house in 1975. For over two decades, McPhee discovered new writers who are now revered as greats of the Australian literary canon, including Helen Garner, Tim Winton and Drusilla Modjeska. Monkey Grip, Puberty Blues and Cloudstreet are just some of the books this Grand Dame of Australian letters nurtured into being. In this insightful conversation, McPhee talks about those halcyon days, her friend the late Carmen Callil and the state of modern publishing.

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Hilary McPhee is a writer and editor. She founded McPhee Gribble Publishers with Diana Gribble in 1975, was Chair of the Australia Council for the Arts 1994–97, and inaugural Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at Melbourne University until 2004. Her books include Other People’s Words, Wordlines and Memoirs of a Young Bastard: the Diaries of Tim Burstall. Her most recent book is Other People’s Houses.

Dr Anne Summers AO is a journalist, researcher, commentator, and best-selling author of nine books, including the classic Damned Whores and God’s Police, first published in 1975 (and still in print), Ducks on the Pond, On Luck and The Lost Mother. Her memoir, Unfettered and Alive, was published in 2018.

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