How two women changed the patriarchal world of Australian publishing

MEMOIR
Other People’s Words
Hilary McPhee
MUP, $34.99

In 1975 Diana Gribble and Hilary McPhee started a small inner-city publishing company in Melbourne. It was called, very properly, McPhee Gribble. They were after all, breaking into the Old Boys Club, so why not sound like an unsmiling leather armchair? The two canny women had a vague idea of becoming an Antipodean Hogarth Press, the press Virginia and Leonard Woolf started in the 1920s in the UK dedicated to publishing the extreme end of modern literature.

McPhee Gribble started out more modestly; packaging, then writing children’s books for other people. They both had children, so the territory was a given – until folk singer and historian Glen Tomasetti cycled into view with a manuscript under her arm. This was Thoroughly Decent People. Hilary McPhee, in her memoir of her life and those particular times, says Tomasetti’s novel was: a perfectly poised folktale about pre-war Melbourne … Glen captured the small tragedies and stultifying gentility of daily life in Melbourne in 1934.

That stultifying gentility did not stop at Melbourne, the bastion of Scottish Christian respectability. Patrick White had turned his baroque eye upon its nooks and a few grannies, but who, actually, read Patrick White?

Here was a novel by a local woman with a well-known identity suggesting things we had not much wanted to think about. And the timing was miraculous; here was a distant rumble of a new audience emerging and that audience was the luck, as well as the scope and eagle-eye of McPhee Gribble. The year 1976 was a thrilling time to be alive, similar to the bliss Wordsworth felt in the Paris dawn of 1791. Well, not quite the French Revolution. Still, although Whitlam and the Labor Party had been banished, their reforming zeal had a resounding effect; change, it seemed, even Down Under, was possible.

And most critically, feminist theories were in the air so it was also thought possible – and in some places even amusing – that women, despite their anatomical destiny, could now do anything. The emphasis is on now. McPhee wryly describes: 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 …

Context is all. And the context was change. McPhee Gribble was later acquired by Penguin but in the decade or so before that, they published books that brought into view a rich and diverse shoal of new Australian writers. McPhee Gribble woke up one day and found they had a name. And what generous, hard-working mentors they were. Every unpublished writer wanted to be published by them, the real problem was in choosing from such riches.

This is an extended, updated version of the first volume of McPhee’s memoir first published in 2001. An added chapter considers AI with some basic but useful comments and there is a contextual conclusion featuring McPhee’s grandchildren. There are very few tales of Australian publishing because, to be real, in the English-speaking world it has little heft. But McPhee Gribble had heft. McPhee’s memoir is a detailed, personal memoir of a specific and enclosed world across a vibrant decade. She mentions many names, some starry, is always generous with her praise, and, thankfully, winningly severe with the (in my opinion) over-rated Bruce Chatwin.

Other People’s Words is also unintentionally revelatory about the everyday functioning of deep systemic social structures. Glen Tomasetti cycles in to see her future publishers. Of course; all these people hopped on their bikes and flew down/across or over to Melbourne University, where no one of any cultural consequence had an Australian accent, especially in the then powerful English Department. Most had, like McPhee and Gribble, gone directly from their private schools to that university. They assumed overseas travel, aka London, when most of the population had never gone interstate.

It is bracing to remember that in the early 1960s, 0.1 per cent of the population went to university, and of that, fewer than 23 per cent were women. It was an exclusive world defined by money and power. And culture came from overseas just as the most dazzling – Humphries, James, Greer – went overseas. Hilary McPhee got a part-time job at the university literary magazine, Meanjin, which introduced her to editing and publishing.

McPhee Gribble was a mighty gust of air in a tired, colonial, patriarchal world that was poised for change. The zeitgeist gave them openness, they had education, connections, courage, self-belief and they shone. They wanted to expand the taste of the reading public to include, and to value, their own writers, their own experience, even their own appalling accents. And so they did. Thank God they did.

McPhee’s extended memoir is a necessity to anyone at all interested in Australian cultural history in more ways than one.

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