Hilary McPhee

Hilary Jane McPhee was born on 15 August 1941 in Melbourne. Her early years were spent in rural Croydon at the foot of the Dandenongs. She went to Croydon State School and to Tintern CEGGS at Ringwood East because there was no state secondary school nearby. In the mid-1950s her father was transferred by the ES&A Bank; the family moved to Coleraine and then Colac, and she attended Hamilton and Colac High Schools. Her mother was a renowned teacher and librarian. McPhee later said a house full of books and a mother who lent her Colette and Simone de Beauvoir were a great gift. Her brother Peter McPhee became a historian and Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne.

On a Commonwealth Scholarship she studied at the University of Melbourne from 1959 to 1962. She enrolled first in combined English and History Honours and graduated with a History major emphasising Australian prehistory. Campus life centred on acting and producing with the Marlowe Society, including a joint Theatre of the Absurd season with the Sydney University Dramatic Society. She later received an honorary doctorate of letters from Monash University (1998) and served as inaugural Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Melbourne (1997-2004).

McPhee's first publishing job was as an editorial assistant at Meanjin under Clem Christesen. After time abroad and at the British Council, she became Penguin Australia's first dedicated Australian-list editor in 1969. She wrote for McKinsey, then commissioned Australian titles at William Heinemann, including early fiction by Gerald Murnane. In 1975 she and Diana Gribble founded McPhee Gribble Publishers. Practical Puffins children's handbooks sold about three million copies and bankrolled a fiercely independent Australian list that included Helen Garner (Monkey Grip), Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette (Puberty Blues), Tim Winton, Drusilla Modjeska, Rodney Hall, Barry Hill and others. With Joyce Nicholson, Anne O'Donovan and Sally Milner they ran Sisters Publishing (1979-c.1984). After Penguin acquired McPhee Gribble around 1989-90, McPhee directed Picador at Pan Macmillan until 1994. She chaired the Australia Council for the Arts (1994-97), the first woman in that role, chaired its Major Organisations Board, and held directorships including Film Australia and Australian Multimedia Enterprises. She was a founding director and sometime editor of New Matilda (from 2003), wrote for The Age, and judged the Miles Franklin, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and Melbourne Prize.

She married artist Peter Freeman in 1964. Their daughter Sara Harriet Freeman was born in London; their son Rupert was born after the family returned to Victoria. In 1976 she married publisher John Michie; they had a son, James. McPhee Gribble's Fitzroy office ran childcare for staff babies, including her own. She married writer and historian Don Watson in 1986; the marriage ended in divorce in 2009. From 2006 to 2010 she lived and worked between Jordan and Italy while attempting a book with Prince Hassan and writing what became Other People's Houses. Diana Gribble, her publishing partner and close friend, died in 2011; McPhee was godmother to Gribble's daughter Anna. She is survived by three children.

McPhee argued that Australian voices were distinctive and hard to place overseas without sanding off their rough edges, and that local writing deserved local publishers. At McPhee Gribble she and Gribble edited in pencil, asked questions, and insisted the text remained in the author's charge. As Australia Council chair she dismantled what she saw as an uneven, mate-driven committee system and later warned against arts funding dominated by lobbyists or cliques. She opposed political censorship in the arts, spoke critically of social media's pull on young readers, and treated AI as a threat especially to short-form journalism while still hoping idiosyncratic writing would survive. She remained frank about feminism, patronage in a male-dominated book trade, and the commerce-versus-magic tension inside publishing houses.

McPhee Gribble is widely credited with helping remake Australian literary publishing in the 1970s and 1980s. Books she and Gribble championed, including Monkey Grip, Puberty Blues and Cloudstreet, became touchstones of national reading. Editors who trained under them, among them Sophie Cunningham and Sue Hines, went on to major roles. Her Australia Council reforms reshaped arts funding architecture. The Hilary McPhee Award at the University of Melbourne, funded by her brother Peter, recognises brave Meanjin essays. After her death on 1 October 2026, Alice Grundy wrote in The Conversation that not everyone who cherishes those books knows her name, but they have first-hand experience of her publishing.

Victorian Honour Roll of Women, 2001 (with Diana Gribble). Officer of the Order of Australia (AO), 2001 Queen's Birthday Honours, for service to the arts including promoting Australian writers, literary publishing and arts administration through the Australia Council. Honorary doctorate of letters, Monash University, 1998. Inaugural Vice-Chancellor's Fellow, University of Melbourne, 1997-2004. The Hilary McPhee Award for an essay in Meanjin was established in 2016 from a donation by Professor Peter McPhee.

Other People's Words (Picador, 2001; expanded MUP anniversary edition) is her memoir of McPhee Gribble and a life in Australian publishing. Wordlines: Contemporary Australian Writing (Five Mile Press, 2010) collected recent Australian work she selected. Memoirs of a Young Bastard: The Diaries of Tim Burstall (Miegunyah Press / MUP, 2012) presents her annotated edition of the filmmaker's early-1950s diaries. Other People's Houses (MUP, 2019) recounts the Jordan and Italy years and the end of her marriage to Don Watson. She co-authored Media She with Patricia Edgar, wrote Age columns, appeared at the Wheeler Centre and Adelaide Writers Week, and was interviewed extensively about editing, Garner, Winton and the Australia Council.

Puberty Blues drew controversy for its depictions of teenage sex and references to abortion; McPhee later said nobody sought to ban it, though Germaine Greer disliked it. At Picador she fought Macmillan board pressure to cut Helen Garner's The First Stone and resigned over the struggle to publish it, a story she said she had rarely told. The book divided readers and remains a cultural flashpoint. Her Australia Council restructuring was initially wildly controversial inside the arts bureaucracy. She also recounted how hard it was to publish Elsie Roughsey's An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New in translation while trying to keep the author's voice.

Hilary McPhee died on 1 October 2026 at the age of 85. The Age carried a death notice around 3 October 2026. Melbourne University Publishing issued a vale on 2 October 2026, recalling her work on Other People's Words, Other People's Houses and the Burstall diaries. Alice Grundy's Conversation tribute the same week called her a literary pioneer who launched Helen Garner, published Cloudstreet and set a standard for Australian editing. Cause of death was not made public in major tributes at the time of writing. She is survived by three children.