In 1976, a young writer named Helen Garner walked into the McPhee Gribble office, a cramped space on Jolimont Lane in inner Melbourne, and said, diffidently, that she thought she might have written a novel. The publisher who read the manuscript, believed in it and edited it into print as Monkey Grip the following year was Hilary McPhee, who died on October 1, 2026, at the age of 85. Over five decades she became one of the people most responsible for deciding which Australian voices the country got to read.

McPhee grew up in Croydon, on Melbourne's outer edge, and studied English and History at the University of Melbourne, working part time as an editorial assistant at the literary journal Meanjin while she was still a student. She went on to work at the British Council in London, at Penguin Australia as its first editor of Australian titles, and briefly at the management consultancy McKinsey, where she was the firm's first female writer. A stint followed at the publisher William Heinemann, commissioning works of Australian history, and she co wrote Media She with Patricia Edgar, a work that became a key document of second wave Australian feminism. Then, in 1975, at 34, she and her friend Diana Gribble founded their own publishing house.

McPhee Gribble started out of a rented room in a Victorian house in a South Yarra back street, and within five years had grown into offices in Fitzroy that included an on site creche for staff, an arrangement almost unheard of in Australian publishing at the time, according to The Conversation. Their co published Practical Puffins children's series sold three million copies and helped bankroll the list of new Australian writers the two women were determined to print. For a few years they also ran Sisters Publishing, a feminist book club imprint, alongside the main list. Garner's Monkey Grip was only the beginning. McPhee Gribble went on to publish Puberty Blues, submitted as a handwritten manuscript by two eighteen year old friends, Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette.

The firm was also the first publisher of Tim Winton, whose novel Cloudstreet, which it brought into print, was voted Australia's best novel by the Australian Society of Authors in 2003 and topped a readers' poll the same year. McPhee later summed up the method she and Gribble had developed together: "At McPhee Gribble we were gentler. We edited in pencil so authors could rub things out," she told Kill Your Darlings in 2026. Asked about the pull between art and the market, she added, "There's always tension between commerce and magic."

McPhee Gribble was sold to Penguin Australia in 1989 after some 15 years of independent operation, and McPhee went on to direct Pan Macmillan's Picador imprint until 1994. That year she became the first woman to chair the Australia Council for the Arts, a position she held until 1997 while overseeing a restructuring of its Major Organisations Board. The work was not easy. "People were very hostile to change, but we were trying to fix an uneven system," she said of the period. "I learned huge things from that period, but god, was it hard. I cried a lot actually."

She kept finding new rooms to work in. Later, in the midst of the end of her marriage to the writer Don Watson, McPhee moved to Amman to take up a role connected to the Jordanian royal family, then split her time between Jordan and a villa in Cortona, Italy, an unsettled chapter she later turned into the 2019 memoir Other People's Houses. Her first memoir, Other People's Words: The Life and Times of an Accidental Publisher, had appeared in 2001 and was reissued in a 25th anniversary edition in 2026 with a new afterword on artificial intelligence and its effects on writing.

In 2001 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia for her service to the arts. She was also a founding director of the online political journal New Matilda and served as the inaugural Vice Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Melbourne, according to the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, which holds a 2015 portrait of her by Jacqueline Mitelman. In later years she sat on judging panels for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and the Melbourne Prize, edited the 2010 anthology Wordlines: Contemporary Australian Writing, and received an honorary doctorate from Monash University.

She was survived by her children, Sara, Rupert and James, by grandchildren Sophie, Carla, Mitchell and Angus, and by her brothers, John and Peter, according to a family notice published in The Age. The writers she published first, among them Helen Garner and Tim Winton, went on to define Australian literature for decades afterward, and the editing method she and Gribble improvised in a rented South Yarra room, asking questions, suggesting rather than instructing, marking up a manuscript in pencil before committing it to ink, became the house style of the publishing culture that grew up around them.