Hilary McPhee AO (b. 1941), writer and editor, began her career at Meanjin before starting a small magazine, Theatre. Marriage to painter Peter Freeman took her to the Middle East and London, where she worked at the British Council. Returning to Melbourne, a mother of two, she began working at Penguin; she worked at McKinsey as their first female writer, then as a consultant; and later at William Heinemann, where she commissioned books about Australian history. With Patricia Edgar, she wrote a pictorial essay, Media She, a key document of second-wave Australian feminism. In 1973, having become associated with the Women's Electoral Lobby she collaborated on an illustrated magazine, The WEL Papers, with Diana Gribble. In 1975 the pair became founding directors of McPhee Gribble Publishers. The success of one of their early ventures, the Practical Puffins series for Penguin Australia, financed the publication of books by new authors including Helen Garner, Kathy Lette and Tim Winton. With a commitment to independence, postcolonial direction and the 'best Australian writing', and pioneering office-based childcare, McPhee Gribble published several hundred titles. After the economic downturn at the end of the 1980s McPhee Gribble was sold to Penguin, where it continued under its own imprint. McPhee then moved to MacMillan, where she directed the Picador imprint until 1994. Headhunted by Paul Keating, she oversaw the controversial reformation of the Australia Council from 1994 to 1997. Her Other People's Words (2001) documents her life in publishing. She was a founding director of online political newsletter New Matilda, established in 2003. From 2006 to 2010 she lived and worked between the Middle East and Italy. Her selection of Australian writing, Wordlines, was published in 2010, and her annotated edition of filmmaker Tim Burstall's 1950s diaries, Memoirs of a Young Bastard, was published by Melbourne University Press in 2012. She has an honorary doctorate from Monash University and was the inaugural Vice-Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Melbourne, of which she remains a senior fellow.
