Hilary McPhee

So you bundle up this hideous manuscript and you hand deliver it to McPhee Gribble?

Yeah, well, I'd heard that these two women I was at university with years before, namely Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble, had started a publishing company.

And I thought, oh, well, see, I didn't know anything about publishing.

I didn't know how you got a book published or I didn't know what you did.

oh, well, I suppose that you had to come up with another one.

So I came up with another one and this was when I was in Paris, I kept on writing.

But my publishers who were Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble came to Paris to some literary fair they were going to and I gave them the manuscript of it, of what I'd been working on.

And a few days later, I went round to their hotel where they were staying in Paris and they said, Helen, this is shit.

What was your brief at the time when they put you in that job?

job?Hilary McPhee, the great Australian, the doyenne of Australian independent publishing, had written a review, and her editorial brief was that we should engage in the public conversation and that the task was primarily or in the first instance to find academics whose work could, with our assistance, be rendered public, be given public expression.

Academics write quite specialist, in quite specialist language.

And defensively too, ac- because they need to, and footnote everything, and so they write in a very defensive way, but that's not very outward-looking to the general public.

We just pedalled everywhere.

And And I heard there were these two women who I'd been, I'd vaguely known them at university, Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble.

They'd set up this new publishing company called McPhee Gribble.

And I think they'd published by this time maybe one or max two novels by women.

And it was published by McPhee Gribble.

And as I'm walking home, who do I bump into? Hilary McPhee, Diana Gribble.

And I bump into Diana Gribble's brother.

Isn't it just weird how the world works?