This is the story of fifteen years in which a small independent company was a seminal force in Australian publishing. From McPhee Gribble came many new writers, including Helen Garner, Tim Winton, Drusilla Modjeska, new perspectives on Australian life and history, new stories - and, fleetingly, hope that an Australian company could become a fully fledged player in the international publishing industry.
This is the story of a friendship between two women. How the company they built with its unique way of working at once mirrored its times and changed them, how it thrived and how it fell.
It is also a portrait of a woman who accidentally became a publisher. Hilary McPhee - her sense of herself at the centre of the universe at the bottom of the world instilled in her by her grandmother - grew up surrounded by books and stories, and also by some of the silences and gaps in the record that defined Australia until recent years. Her belief in publishing not just as a process but as a means of transmission of ideas and imagination had its origins in every corner of her life.
'Other People's Words' is a rare and often moving insight into the transforming power of words. It is a personal reflection, autobiographical in the sense that it draws on the author's life and some of the people in it. Laced with anecdotes and anonymous case studies, to "illustrate" the text, it is written for those who are interested in the way storytelling and wordsmithing and the dissemination of writing is changing with new technologies.
