Other People's Words

This is the story of 15 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, the hope that an Australian company could become a fully fledged player in the international publishing industry. It is the story of a friendship between two women. Two strong, "difficult" women who created a company with a unique way of working which at once mirrored its times and changed them, and which, though it did not survive, left its mark deep in the culture. It is also a portrait of a woman who accidentally became a publisher with her sense of herself at the centre of the universe and the bottom of the world - who believed, perhaps more than anything, in the transforming power of words.