Robert Milliken

Mother of Rock is an Australian journalist’s adoring biography of one of our great social journalists. Sydney newsman Robert Milliken’s life of expatriate writer Lillian Roxon (1932–73) is foremost an account of the birth of celebrity tabloid press in the 1960s and its close links with the emergence of rock music as an art form and breeding ground for ‘stars’. Like Roxon’s writing itself – a generous selection of which is reproduced at the back of the book – what little discussion of the qualities of the music of the times there is comes second to an account of its social and market implications and its dramatic leading personalities. Roxon emerges as a radical, under-acknowledged progenitor of ‘new journalism’.

Martin Amis’s encapsulation of biography is that it should convey a sense of what it would be like to spend some time alone in a room with the subject. Robert Milliken begins his story of Australian journalist and rock music taxonomist Lillian Roxon by revealing that he once went one better: thirty years ago, as a rising reporter in London, he not only met Roxon at a boutique hotel in Notting Hill but jawboned with her at length. That is to say, she talked and he listened. Roxon, Milliken recalls:

talked without interruption for the next two hours, entertaining me, shocking me and making me laugh. She told scandalous stories about this one and that one, and even about herself. She also talked about her problems with editors, her asthma and her mother, three principal preoccupations of her life, even though Mrs Roxon, caricatured as an interfering Jewish mother, was long since dead.