Lillian Roxon (8 February 1932 – 10 August 1973) was a noted Australian journalist and author, best known for Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia (1969).
Early life
She was born Lillian Ropschitz in Alassio, Province of Savona, Italy. Her family, originally from Lwów in Ukraine, then Poland, moved to the coastal town of Alassio in Italy.
As the Ropschitz family were Jewish, they migrated to Australia in 1937 to escape the rise of fascism, and settled in Brisbane. Shortly after their arrival, the family anglicised their names; the surname Roxon was Lillian's suggestion.
She studied at the University of Queensland, where she met and had a brief affair with Zell Rabin, who gave Lillian her first job in America and who became a key associate of media magnate Rupert Murdoch in the early 1960s. She pursued further studies at the University of Sydney from 1949, where she fell in with the cultural movement known as the Sydney Push, then congregating at the Lincoln Inn.
In the process, she attracted the attention of an ASIO operative and was "reported on 25-6-51 as a communist sympathiser". She began her career in newspapers in Sydney and for several years worked for the tabloid magazine Weekend, owned by newspaper magnate Sir Frank Packer and edited by journalist and author Donald Horne.
In 1959 she moved permanently to New York, becoming the first Australian female overseas correspondent and the first Australian journalist to establish a high profile in the U.S. From 1962 onward, she was the New York correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and over the next ten years she carved out a career reporting on arts, entertainment and women's issues for the Australian, American and British press.
Career
In the mid-1960s Roxon became fascinated by pop music and the rise of groups like The Beatles, The Byrds and The Rolling Stones and she began to write regular articles on the subject. In early 1967 she visited San Francisco and was one of the first mainstream journalists to write about the nascent hippie movement, filing a landmark story for The Herald on the subject. She also contributed to Oz magazine along with the short lived Eye magazine in the late 1960s.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Roxon became close friends with critic and rock manager Danny Fields, Village Voice journalist Blair Sabol, musician and writer Lenny Kaye (later the guitarist in Patti Smith's band and compiler of the original Nuggets LP), photographers Linda McCartney and Leee Black Childers and Australian academic, author and feminist Germaine Greer.
In 1965 she was joined by Sydney Morning Herald's autocratic foreign correspondent Margaret Jones. It was a clash of two unbending personalities which her biographer Robert Milliken described as "like two sopranos sharing the same stage". Perhaps to keep these two apart, Margaret was posted to Washington the following year.
Roxon also played host to many Australians who visited the city, including The Easybeats, singer Lynne Randell and artist Clifton Pugh. Australian singer Helen Reddy credits Roxon for her first awareness of the women's movement and for providing much of the impetus for co-writing her international hit, "I Am Woman".
Linda McCartney (then Linda Eastman) was one of Roxon's closest female friends and she did much to further Eastman's career, but the friendship ended abruptly in 1969 when Eastman moved to London, married Paul McCartney and cut all ties with her former friends, a move which wounded Roxon deeply.
Lillian eventually retaliated, four years later, with a scathing review of the McCartneys' first American TV special. Published in the New York Sunday News on 22 April 1973, Roxon's review panned the documentary and poured scorn on Linda, slamming her for being "catatonic with horror at having to mingle with ordinary people", "disdainful if not downright bored ... her teeth relentlessly clamped in a Scarsdale lockjaw", and "incredibly cold and arrogant".
During 1968-69 Roxon was commissioned to write what became the world's first rock encyclopaedia, published by Grosset & Dunlap in late 1969, and the work for which she is best remembered.
Roxon appears briefly, as an interviewed member of the audience in the film Celebration at Big Sur, filmed at the 1969 Big Sur Folk Festival.