Countdown to Mitchell centenary - State Library of New South Wales

A new documentary, Mother of Rock: The Life &
Times of Lillian Roxon, marks 40 years since Lillian
published the Rock Encyclopedia and became a
New York celebrity. The film shines a light into the
decadent world of Max’s, and Roxon’s place in
documenting the emerging rock revolution. As well
as its impressive cast list — featuring interviews with
Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper and Germaine Greer, leading
rock writers and photographers, and many of
Roxon’s closest personal friends including author
David Malouf — the film uses diaries, letters and
photographs from the Lillian Roxon papers in the
Mitchell Library to uncover the early aspirations,
and the humour and charm, of its subject.
The papers were donated by her family and by
film producer Margaret Fink, a close friend from
Roxon’s Sydney Push days in the 1950s.
Roxon came from a Jewish family who had fled
Mussolini’s Italy for the suburban safety of Brisbane,
Australia. The diaries she kept as a teenager show her
early entrancement with Hollywood glamour as an
escape from family obligations. In the mid 1940s she
often saw several double-features a week, writing on
17 July 1945:
Got into trouble this morning. Have to go to dressmaker.
Didn’t go. Saw ‘Fallen Angel’ and ‘Meet me on Broadway’
(Dana Andrews was super.)
She arrived at Sydney University in 1949
and immediately aligned herself with the antiauthoritarian,
anarchist Push movement. She
embarked on a career as a journalist for the tabloid
Weekend, edited by a young Donald Horne, writing
fresh and inventive pieces that would distinguish her
as a forerunner of the New Journalism.
s l m a g a z i n e Summer 2009/10 / State Library of New South Wales / 21