Lillian Roxon - From Italy To Australia, Then The U.S.A.

From Italy To Australia, Then The U.S.A.

She was born Lillian Ropschitz in Alassio, Province of Savona, Italy. Her family, originally from Lwów Ukraine, then Poland, moved to the coastal town of Alassio in Italy, where Lillian was born. Because the Ropschitz family were Jewish, they migrated to Australia in 1937 to escape the rise of fascism, and they 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 Rupert Murdoch in the early 1960s. She pursued further studies at the University of Sydney in the 1950s, where she fell in with the freewheeling movement known as the Sydney Push. 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 renowned 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 America. From 1962 onwards she was the New York correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and over the next ten years she carved out a singular career reporting on arts, entertainment and women's issues for the Australian, American and British press.