Early and Personal Life
Roxon was born in Sydney. She is the second of three daughters and the niece of the late Australian journalist and Sydney Push member Lillian Roxon. Her paternal grandparents were Jewish and migrated from Poland to Australia in 1937. Anglicising the family name from Ropschitz to Roxon, her grandfather worked as a GP in Gympie and Brisbane. Her mother Lesley trained as a pharmacist, while her father Jack was a microbiologist. He was a strong influence in her life and she was devastated by his death from cancer when she was 10 years old.
Roxon was educated at the Methodist Ladies' College in the Melbourne suburb of Kew, and the University of Melbourne. She ultimately came to the view that "governments have got a role to make sure they can help people in circumstances they can't control—either through their health failing or an accident". She has publicly stated that she is an atheist.
Between 1992 and 1994, Roxon was employed as a judge's associate to High Court Justice Mary Gaudron. She then became involved with the trade union movement, joining the National Union of Workers as an organiser. Roxon was also an industrial lawyer and senior associate with the law firm Maurice Blackburn and Co. from 1996 to 1998.
In 2012 Roxon was featured in the Australian Story television program in an episide entitled "Kicking The Habit", about her advocacy for plain cigarette packaging.
Read more about this topic: Nicola Roxon
Famous quotes containing the words early, personal and/or life:
“I looked at my daughters, and my boyhood picture, and appreciated the gift of parenthood, at that moment, more than any other gift I have ever been given. For what person, except one’s own children, would want so deeply and sincerely to have shared your childhood? Who else would think your insignificant and petty life so precious in the living, so rich in its expressiveness, that it would be worth partaking of what you were, to understand what you are?”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“It is very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)