Andrew McMillan

Andrew McMillan started freelancing for the national rock music magazine RAM in his final year of high school in Brisbane in 1975. On finishing school he continued freelancing for music and popular culture magazines in Australia and the UK and started writing skits/specials for a radio production house in Brisbane. In 1977 he moved to Sydney, spent a year on the staff of RAM, quit and hitch-hiked to Darwin, spent a week on Lameroo Beach, returned to Sydney and then resumed freelancing, writing for The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald,The Age, Sunday Telegraph and scores of magazines (including Rolling Stone, Playboy, Penthouse etc) as well as scripting/producing music shows and specials for a couple of commercial radio networks.

Andrew’s first book Strict Rules, focusing on the 1986 Midnight Oil/Warumpi Band Blackfella-Whitefella tour of remote Aboriginal communities in the NT, was initially published in hardback by Hodder & Stoughton in Australia and the UK in 1988.

At the end of that year he moved to Darwin to work on Catalina Dreaming, a book about the RAAF Catalina flying boat crews who operated out of northern Australia during WW2. His work on that book was disrupted by events he witnessed in East Timor in 1990. The result of his research into that conflict, Death In Dili, was published by Sceptre in 1992. Sceptre also brought out a paperback edition of Strict Rules that year.

Continuing his research into the Catalina story, he made many visits into Aboriginal communities in Arnhem Land associated with WW2 RAAF bases and subsequently redirected his energies into what he considered to be a more urgent book, a contemporary history of the region.

An Intruder’s Guide To East Arnhem Land was first published by Duffy & Snellgrove in 2001. <www.duffyandsnellgrove.com.au> In 2002 they published Catalina Dreaming. It was released as a talking book by Louis Braille Audio in 2003.

In 2007 independent Darwin publisher Simon Niblock of Niblock Publishing <www.niblock.com.au> issued an updated edition of An Intruder’s Guide To East Arnhem Land (taking in the federal intervention) and reissuedStrict Rules in 2008. In 2008 another independent Darwin publisher, F11 Productions, released a photographic coffee table book, Tiwi Footy - Yiloga, for which Andrew wrote the text (with Tiwi translations on facing pages). <www.f11.com.au>

The updated edition of An Intruder’s Guide To East Arnhem Land was short-listed for the NT Chief Minister’s History Book Award in 2008 and won the inaugural Territory Read NT Book of the Year award in 2009.

Over the years since moving to Darwin he’s also won literary awards for essays, short stories and poetry, had a play produced by Darwin Theatre Company (Dingo Calling), written and produced radio specials for the ABC (On The Roadhouse x 25) and written lyrics for Janie Kitto, an Aussie singer/recording artist based in Europe. <www.myspace.com/kittowhosjack> His recent freelance pieces have been published in The Monthly, Griffith Review and Meanjin. For sport he plays Pitjantjatjara Noughts & Crosses, Scrabble, Stuart Highway Cricket and - as Acting Chief of Staff since 1991 - a Consul Supertyper with the occasional ‘rock journalism’ act Darwin’s 4th Estate. <www.myspace.com/darwins4thestate>

Excerpts from published profiles:

• Jillian Burt, Follow Me pp 115  1984 “Gonzo journalism gets results because it isn’t polite. The Gonzo journalist jumps in feet first, plays longer, louder, crazier, dirtier than all the rest, and comes out with a story in which essentially he (or she) is the pivot; but the padding is of all the REAL stories that other journalists, working by more conventionally polite methods, don’t reach. The mild-mannered reporter winds up with a mild mannered story.  Anyone interested in The Models would do well to refer to a back issue of RAM. Andrew McMillan, a Sydney rock journo who writes with the fury of a war correspondent in a combat zone, stalked the Models for months, turning up in totally bizarre, out of the way places at the most unexpected time, and probed for the truth till he hit a nerve or two and exposed them… Andrew McMillan, by throwing pop protocol to the wind, brings out the brat in the Models.  (The Models’ singer) Sean Kelly : “It’s all true, it’s an amazing story. It’s a real shock to see it all in print. That actually happened though…”
• Anthony O’Grady - The Sun Sydney {22 Oct 1987} “As a freelance writer for the past decade, he’s learnt to eat small, spend even less, and find comfort in literary, rather than living, standards.”
• Christie Eliezer - Juke magazine {24 Dec 1988} “A lot of potentially good writers were tossed up when punk exploded in its white blur. Faced with this sudden exciting music, hundreds of fanzines were cranked out in garages everywhere. The cream writers of these would eventually make the leap over to the major rock papers, helping to change their tone in the same way that the bands were rewriting rules in music.  Of that generation of rock journos, only three went on to become great writers.  The rest became disillusioned when the music got swallowed up, or moved onto other areas (because the rock press has always been more of a labour-of-love than any smart career move), or farted out to typing the weekly horse results in the local paper, or lightened up their writing styles to fit in with their new yuppie corporate image.  Andrew McMillan was always a problem. Like all young journos, he was hyperbole, obsessed with his idealism and ambitions, flirted with great romantic notions of becoming a perpetual drunk to turn that into his art, of being journalism’s answer to Keith Richards, maybe, certainly to be the new Hunter S. Thompson.  So, okay, a lot of his peers might have thought he was a bit comical but the thing is, he’s never lightened up. Even today he doesn’t write stories. He pours out miles of claustrophobic reams of words which the reader needs to be intrigued (read dedicated) enough to scramble through to the end.”
• Greg Taylor - Sun-Herald {22 Jan 1989} “…one of Australia’s few full time, professional rock journalists … McMillan’s interest in the Outback shows no sign of abating. The man who spent most of the mid 70s and early 80s raging and writing about Big City music has walked out of his Chippendale home for the last time. He rang for our interview from Queensland : “I’m heading north, mate : see you in a year or so.”
• Joanne Rugg - Centralian Advocate, 10 Mar 1989 “In the music press today, there is one Australian writer emerging head and shoulders above the rest. Melbourne-born Andrew McMillan is a freelance writer whose work was published while still at school and since those early days he has developed a unique and impartial style of writing that places him in his own category…”
• Glenn A. Baker - Sydney Morning Herald {13 May 1989} “Andrew McMillan has long been a rock writer with an apocalyptic vision. A gentle man drawn to the swaggering nihilism of heavy metal thunder, he has created his own genre of music observation and criticism.”
• Nicolas Rothwell - The Australian Magazine {16-17 Nov 1996} “Australia’s most eminent practitioner of the new journalism.”
• Nicolas Rothwell - The Australian {Aug 1999} “Festival audiences…can see products of (Darwin’s) thriving, distinctly Bohemian arts scene (including) a concert from Darwin’s 4th Estate, gonzo author Andrew McMillan’s band of typewriter-playing journalists.”
• Nicolas Rothwell - The Weekend Australian Review {27-28 October 2001} “One of the first…was a self-conscious young Brisbane essayist named Andrew McMillan, an admirer of the American ‘new journalism, whose rites of passage had been served in the bleak, splintered realm of punk rock. McMillan, who already knew the outback and was a friend of Midnight Oil, followed them on their 1986 Blackfella Whitefella Tour across the Northern Territory and produced a book-length account, Strict Rules - perhaps the first example of gonzo-flavoured, yet distinctly Australian-accented, reportage from the Aboriginal world. Shortly afterwards, he moved to Darwin, where a nexus of distinctly alternative-flavoured creative souls began to gather and to draw their sustenance from the shimmering fault lines between the Top End’s black and white domains.”
• Nicolas Rothwell - Australian Literary Review [7 February 2009] “Andrew McMillan, the Xavier Herbert of his time, the unending chronicler of the steamy north.” ??