“Magazine writing is a weird job,” The Australian’s national music writer Andrew McMillen tells me. “You get to spend a lot of time with particular people, while trying to, in your mind, and then on the page, find a way to tell a story about a situation or a person.” How strange it must be, Andrew muses as we talk in an unused office on the bottom level of NewsCorp’s Bowen Hills office, to be the subject of a feature story and have a person like himself following you around all day, plugging you with questions about your innermost thoughts and experiences. “Like, how often do people actually get that?” Andrew asks rhetorically. “My wife is nowhere near as interested in my daily life as I am in a profile subject when I’m working on a profile.” It’s weird, perhaps strange for the person involved, but ultimately a process that produces an amazing product – a feature story that can educate, inform, and entertain all at once. Despite finding it “exhausting”, it’s a process Andrew has a particular knack for, which I discover more about in our hour-long chat.
“Reporting is the fun part of journalism,” Andrew tells me. “Just going somewhere with a person and experiencing a situation with them. That is so much fun. The hard part is when you gotta get back to your desk and write the fucking thing down.” Andrew’s brain whirls, going through his schedule for the week. “Tomorrow, I’m going to Melbourne to interview a musician and have dinner with him. And then the next morning, I’m gonna go watch him box…This is a well-known person.” He pauses to ask when the interview will be published, and if he has the all-clear to reveal his source. It turns out he does, and Andrew starts outlining what will become one of his latest features, a profile on Mark Seymour, former frontman for iconic Australian pub band Hunters and Collectors. Seymour, explains Andrew, is releasing a solo album called The Boxer, and he’s recently been getting into the sport. I sense Andrew’s excitement as he describes the situation ahead of him as feature writing gold. “That is perfect for me, because I have not been in my 15 years of journalism in a situation where I can potentially watch one of Australia’s great rock and roll frontman get punched in the head.”
Andrew McMillen playing the guitar. Image: Rachael McMillen
Andrew interviewed another Australian rock n’ roll legend this year for a much longer format, a feature in The Weekend Australian magazine. His subject: former federal politician and Midnight Oil frontman, now solo-artist, Peter Garrett. I’m eager to learn more. “Of all the musicians I’ve written about,” Andrew says, “I think it’s fair to say that Peter Garrett has had the biggest life of any of them.” The feature, which included a trip to North Queensland and an unofficial role as Garrett’s designated driver, as well as meeting Garrett in his Sydney recording studio and finally at a pub near his home in Kangaroo Valley, ran in the magazine and on the front page of the newspaper in March. With Garrett, Andrew was well aware that “it wouldn’t just be about the music,” and the piece ended up featuring comments from the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, a friend and former colleague of Garrett’s. Andrew’s interactions with Garrett built to their final chat in a pub in Kangaroo Valley, near Garrett’s home. “I wanted to ask him about certain things: the death of his parent quite young in his life, how that shaped his life going forward, the indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum and the way that public vote went, these kinds of topics which are kind of big and obvious.” How did that conversation go? “He was comfortable to a point. But I could tell with the family stuff, that he was uncomfortable and kept trying to deflect and move the focus away from him.”
Nevertheless, Andrew built a level of trust with Garrett which won him access to Garrett’s family, who provided comments for the piece, something the veteran artist and activist hadn’t done before. Garrett, Andrew says, is particularly resistant to the idea of analysing his own songs and lyrics, “obviously a learned response to talking to hundreds of journalists like me across the years.” Interestingly, Andrew says he understands where Garrett is coming from and sees it as the most “sane” response to journalists like him. For some artists, especially young ones, the presence of an intensely curious journalist like Andrew can be “intoxicating”, but not all artists are willing to go there, which Andrew says he respects. As we talk, I think about the feature stories of Andrew’s I’ve read, and I can’t help but wonder whether he’s unpacking me like one of his interview subjects as we talk, analysing my mannerisms and energy. It occurs to me that perhaps I’m projecting, given I’m doing that very thing.
There’s more to a feature story than just exclusive details, and I ask Andrew about his writing process for the Garrett piece. “I think in terms of scenes, and I have done that for a long time…It’s a good challenge in a way to have all this material and then try to like a surgeon fillet out all the best bits and the sections that will keep the narrative flowing toward a conclusion that hopefully feels inevitable and well earned.” Andrew is big on endings and likes to the technique of tying the beginning of the piece to the end. Theme is important, too. For the Garrett piece, the theme of “true north” developed organically early on as it is the title of Garrett’s second solo album – the focus piece of the story – and fits nicely with his activism to protect ecosystems in North Queensland, and finally is a reflection on Garrett’s meaningful life at age 70. Andrew’s editor, Elizabeth Colman, was first to point the neat theme out.
Writer Andrew McMillen wrote a piece on musician Peter Garrett in March
We go back now, the caffeine from the coffee Andrew bought me working its way into my brain synapses and helping the conversation flow. Andrew grew up in Bundaberg, a small city in Central Queensland best known for its rum distillery. Andrew’s father was a teacher-librarian and from a young age the house was filled with books, making stories a huge part of Andrew’s childhood. “I loved reading as far back as I can remember. And I just consumed books ravenously, and still try to do that as often as I can.” How about music? “I can’t remember a time in my life when music was not a feature. My parents were and still are big music fans.” Andrew tells me he used to sit in the loungeroom of his parents housing listening to CD’s and old vinyls, and one of his earliest musical memories is looking over the liner notes to the 1993 Midnight Oil album, Earth, Sun and Moon. Andrew was five. “It’s one of those situations, Isaac, where I found myself in a job that is the perfect fit for me.” Which leads Andrew to describe his life: “At a certain level, beyond my wife, my child, my family, I don’t care about much else than those other things, words and music.”
I think to myself as we talk that Andrew’s being modest when he says he “found himself” in the enviable role of national music writer – the reality is it took hard work and discipline learning the craft from outside the newsroom, as a freelancer. This is where our conversation turns next. Journalism appeared for Andrew “by accident, in a way.” He moved from Bundaberg to Brisbane in 2006 and studied communication at UQ without knowing what he wanted to do for a career. It was outside of university that Andrew developed his passion for music writing. The first week he arrived at university, while his peers were partying during Orientation Week, and freshly turned 18, Andrew was off attending live music shows in Brisbane. “That right there says a lot about my priorities as a person,” Andrew laughs. Brisbane at that time had several street press newspapers – Rave, Time Off, Scene, and a Faster Louder. After a concert, Andrew would look up the review and see what the writer had said about the show, and decided Brisbane needed a new music critic. His first gigs were writing for Rave magazine and Faster Louder, covering live shows for free tickets and a bit of cash. Journalism came later, and Andrew stresses the distinction between music criticism and journalism, the former being opinion writer and the latter reporting on what happened. Music criticism became a natural transition to music journalism for Andrew, and in 2009, he switched to full-time freelancing.
Andrew was already working full-time at a web design company but found he wasn’t being creatively fulfilled. It was a “fork in the road” moment for Andrew, who could have continued down the web design field or “see how far I can take this journalism thing.” His first break came shortly after he’d left that job when he pitched a series of essays on the future of the record industry to Music Network, a now defunct print publication that covered the Australian music industry. “Basically, I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about,” Andrew says. “I was like a 21-year-old music fan. And for whatever reason, the editor there said, ‘Yeah, all right, I’ll take it on.’” The editor offered $1500 for the five articles. “I have a vivid memory of reading that email and thinking, ‘I’m a genius. I can just stay home, write, and get paid for it. My friends, my housemates, they were either studying at uni or going to nine-to-five jobs in offices. I’m like, ‘this is amazing, I’m a genius, how easy is this?” Andrew adds: “Little did I know how difficult freelancing would become.”
McMillen wrote Talking Smack: Honest Conversations about Drugs in 2014
Did that moment quitting his full-time job at the web design company to go freelancing feel like jumping off a cliff? “Carefree isn’t the right way to put it, but my overheads, my costs, were minimal. I was share-housing with two mates, my weekly rent would have been $100 a week, plus food, plus beer. There were not many other outgoing expenses in my life.” Andrew worked hard and found he had a natural talent for telling stories. “I did it for eight years and I became very good at it, because I was very disciplined at it.” He tells me learnt to pursue the best paying jobs and allocate his time to work on assignments that paid enough to make them worthwhile. “Quite quickly I realised that freelancing was all about relationships,” Andrew says. “And I kind of enjoyed the sport or the game of climbing that ladder and doing enough for a particular editor or a particular publication, to use that as leverage to get other assignments or other publications.
Andrew walks me through his freelance journey, starting at local publications like Music Network, and online sites like Mess, Noise, and The Vine, (none of which exist anymore). Then he pitched and wrote stories for Triple J mag, Rolling Stone Australia, Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail, and The Australian. Eventually he wrote for premium magazines like GQ, QWeekend magazine, and The Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend. He even got a byline in the New York Times for a fantastic story on Australia’s bungled NBN rollout, an “easy highlight to pick out of that time,” Andrew says. The journey wasn’t easy, Andrew concedes, telling me that it was often a roller coaster of some months being great with plenty of assignments and others where nothing much happened. “I had plenty of times where I could easily have quit or became frustrated and wanted to quit,” Andrew says. “Freelancing is about dealing with rejection constantly,” an important lesson learned on the job. His main mentors – award-winning feature writer Richard Guilliatt and entrepreneur Nick Crocker, helped him through the hardest times. Both shared important insights that helped Andrew along his journey.
In Guilliatt’s case – then a staff writer on The Weekend Australian magazine, and who Andrew interviewed on his own Penmanship podcast in 2017 – tough love on Andrew’s story drafts was a “supercharge” for Andrew’s writing, “because I was getting direct advice from a pro on what I was missing, what I could do better.” Guillatt has decades of magazine writer experience and in 2023 released a podcast with The Australian, Shadow of Doubt, worth a listen. “That guys knows his way around a feature story,” Andrew says. It was Nick Crocker who gave Andrew the invaluable advice early on his in freelancing journey that most of his time would be spend on generating story ideas, rather than execution. “As a freelancer, you’re only as good as your ideas,” Andrew says. “That muscle of finding untold stories or unanswered questions, that was definitely honed in those years.” How does one develop that skill for finding good stories? “Reading,” Andrew says. “Locally, nationally, and internationally. And going out in the world and seeing things and just wondering, ‘how did that get there? Who’s that person? How did this happen?” The obvious who, what, when, where, why, how type questions are valuable, because often other people are wondering the same things. Then it’s about pitching to editors and getting a commission, usually a few hundred dollars. “You string enough of those together, and you could make a living.”
McMillen’s 2017 podcast Penmanship featured interviews with Australia’s best writers including several well-known journalists
The freelancing lifestyle isn’t for everyone, Andrew concedes, and he wonders how anyone can get a start doing it in 2024 with low and mid-tier publications increasingly shutting down or relying on free content. “There wasn’t a lot of relaxing when you’re a freelancer because … I was always thinking of story ideas in the background and trying to maintain dozens of relationships with people, both in Australia and abroad.” There was also the “low level undercurrent” of discomfort that exists in the freelance lifestyle knowing “you’re literally only as good as your last story” and Andrew says didn’t realise how much it was weighing on him until he stopped.” He adds, “it can be really rewarding and a great way to live. But when you’re staring down the barrel of your own bills on a weekly basis, and you’re waiting for a payments of 500 or $1,000, a pop to come through to sustain you. That’s a really hard way to live.” In his early freelancing years he worked “obsessively” to the point where his girlfriend intervened – he could choose long hours or her. “So I thought she might be onto something here. So I reduced my working hours – reduced the night-time working hours certainly.” He adds, “And we’ve been happily married since 2015.”
I ask Andrew about his highlights working at The Oz. Profiling Daniel Johns, former frontman of Australian band Silverchair, was a highlight as Andrew grew up listening to their music and still finds his solo work interesting. That piece on the reclusive, media-shy Johns also featured a twist. Andrew spent the afternoon on John’s roof drinking alcohol and looking at a rainbow forming across the bay near Newcastle, relishing the experience with one of Australia’s great rock singers in anticipation of his latest album. Then just over a week later, John’s crashed his car into another vehicle in a drunken state. The story changed in that was previously a fun interaction of a journalist and a rockstar became more ominious. “It was a kind of a fun Tuesday afternoon for me while I was reporting the story, but perhaps it was a more regular occurrence for him,” Andrew says. John’s has since gone to rehab and is sober, and the “personal element of that deep connection to Silverchair’s music” has made it a lasting memory for Andrew.
Another favourite is his coverage of the Byron Bay metal band Parkway Drive, a feature of Andrew’s childhood when they played at his Bundaberg high school in 2005. For that story he went to the drummer’s house in Byron and chatted with him and his parents, then later went down to Sydney to watch them film a promo for the NRL – Parkway Drive were the soundtrack of the footy that year. It was “a rare case where they were crossing over into mainstream and getting their music heard on a very prominent TV program,” and as Andrew watched them mime their performance on a stage at Allianz Stadium, flamethrows spewing fire around them, he kept thinking to himself “this is so fucking weird that I’m watching this band … who I grew up listening to.” The band were laughing too at the absurdity of the situation. Then there’s a darker story that still means a lot to Andrew. He wrote ‘Susan Unbroken’ for the Weekend Australian magazine about a woman called Susan Bryant, whose husband Andrew, a doctor, had died suddenly by suicide. Susan became an advocate for mental health awareness afterwards, and Andrew covered her story in a magazine article after scrolling Reddit one night and finding her story. “That was a very meaningful story to me, and still is,” Andrew says.
I ask how Andrew views his job after seven years the nation’s premier music writer. “I’m so pumped almost every day about this job,” Andrew says. “I just find it endlessly fascinating so far…I just feel that my abilities are getting stronger with each story.” He tells me his love for storytelling has not diminished at all. “It gets stronger ever week, for sure, because I have so many brilliant colleagues here as well. Here in the Brisbane bureau, as well as on the paper nationally, there’s just so much great storytelling.” What’s next then? “I have no fucking idea, dude,” Andrew responds. He tells me that music writing is a luxury role anywhere, and says he’s recently focused more on multimedia reporting. Andrew is optimistic about the future. “There’s a lot to be inspired by and look forward to, and I am inspired, and I do look forward to it.”