From Scotland, Robert McMillan ran away to sea at the age of 14, and for a time lived in the United States of America, where he worked on a Boston newspaper. He then went to England and was employed by the
Liverpool Mercury. Upon his arrival in New South Wales around 1890, he became editor and proprietor of the
Blue Mountains Express. In 1892 he began writing regularly for the
Stock and Station Journal, and soon became editor and a shareholder of that publication. He continued with that journal until 1917, writing columns and feature articles using various pseudonyms. In 1917 he became the editor of the
Queensland Grazier. In the early years of the twentieth century he was an active campaigner against restrictive Federal taxes on the printing industry, and was instrumental in breaking the exclusionary press cable service monopoly. He was, at various times, a representative of the New South Wales Country Press Association, director of the Independent Cable Association of Australasia, a foundation committee member of the New South Wales Institute of Journalists, a member of the Institute of Journalists, London, and founder and honorary Secretary of the Queensland Press Institute. In 1921 until his death in 1929 he was again the editor of the
Stock and Station Journal, which became
Country Life in 1924.
A number of selections of Robert McMillan's non-fiction works, often presented as stories for children, were published, including Science Gossip for Young and Old (1907), The Origin of the World (1913), The Story of a Microscope (1914) and Why We Do It : Psychological Gossip (1919). He also published a pamphlet, An Infamous Monopoly : The Story of Our Cable-Slavery (1908), which attacked the United Cable Association's monopoly of press cables.
