The Australian wins plaudits at Walkleys
The Australian has featured strongly in journalism’s most prestigious awards, earning top gongs in investigative, feature and commentary writing, and the headline category.
The Australian has featured strongly in journalism’s most prestigious awards, earning top gongs in investigative, feature and commentary writing, and the headline category at the 67th edition of the Walkleys on Thursday night.
Hedley Thomas, David Murray, Isaac Irons and Slade Gibson claimed the investigative journalism crown for Shandee’s Story, a podcast series that exposed failures in Queensland’s state-run DNA laboratory following the murder of 23-year-old Mackay woman Shandee Blackburn.
The win marks Thomas’s eighth Walkley Award.
Will Swanton won the feature writing short (less than 4000 words) award for “The Babushka Smuggle”, in which he detailed a Sydney woman’s daring rescue mission to save her 91-year-old grandmother from war-torn Kyiv.
The Australian’s sub-editor Simon Firth claimed the headlines award, with “Hits & Mrs: It’s an Oscars like no other”, “Packer’s Act 3: Easy lies the head that no longer wears Crown” and “Pharma wants a knife: cashed up Mayne keen to cut some deals”.
The commentary, analysis or opinion award went to The Weekend Australian columnist Nikki Gemmell for “Election Aftermath”, “A Son’s Accident” and “The Untameable New Female”.
Walkley Foundation chief executive Shona Martyn said it had been a “huge year” for news, with war in Ukraine, the federal election and flooding events. “Australian journalists, photographers and camera operators have excelled in their coverage of these major events, sometimes putting their lives on the line,” she said.
“This year’s best journalism includes stories that were uncovered by old school legwork, tips, hard work, hunches and painstaking and considered investigation.”
Judging board chair Michael Brissenden said the quality of reporting in 2022 “hasn’t disappointed … in a year that has seen significant and powerful reporting on the fallout from the Covid pandemic, on extraordinary abuses of trust and power in sport and in government, on Indigenous issues and the environment and on the floods and Ukraine … Judging the best of all this isn’t easy and we congratulate all the winners and finalists.”
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