The Australian’s national chief correspondent Hedley Thomas wins 2022 Graham Perkin award
The Australian’s national chief correspondent has won one of journalism’s highest honours for his outstanding podcasts Shandee’s Story and The Teacher’s Trial.
Curiosity, compassion and a strong streak of righteous fury at incompetence and injustice: those are the qualities that make Hedley Thomas Australia’s most outstanding journalist.
Thomas already has two Gold Walkleys and too many other awards to count – and on Friday night he was named the 2022 Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year.
The honour was presented at the Melbourne Press Club Quill Awards for Thomas’s work in exposing the failings of Queensland’s DNA testing laboratory, in our investigation Shandee’s Story.
He was also recognised for his work on The Australian’s acclaimed podcast The Teacher’s Trial, which followed the murder trial of former schoolteacher and football star Chris Dawson, who was found guilty last year of murdering his wife Lynette in 1982. Dawson was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
Part of Thomas’ magic is the ability to seize a fortuitous moment and tell an extraordinary story. In the case of Shandee’s Story, it was a Google search – along the lines of “DNA expert juries Queensland” – that led him to Kirsty Wright, a courageous scientist who helped him uncover catastrophic failures that have shaken the forensics community around the nation.
Thomas was not trying to uncover a scientific scandal – he was investigating the unsolved 2013 murder of Queensland woman Shandee Blackburn. But his on-the-ground reporting in Mackay kept turning up baffling misconceptions among the locals, thanks to the way DNA evidence had been presented in court.
Thomas found Dr Wright on a web search. Together they began pulling at the thread of evidence in Shandee’s case and found a full-blown scandal: crime scene samples had been botched, buried or ignored for years.
Part of Thomas’s appeal to audiences is his uniquely warm and engaging storytelling style, which he brought to audio in The Teacher’s Pet podcast, along with his collaborator, sound engineer and musician Slade Gibson.
Thomas has previously said one of the driving forces behind his work is a desire to achieve results, not to just to retell a story.
“My overriding aim with these podcasts is to solve crimes,” he said last year. “If we’re going to put that much effort in, let’s try and … identify a culprit.”
Speaking after receiving the award on Friday, Thomas paid tribute to those who shared with him their stories but said such work came with challenges.
“One of the greatest barriers that a lot of journalists come up against is the reluctance of the authorities and some in the criminal justice system to allow journalism to try to solve these cases that police failed to solve,” he said.
“In Lyn Dawson’s case it was 36 years old and I took it on. We have to fight the attempts to block our access to what should be public information.”
The Australian’s chief international correspondent, Cameron Stewart, was highly commended at the Quill Awards in the feature writing category for his story, “Bad Betty”, about Victorian Supreme Court judge Betty King, in The Weekend Australian Magazine. Stewart won the Graham Perkin award in 2008.
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