 | This biographical article is written like a résumé .(November 2019) |
Hedley Thomas | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Occupation(s) | Journalist and author |
| Known for | Walkley Awards; including two Gold Walkleys |
| Notable work |
|
Hedley Thomas is an Australian investigative journalist and author, who has won seven Walkley Awards, two of which are Gold Walkleys. [1]
Thomas is married and lives in Brisbane. He has two children. [2] In 2002 Thomas and his family were victims of a death threat and a drive-by shooting. [3] [4]
Soon after completing high school, Thomas started his career as a newspaper copy boy for the Gold Coast Bulletin in 1984. [2]
After nine months as a copy boy he started a journalism cadetship at the Gold Coast Bulletin, then in 1988 moved to The Courier-Mail in Brisbane. [2] [5] After a year, he moved to London as a foreign correspondent for News Limited Australia for two years.[ citation needed ] As a 22-year-old journalist there he covered historic events such as the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Romanian Revolution. [6]
Thomas returned to The Courier-Mail in late 1991, working there for 18 months. [2] [5] Thomas then moved to become the News Editor at the Hong Kong Standard for six months, before moving to the South China Morning Post in late 1993. [2] [5] There Thomas served in a variety of roles, including Senior Reporter, Deputy Features Editor, and Senior Writer. [5]
In 1999 Thomas returned to Brisbane and The Courier-Mail. [5]
In 2005 he won a Walkley Award for a series of articles on Bundaberg Director of surgery Jayant Patel, which he later used a base for the non-fiction book Sick to Death, published in 2007. [7] The book also won the Queensland Premiers Literary Award for "Literary Work Advancing Public Debate". [8]
In 2006 Thomas moved to the Brisbane bureau of The Australian , [5] and in 2007 won a Gold Walkley for a series highlighting the flawed police pursuit of Mohamed Haneef, an innocent doctor accused of being a terrorist. [9] After winning the award, Thomas left journalism in early 2008 [10] to work in the resources sector, with a role in communications, investor and government relations. [11]
He returned to journalism and The Australian around 2010, [5] notably covering aspects of the AWU affair during 2012. [12]
Thomas won a second Gold Walkley in 2018, along with producer Slade Gibson, for podcast series The Teacher's Pet , a 14-episode investigation of the unsolved disappearance of Sydney mother Lynette Dawson in 1982. As of December 2018 [update] , the podcast series was downloaded 28 million times, and was the only Australian podcast to hit the number one spot in the US, the UK, Canada and New Zealand. [13] [14]
He was inducted into the Melbourne Press Club’s Media Hall of Fame in November 2018. [15]
In 2022, following a guilty verdict in September in the murder trial of Lynette Dawson's former husband, Chris Dawson, Thomas received the Sir Keith Murdoch Award for his work on the podcast series. [16]
Awards include:
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