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Australian journalist From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hedley Thomas is an Australian investigative journalist and author, who has won eight Walkley Awards, two of which are Gold Walkleys.[1]
 | 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 |
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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] As a result of its success, the investigative depth of the show was also criticised as potentially complicating, or compromising, witness testimony and ongoing police investigations.[15][16] In 2022, following a guilty verdict in the murder trial of Dawson's former husband, Chris Dawson, Thomas received the Sir Keith Murdoch Award for his work on the podcast series.[17] Two follow-up series, called The Teacher's Trial and The Teacher's Accuser were aired 2022-2023.[18]
Since the success of The Teacher's Pet, Thomas has hosted (and regularly appeared in) a number of other podcasts[19] including The Night Driver (2020);[20] Shandee's Story and Shandee's Legacy (2021-2023).[21] In February 2022, revelations from Shandee's Story prompted the coronial inquest into her disappearance to reopen[22] alongside a wider inquiry into Queensland's state-run forensics lab.[23]
He was inducted into the Melbourne Press Club’s Media Hall of Fame in November 2018.[24]
Awards include:
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