Journalist
IT TAKES A by Jessica Owers
Australia’s most famous journalist is also one of racing’s diehard fans. Jessica Owers met senior investigative reporter Hedley Thomas.
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n 1887, on the first Tuesday in November, a tired racehorse trudged back to scale at Flemington with the Melbourne Cup in his pocket. Dunlop, to all but a few a lazy, one-paced plug, had won the Cup in race-record time, months after strangles had just about done him in. In the stands, publican Richard Donovan, who coowned the horse, had won a fortune, and it was a long night at the Pastoral Hotel a few clicks east of Flemington. Never mind that Donovan was bankrupt just a few years later; the story was told and it was permanent, as all good Cup stories are. Fast forward 136 years to Brisbane, to senior investigate journalist Hedley Thomas. Some handful of generations removed, his grandfather was Richard Donovan, or, more specifically, his grandfather’s mother’s grandfather. Thomas has an old cigarette card of Dunlop, looking ewe-necked and white-socked with Tom Sanders aboard. For a man wildly famous for his storytelling, the story of Dunlop is one of his favourites. “It’s always fascinated me,” Thomas says, and his large, serious eyes light up. “I always knew about Donovan through my mum, and I knew from my dad that his father was a really keen punter. Apparently he died listening to the races on a Saturday, with the transistor radio to his ear in the backyard.” Thomas is a weapon in Australian journalism. His investigative work has decorated the most serious of mastheads, from the South China Morning Post to the Courier-Mail and The Australian. He is that vintage sort of reporter, with a Spirax notepad and an impatience to tell a good story the right way. Thomas has won seven Walkley Awards (two gold) for his work in investigative journalism. He was News Corp’s youngest ever London correspondent, and he is in the Melbourne Press Club’s Media Hall of Fame, not that he’d ever tell you.
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\ IT TAKES A JOURNALIST \ JESSICA OWERS
In 2018, Thomas pressed his editor at The Australian to allow him time and budget to investigate the disappearance in 1982 of Lynette Dawson. It was a cold case that had crept up on Australians occasionally for nearly 40 years; a mild-mannered housewife who had vanished one summer day from her home in Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Her husband, Chris Dawson, had never been investigated for her murder, despite two coronial inquests suggesting as much. Thomas, who had dabbled in the case as far back as 2002, proposed a long-form investigate podcast, supported by stories in the paper, in days when podcasts were still shiny, new and untapped. ‘The Teacher’s Pet’ became a breathtaking success. Fourteen initial episodes, 220,000 words and “six months of shoe-leather reporting”. It went around the world, leading podcast downloads in the US, the UK, Canada and New Zealand, the only Australian podcast ever to do so. The response to it overwhelmed Thomas, who went from having four or five episodes in hand to having none in hand, such was the floodtide of new evidence that rushed at him after even just the first episode. “When I started ‘The Teacher’s Pet’, I didn’t know how to do a podcast. I’d never done one,” Thomas says. “I’m a storyteller, so I knew how to write and I thought I could write quickly, but it got to this crazy situation where I had to produce 15,000 words a week, narrate them, factcheck and legal them. So much information started flowing in from people who were listening to episodes one and two that I had to circle back and interview them, then restructure the episodes that I thought I had completed. It meant that I lost the head start, the buffer, and I was doing episodes week to week.”
