Miscellaneous
The 2020 winner of the Gold Walkley Award, the highest prize in Australian journalism, was ABC’s Mark Willacy and the ABC Investigations team, Four Corners, for the shocking program “Killing Field” revealing alleged war crimes committed by Australian SAS soldiers. Working tirelessly to find sources within the secretive ranks of the Special Air Service Regiment, the SAS, and spending weeks verifying allegations with family members of alleged murder victims on the ground in war zones, Willacy produced gut-wrenching reports too powerful for the public and the defence hierarchy to ignore. Willacy was interviewed by Chris Masters, Gold Walkley award-winning journalist and author, and the first Australian journalist to be embedded with special forces in Afghanistan, to discuss the program, the difficulties of conducting investigations into one of the more secretive organisations in the country, and the obfuscation of the Australian Defence Force, at the 2020 Walkley Winners' Dinner in Sydney on February 26.