Guardian Australia has won a Walkley award for excellence in journalism for a series on Australians facing the truth of their family’s involvement in frontier violence.
Guardian Australia won the Walkley Indigenous affairs at Thursday night’s ceremony for the The Descendants series, which built on Guardian Australia’s 2019 Walkley award-winning series The Killing Times. The series explored the deeply personal process of truth-telling about some of the most horrific incidents in Australia’s past, from both sides of the frontier.
The team was led by Lorena Allam, Guardian Australia’s former editor of Indigenous affairs, now industry professor at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous education and research at UTS, as well as former Guardian Australia Indigenous affairs reporter Sarah Collard, and Guardian Australia Indigenous affairs reporter Ella Archibald-Binge.
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
The Descendants data and interactive were built by the data and interactives editor, Nick Evershed, and editorial developer, Andy Ball. Illustrations are by the picture desk producer and illustrator Victoria Hart, with photography by Yamatji man Tamati Smith and Guardian Australia photographers Ellen Smith and Blake Sharp-Wiggins.
Christopher Hopkins was also named the Nikon-Walkley Press Photographer of the Year for his portfolio of work, which was published in Al Jazeera, the Age and the Guardian. Judges praised Hopkins as a “powerful storyteller who uses beauty and an artistic approach to his assignments which range from protests to portraits, in both colour and black and white”.
Adele Ferguson and Chris Gillett won the 2025 Gold Walkley, Australian journalism’s highest honour, for a series of stories on 7.30, Four Corners and ABC online which explored the systematic failures in childcare.
Ferguson and Gillett won three Walkley categories: TV/video: current affairs short, TV/video: current affairs long, and all-media prize for investigative journalism. The pair worked on the latter two with colleagues Ben Butler and Lara Sonnenschein. The Walkley judging board unanimously described their work as the investigation of the year.
Rick Morton was awarded the Walkley book award for Mean Streak which was about the robodebt scheme.
Peter Manning, the former head of ABC TV news and current affairs, was honoured for his outstanding contribution to journalism.
Manning oversaw a golden age for Four Corners between 1985 and 1989 and launched programs such as Lateline, Foreign Correspondent, and Landline before becoming a journalism academic. The Walkley Foundation’s board of directors selects the award from peer nominations.
