Guardian Australia wins Walkley award for Indigenous affairs for The Descendants series | Indigenous Australians
Guardian Australia won the Walkley award for excellence in journalism for a series about Australians coming to terms with the reality that their families are involved in border violence.
Guardian Australia won the Walkley Indigenous award at Thursday night’s ceremony for The Descendants series, based on Guardian Australia’s 2019 Walkley-winning series The Killing Times. The series explored the deeply personal process of telling the truth from both sides of the border about some of the most horrific events in Australia’s past.
The team was led by Lorena Allam, Guardian Australia’s former Indigenous affairs editor and now industry professor at the Jumbunna Institute of Indigenous education and research at UTS, as well as former Guardian Australian Indigenous affairs correspondent Sarah Collard and Guardian Australian Indigenous affairs correspondent Ella Archibald-Binge.
The Descendants data and engagement was created by data and engagement editor Nick Evershed and editorial developer. Andy Ball. Drawings are by art desk maker 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 Nikon-Walkley Press Photographer of the Year for his portfolio of work published in Al Jazeera, The Age and The Guardian. The jury praised Hopkins as “a powerful storyteller who uses beauty and artistic approach in both color and black-and-white assignments that range from protests to portraits.”
Adele Ferguson and Chris Gillett have won Australian journalism’s highest honour, the 2025 Gold Walkley, for a series of stories exploring systemic failures in childcare across 7.30, Four Corners and ABC online.
Ferguson and Gillett won three Walkley categories: TV/video: current affairs short, TV/video: current affairs long and the all-media award for investigative journalism. The duo worked on the latter two with colleagues Ben Butler and Lara Sonnenschein. The Walkley panel of judges unanimously named their work the investigation of the year.
Rick Morton won the Walkley book award for his book Mean Streak, about the robot debt scheme.
Peter Manning, former head of news and current affairs at ABC TV, has been honored for his outstanding contribution to journalism.
Manning had a golden era for Four Corners between 1985 and 1989, launching 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.
