Colleen Egan is a Western Australian journalist.
Extract from Walkley Awards page: Citation
MOST OUTSTANDING CONTRIBUTION TO JOURNALISM 2006
Colleen Egan, investigative journalist, The Sunday Times
Colleen Egan is one of the true advocacy journalists of our time, willing to bear immense personal sacrifice in order to see that justice is served for the disempowered.
The Perth-based journalist was the first to properly investigate the case of Andrew Mallard, convicted and detained in 1995 for the murder of jeweller Pamela Lawrence. Approached by the Mallard family in 1998, Egan’s subsequent investigations revealed that Mallard’s conviction had been largely based on a forced confession.
Since then, she has been the driving force behind the long-running campaign to prove the Western Australian man’s innocence. Her stories and commentary on Mallard, published in The Sunday Times and The Australian over the past four years, served to spark public interest in the family’s campaign to have him released.
Egan’s insightful work inspired other journalists, to whom she volunteered her support, including the ABC’s Four Corners and documentary maker Michael Muntz, whose program Saving Andrew Mallard screened on the ABC in May 2006. Egan’s own work for The Sunday Times, “An Innocent Man Walks Free”, was commended for this year’s Walkley Award for Print News Report.
After years of work, Egan helped to uncover new evidence that led to Mallard’s release after 12 years of imprisonment, and a public apology from the WA Police Commissioner Karl O’Callaghan in October 2006. The conduct of the police involved in the case is now under scrutiny by WA’s Crime and Corruption Commission.
Egan first etched a name for herself as an investigative journalist in 2000 when her exclusive interviews with terrorist Jack Roche were published in The Australian. Her work has since taken her to London, covering trials at the Old Bailey, and back to Perth as a weekly columnist for The Sunday Times.
She has shown what can be achieved when individuals commit themselves to a worthy cause. In the true spirit of this award, Colleen Egan used the full extent of her skills to doggedly pursue a worthy story and redress a wrongdoing. Her work has been responsible for the overturning of a major miscarriage of justice.
Colleen Egan, of the Sunday Times, Perth, has won News Limited’s 2007 Sir Keith Murdoch Award for Journalism for an eight-year investigation that led to the freeing of a man who was wrongly jailed for murder.
From Crikey: Noel Crichton-Browne: never recovered after allegedly telling journalist Colleen Egan "I will screw your tits off" if she reported how he voted at a party conference in 1995. On being told it was her job to report the news, Crichton-Browne said: "Would you like to have s-x tonight? Write that down."