The Guardian Australia today are celebrating 10 years since their launch on 27 May, 2013 and have featured various throwback articles of their biggest stories in the decade since launching.
Since 2013, the Guardian Australia has won a number of awards, including Walkley Awards, Quill Awards for Victorian Journalism, the Lowy Insitute Media Award, and National Rural Press Club Awards, among others.
Below are excerpts from the featured stories from The 10th Anniversary of The Guardian Australia:
Behrouz Boochani, the refugee writer who exposed the cruelty of Australia’s island jail
Behrouz Boochani and Ben Doherty look back at the risks he took to get this story of cruelty in Australia’s island jail to the world.
“When Ben Doherty met Behrouz Boochani for the first time, it was the middle of the night on Manus Island.
The two journalists embraced in the darkness of the immigration detention centre.
Boochani was struck by how tall Doherty was. The Guardian Australia reporter was shocked by the refugee’s frailty, his ribs visible in the moonlight.
“I knew of the mental anguish being in those situations had but the physical impact on his body was extreme,” he says. “Behrouz was a really unwell man by the end of his detention.”
The staggering omission that led to Deaths Inside, the tally tracking Indigenous deaths in custody
The question was: ‘How many people have died since the 1991 royal commission?’ Nobody knew – so a Guardian Australia team spent eight months trawling through inquests and media reports, striving to highlight human stories behind shocking statistics.
“In cities across Australia in 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests erupted around the world, the number 432 was everywhere – displayed on banners at rallies and at marches.
“That number didn’t exist before we published Deaths Inside,” says Calla Wahlquist, one of the Guardian Australia journalists behind the massive data-based project.
Eight months in the making, Deaths Inside identified every Indigenous death in Australian custody known to have taken place since the royal commission into these deaths delivered its 1991 report – laying bare how little had changed in the intervening 27 years.
Part of its genesis dates back to August 2014, when a 22-year-old Aboriginal woman named Ms Dhu died in police custody in Western Australia while serving time for unpaid fines.”
How a leaked USB stick became the Nauru files – a tale of brutality and despair told in 160,000 words
A huge cache of reports from the heart of Australia’s immigration detention regime led to a Guardian scoop – and lasting change to how the country treats asylum seekers.
“It was March 2016 and Paul Farrell, then a reporter at Guardian Australia, had agreed to meet an anonymous source.
He had been reporting on immigration for several years but still, when he was slipped a USB stick across the table and told, “I think it might be of interest to you,” he had no idea what to expect.
“I booted it up and what flashed on to the screen was most comprehensive archive I’d ever seen of what was happening at the Nauru [immigration detention] facility at the time,” he says.
“Accounts from guards, caseworkers and teachers of horrific incidents they’d observed: self-harm, violence, hunger strikes. There was just this overwhelming sense of despair.”
Farrell walked into the office of the then deputy editor of Guardian Australia, Will Woodward, who immediately understood the importance of the story.
The question then became how to publish the 8,000 pages of leaked documents.”
How two reporters exposed Centrelink’s robodebt injustice and gave voice to the victimised
Christopher Knaus and Luke Henriques-Gomes look back at a Guardian Australia scoop and tell how initial shock gave way to disbelief, frustration and then – finally – vindication.
“It was 2016 and in the days before Christmas, a time when the news cycle slows down. Guardian Australia reporter Chris Knaus was deep in conversation with a whistleblower.
The compliance officer from the Centrelink debt recovery team told him that a majority of the debts being pursued under the Turnbull government’s new welfare crackdown were not legitimate.
They were “grossly unfair”, the officer said, and the automated system used to generate them was deeply flawed.
On 23 December, in an exclusive article not even Knaus entirely realised the significance of, he reported: “The system relies on an automated data-matching process to detect discrepancies between fortnightly income reported to Centrelink and annual pay information held by the tax office.”
This process became known as “income averaging” – a key part of the scheme later dubbed robodebt – and was ruled unlawful in a landmark federal court case. The entire scheme would later become the subject of a royal commission.
In early 2017 Knaus reported the first clear evidence of how income averaging was being used by Centrelink to raise millions in inaccurate debts. His story on one welfare recipient, Michael Griffin, laid out the faults in the income averaging process in stark simplicity.”
More articles celebrating the anniversary of The Guardian Australia are available here.