Kathy Marks wins top journalism award

Former Reuters journalist Kathy Marks has won Australia’s top journalism award for her coverage of the plight of indigenous Tasmanians. 

Marks, who worked for Reuters in the mid-1980s, was honoured in the Indigenous Affairs category at the 2013 Walkely Awards in Brisbane on 29 November. Her winning entry, Channeling Mannalargena, explored issues of identity, ancestry and culture among the Aboriginal people of Tasmania and appeared in the January 2013 edition of Griffith REVIEW, an Australian quarterly. The judges called Marks’ article “an elegantly written essay about a community still wrestling daily with the act of colonisation”.

Marks joined Reuters as a graduate trainee in 1984 and worked in London and Bonn before joining The Daily Telegraph. She moved to Sydney in 1999 as the Asia-Pacific Correspondent for The Independent. Marks is the author of Pitcairn: Paradise Lost, a book that resulted from her coverage in 2004 of the sexual abuse trial on remote Pitcairn Island of seven descendants of the original mutineers on the Bounty. The book won an Australian Crime Writers Association Ned Kelly Award for writing about true crime in 2010. ■