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Frank Moorhouse

Biographical Notes from The Walkley Awards website 2007

All Media - Social Equity Journalism - Winner

Frank Moorhouse, Griffith Review, "The Writer in a Time of Terror"

For a developed country, Australia's international press freedom ranking trails embarrassingly behind many supposedly less fortunate nations. In his essay, Frank Moorhouse catalogued the significant losses of civil liberties and freedom of expression in Australia in recent years. Thoroughly and dispassionately, Moorhouse listed intrusions by the security agencies and the Attorney-General against freedom of expression, all in the name of national security.

His essay went on to frame debate on an issue that has grown in prominence with the Government's campaigns against whistleblowers, leaks and journalists protecting their confidential sources. It is an issue with implications bigger than journalism, reaching to the heart of democracy and civil liberties.

Moorhouse completed a cadetship on Frank Packer's Daily Telegraph and then edited country newspapers including the Lockhart Review and the Boorowa News. He has since been a columnist and contributor to various publications and written 14 books, mainly fiction, including the first two novels in his League of Nations trilogy – Grand Days and Dark Palace (both Vintage Australia). Dark Palace won the 2001 Miles Franklin Prize for Literature.

This essay has already won the 2007 PEN Keneally award and the Alfred Deakin prize in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards.

Judges' comments

With a great depth of historical insight, his essay ultimately becomes a devastating critique of what Moorhouse argues has become "an alarmingly authoritarian" government seeking to deal with the threat of terrorism.