It takes a journalist

by Jessica Owers

Australia’s most famous journalist is also one of racing’s diehard fans. Jessica Owers met senior investigative reporter Hedley Thomas.

In 1887, on the first Tuesday in November, a tired racehorse trudged back to scale at Flemington with the Melbourne Cup in his pocket. Dunlop, to all but a few a lazy, one-paced plug, had won the Cup in race-record time, months after strangles had just about done him in.

In the stands, publican Richard Donovan, who coowned the horse, had won a fortune, and it was a long night at the Pastoral Hotel a few clicks east of Flemington. Never mind that Donovan was bankrupt just a few years later; the story was told and it was permanent, as all good Cup stories are. Fast forward 136 years to Brisbane, to senior investigate journalist Hedley Thomas. Some handful of generations removed, his grandfather was Richard Donovan, or, more specifically, his grandfather’s mother’s grandfather. Thomas has an old cigarette card of Dunlop, looking ewe-necked and white-socked with Tom Sanders aboard. For a man wildly famous for his storytelling, the story of Dunlop is one of his favourites.

“It’s always fascinated me,” Thomas says, and his large, serious eyes light up. “I always knew about Donovan through my mum, and I knew from my dad that his father was a really keen punter. Apparently he died listening to the races on a Saturday, with the transistor radio to his ear in the backyard.”

Thomas is a weapon in Australian journalism. His investigative work has decorated the most serious of mastheads, from the South China Morning Post to the Courier-Mail and The Australian. He is that vintage sort of reporter, with a Spirax notepad and an impatience to tell a good story the right way.

Thomas has won seven Walkley Awards (two gold) for his work in investigative journalism. He was News Corp’s youngest ever London correspondent, and he is in the Melbourne Press Club’s Media Hall of Fame, not that he’d ever tell you.

In 2018, Thomas pressed his editor at The Australian to allow him time and budget to investigate the disappearance in 1982 of Lynette Dawson. It was a cold case that had crept up on Australians occasionally for nearly 40 years; a mild-mannered housewife who had vanished one summer day from her home in Sydney’s Northern Beaches. Her husband, Chris Dawson, had never been investigated for her murder, despite two coronial inquests suggesting as much. Thomas, who had dabbled in the case as far back as 2002, proposed a long-form investigate podcast, supported by stories in the paper, in days when podcasts were still shiny, new and untapped.

‘The Teacher’s Pet’ became a breathtaking success. Fourteen initial episodes, 220,000 words and “six months of shoe-leather reporting”. It went around the world, leading podcast downloads in the US, the UK, Canada and New Zealand, the only Australian podcast ever to do so. The response to it overwhelmed Thomas, who went from having four or five episodes in hand to having none in hand, such was the floodtide of new evidence that rushed at him after even just the first episode.

“When I started ‘The Teacher’s Pet’, I didn’t know how to do a podcast. I’d never done one,” Thomas says. “I’m a storyteller, so I knew how to write and I thought I could write quickly, but it got to this crazy situation where I had to produce 15,000 words a week, narrate them, factcheck and legal them. So much information started flowing in from people who were listening to episodes one and two that I had to circle back and interview them, then restructure the episodes that I thought I had completed. It meant that I lost the head start, the buffer, and I was doing episodes week to week.”

Journalists cut their cloth on deadlines. It’s part of the job, but when 27 million worldwide listeners were downloading ‘The Teacher’s Pet’, it began to erode almost all aspects of Thomas’s life. It was the only story he worked on through 2018, a live, unfolding investigation into the disappearance and suspected murder of Lyn Dawson. Public pressure leaned towards a renewed investigation into the case and, with the podcast pulled down from Australian audiences during a subsequent trial, Chris Dawson was found guilty of his wife’s murder in late 2022. It was a win for justice, but a win for journalism too, and Hedley Thomas, a self-confessed introvert, as many writers are, was in the centre of it.

“Is it fame or just a bit of recognition?” he says. “I feel a bit awkward about that because I still go down to the Kenmore Tavern in my crocs, a bad shirt and board shorts.”

Thomas is a famous man now. Like most writers who ply their trades telling other people’s stories, he’s not always comfortable telling his own. He and his wife, former journalist Ruth Mathewson, live on acreage outside of Brisbane, in Brookfield with a labrador and two cows called Thelma and Louise. He eats raw onions à la Tony Abbott, and in conversation he is genuine and witty. But though built tall and broad, Thomas has a softness that probably cracked the back of his record-breaking podcast. He’s easy to talk to, which is obvious in his honied, near-addictive narration of ‘The Teacher’s Pet’.

The story of Dunlop is bobbing in the back of Thomas’s mind. He has questions about it, like how Richard Donovan ended up with the gelding in the first place. Did he buy the horse? Was it gifted to him? One day he might write a book about it, and it quickly becomes clear that this driven journalist, too impatient to go to university and who instead joined the Gold Coast Bulletin at the age of 17, is a racing tragic.

“I was a teenager jumping the fence at the racetrack at Bundall so we didn’t have to pay the three bucks’ admission,” Thomas says. “We’d go punting for the day. I remember wagging school with a friend of mine, Darren Wilkes, to go to the Prime Minister’s Cup, which was a midweek meeting on a Tuesday or Wednesday, and this is going back to 1983 or 1984. I must have been attracted to gambling as well because we also used to go to an illegal casino that was above the gelati bar in Surfers Paradise, in the Cavill Mall.”

Thomas was born in Canberra but the Gold Coast was the making of him. He loved its crooks, cons and honesty. It wasn’t trying to be anything other than it was.

“I love the Coast,” he says. “I think I’m a much more effective journalist because I’ve got a great bullshit detector, better than most, and that’s because I grew up on the Gold Coast. It had a reputation through the 80s as a regional city that had great natural draws, but it certainly attracted these so-called white-shoed con artists, and, as a young teenager at high school, and then as a young reporter at the Gold Coast Bulletin, I reported on some of these people.”

Roots seem to matter to Thomas. At the darkest points of ‘The Teacher’s Pet’, he took refuge at a Main Beach apartment belonging to Gerry Harvey and Katie Page. Harvey Norman had been the primary sponsor of the podcast, and the company is pushing six years in its support of all of Thomas’s podcasts since.

“Katie must have respected what I was trying to do,” he says. “I know she believes very strongly in the power of podcasts to help solve crimes, but who would have thought ‘The Teacher’s Pet’ would become this global juggernaut, that her connection to it would end up where it is now?”

From the Harveys to John and Paul Messara, Thomas is a connected man in racing. You’ll find him in a corporate box or the celebrity tent on Magic Millions Raceday, but you’ll also find him working the ring with the punting public. He loves the strangeness and colour of the racetrack. He credits it with a lot of his people skills.

From the Harveys to John and Paul Messara, Thomas is a connected man in racing. You’ll find him in a corporate box or the celebrity tent on Magic Millions Raceday, but you’ll also find him working the ring with the punting public. He loves the strangeness and colour of the racetrack. He credits it with a lot of his people skills.

“I love getting down into the public areas, into the bars and along the fence, separated from the VIPs and the silvertails,” he says. “The atmosphere down there is amazing. I love the egalitarianism of the track. I love it that John Messara could be as astute at tipping a horse to me as the bloke wearing pluggers and missing three teeth, who I bump into because he spilled beer on me as I made my way to the fence.” Thomas has small investments in racehorses here and there. He knows a bit about bloodlines, but the only one that has captivated him is Dunlop, the 1887 Melbourne Cup winner. Dunlop was ordinary at stud, so it’s not a bloodline with numbers on its side, but the six-time Groupwinning broodmare Veloce Bella is one of its rare descendants. In 2013, a Zabeel yearling from the mare was heading to Karaka and, assisted by John Messara, Thomas had notions to buy her. She proved wildly out of reach at $440,000, gavel down.

“I tried, and I mean really tried, to buy this offspring of Dunlop’s with this crazy idea that I would win a Melbourne Cup,” Thomas says. “It was going to be a repetition of history, but what are the chances? John Messara is such a wise and decent man. He must have thought he had a live one here.”

Journalism is a distrusted profession. In a recent Ethics Index, released by the Governance Institute of Australia, journalists ranked in the bottom 10 when it came to ethical perception, in hot company with Tik Tok and federal parliament. But there are journalists, and then there’s Hedley Thomas, for whom the ritualistic responsibilities of the career run deep.

During Chris Dawson’s recent trial, in which he was found guilty of the murder of his wife, Thomas was in the witness box for three days in what felt like “a really intrusive fishing expedition”. His podcast was held up to the light as an example of egregious media interference in a criminal trial process, and it was inferred that an ‘over-zealous and uncensored investigative journalist’ was a risk to a fair trial. Thomas takes exception to this, to judges and defence lawyers telling journalists how to practice journalism. In his podcasts, including the ratings hit ‘Shandee’s Story’, he has used journalism to hunt fact and truth in the name of storytelling. Claire Harvey, his hard-hitting colleague at The Australian, told him he’s a bit of a hero to most other journalists, while Leigh Sales, an award-winning reporter, said it perfectly.

“If you’ve done something wrong, there can surely be no more terrifying prospect than Hedley Thomas taking an interest.” It’s on the inside leaf of Thomas’s new book, The Teacher’s Pet.

“I’m not an angry or aggressive person,” he says. “I’m pretty chilled. I’d rather have a peaceful, yielding sort of life, but I hate seeing wrongdoings. I hate seeing unsolved crimes that could be solved, and I can become relentless, focused and single-minded when it’s necessary. I’ve had to stand up against some very strongwilled, clever people and not yield, but I’m very stubborn. My wife tells me I hate being told what to do, and I don’t like it when I’m being bullied or steered against my own will.”

The press, they say, must be brave as well as free, and it needs journalists like Hedley Thomas. He is yet to set his career interests on horse racing, and that’s probably just as well.

The press, they say, must be brave as well as free, and it needs journalists like Hedley Thomas. He is yet to set his career interests on horse racing, and that’s probably just as well.