Billionaire brings former Gold Walkley winner back from the cold

August 28, 2026 — 5:00am

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In this week’s On Background, two journalism powerhouses return to the field, News Corp struggles to fill one of its top tabloid jobs, and Punters Politics baffles the Canberra press gallery.

Two very different forces in journalism, which have been dormant for some years, are coming back.

On Background hears the Gold Walkley-winning investigative reporter Caro Meldrum-Hanna, best known for the controversial three-part Ghost Train series published by the ABC, is back on the tools, working on a project backed by billionaire philanthropist Judith Neilson.

While details are scant, Meldrum-Hanna is working to produce a program on Indigenous Australians, with the backing of Neilson’s deep pockets.

The two are certainly an interesting combo. Meldrum-Hanna won five Walkleys in the 2010s during her time at the ABC, eventually working on a series of investigations under the “EXPOSED” brand that confusingly ran in the Four Corners time slot but wasn’t strictly part of it. Very ABC.

Four Corners itself has been in trouble recently after it was forced to remove multiple episodes fronted by Mahmood Fazal over sourcing issues. But before then, there was Exposed: the Ghost Train Fire, which sparked a furore from friends and colleagues of the late NSW premier Neville Wran. An independent ABC review praised the program overall, but found it had also unfairly implied Wran was complicit in the fire at Sydney’s Luna Park involving the underworld........

© The Sydney Morning Herald