International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Bill Birnbauer, Australia, is senior lecturer in journalism at Monash University in Melbourne. Before joining Monash in December 2008, he was an investigative reporter at The Sunday Age and The Age newspapers.

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He has 30 years experience in print journalism, has written two books and has produced documentaries for ABC and SBS television in Australia. In 1993, he became a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. He was one of the first reporters to use Australia’s Freedom of Information laws, unearthing documents on potential nuclear station power sites, and later, obtaining mortality rates for state hospitals. He has won numerous awards, including a Melbourne Press Club Quill award and shared a Walkley Award, Australia’s top journalism prize, for a narrative on the Port Arthur massacre, in which a gunman killed 35 people. He has won five legal reporting awards for his stories on Big Tobacco’s international strategy to destroy damaging internal documents to keep them out of litigants’ hands. He has participated in two ICIJ projects: the first exposing links between organized crime syndicates and Big Tobacco, as well as The Water Barons, an award-winning project on the privatization of water. He is currently doing a Masters degree on non-profit investigative journalism.