Joanne McCarthy

“Dogged” is a word that comes up regularly in relation to investigative reporting, and Joanne McCarthy is a true terrier. Her reporting unravels injustice and makes a real difference for the vulnerable. 

Thousands of women were implanted with pelvic mesh devices in public and private hospitals in the 1980s and 1990s. While doctors sounded the alarm about horrific complications, the manufacturers continued to aggressively market the devices and regulatory bodies remained largely silent. McCarthy put a human face to the women left suffering in silence, some left unable to have sex, “permanently incontinent”, distressed and depressed. Negligence cases sank without trace and systems that should have protected victims failed around the world, while McCarthy drew the threads back to our own backyard. 

Her investigation spanned three years and more than 80 articles. It provided a local view of a global catastrophe, as sensitive to victims as it was unflinching in exposing negligence.

McCarthy is a Newcastle Herald journalist whose extensive coverage of institutional child sexual abuse contributed to the establishment of the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Her campaigning reporting also won her the 2013 Gold Walkley and Graham Perkin Award. In 2015, she received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Newcastle for her work exposing child sexual abuse in the Hunter region. McCarthy was raised and still lives on the Central Coast of NSW. She has proudly remained a regional journalist for nearly four decades. This is her third Walkley Award.