Journalism alumnus wins highest accolade

An ABC North Asia correspondent and USQ alumnus was recently named Queensland Journalist of the Year at the annual state media awards.

Mark Willacy, who graduated from USQ with a Bachelor of Arts (Journalism and English Literature) in 1995, was also awarded for Best Television Feature.

It was Mr Willacy’s report broadcast on ABC TV’s Foreign Correspondent program about the massacre of 34 journalists in the Philippines that won him the highest accolade.

Mr Willacy, who regularly returns to Toowoomba to visit his parents, said studying at USQ was a good grounding for launching a career in journalism.

'The ABC certainly believed I’d been equipped with the right sort of skills needed for a young reporter,' he said.

Currently the ABC's North Asia correspondent, Mr Willacy has been based in Tokyo since early December 2008.

From 2002 to mid-2006 he was the ABC's Middle East correspondent based in Jerusalem and during his four year posting, covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the war in Iraq.

He won a Walkley Award – Australia’s premier journalism award - for his reporting on the fall of Saddam. With cameraman Louie Eroglu, Mr Willacy broke the ABC record for the longest off-base assignment, spending 93 days on the road in and around Iraq covering the war. After the war, he also reported on Iraq's first democratic elections in half a century and the ongoing insurgency.

He was also nominated for Walkley awards in 2004 and 2006 for his coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has reported from across the Middle East and Asia, covering stories in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, Morocco, Lebanon, Turkey, Iran and the Persian Gulf (on board HMAS Melbourne and HMAS Kanimbla).

After returning from the Middle East Mr Willacy was a senior reporter with the ABC rural program Landline. Following that, he moved to The 7:30 Report, where in 2008 he won best TV current affairs at the Queensland Media Awards for breaking stories on dangerous lead levels in children in Mount Isa.