Ben Hills

Ben Hills is a senior writer on the Sydney Morning Herald and one of Australia's most experienced investigative reporters. After an apprenticeship on a number of country newspapers, he worked for the Melbourne age from 1969-1981 under the late Graeme Perkin, and was responsible for founding that newspaper's insight investigative reporting team (famous for such exposes as the housing commission land scams, and the reporting which led up to the "loans affair" and the sacking of Gough Whitlam as prime minister) and served as foreign correspondent, assistant editor, and magazine group publisher. From 1981-5 Ben was a producer on the Australian 60 Minutes current affairs programme during its heyday, working with the original team of George Negus, Ray Martin, Jana Wendt and Ian Leslie. Ben returned briefly to Melbourne in the mid-1980's to work under Eric Beecher on the Melbourne Herald, before returning to Sydney to join the Sydney Morning Herald.

In a long and varied career, Ben has covered wars (reporting from Beirut, Belfast, and the Sahara during the 1970's and 1980's), coronations (the Emperor Bokassa in the Central African Empire) disasters (the Kobe earthquake of 1995) and scandals (medical horror stories such as the dalkon shield, the blood/aids scandals of the 1980s, the victims of minamata, a baby-trading racket in taiwan, and the death-toll of asbestos). He has interviewed prime ministers (Whitlam, Fraser, Howard), cardinals, generals, film-stars, authors and super-chefs -- as well as aboriginal and Ainu rights activists, art-forgers, victims of fraud, crime and medical malpractice, and survivors of the Hhiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombing, the japanese medical death-camps of china and the "comfort women" of korea.

He has served as a foreign correspondent on three occasions, reporting from about 60 countries : in the mid-1970's based in London, but principally covering Europe, Africa and the Middle East ; in the early 1980's based in Hong Kong, where he was publisher of a magazine group ; and from 1992-1995 when he was the Herald's Tokyo correspondent, covering Japan, North and South Korea, eastern Russia and north-east China.

In 1989 Ben was "commended" in the Graeme Perkin Australian journalist of the year award ; and in 1990 he won the Walkley, Australia's most prestigious award in journalism, for investigative reporting. Ben can be contacted through his website benhills.com.
Japan Behind the Lines
© : Ben Hills. 1998 - 2007