Louise Milligan
Laura Elizabeth Woollett reviews ‘Pheasants Nest’ by Louise Milligan
A mid-career genre change is always cause for attention. Best known for her fearless investigations into institutional sexual abuse, it is hardly surprising that Louise Milligan should transfer her journalistic nous and commitment to social justice into the realm of crime fiction. Pheasants Nest is part of a movement in post-#MeToo crime fiction, which has flourished in Australia and abroad in the past decade. It challenges the norms of the genre to centre victims and amplify the reverberations of violence against women (recent examples include Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women and Jacqueline Bublitz’s Before You Knew My Name).
... (read more)In the wake of Brittany Higgins's startling allegations of sexual abuse in Parliament House, Beejay Silcox revisits her review of Witness by award-winning journalist Louise Milligan. Witness (recently shortlisted in the 2021 Stella Prize) is an interrogative critique of the criminal trial process. It is the culmination of five years of research into how witnesses are treated (and often intimidated or worse) in court rooms.
... (read more)Beejay Silcox reviews 'Witness: An investigation into the brutal cost of seeking justice' by Louise Milligan
The street entrance to the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court is a scoop-hungry gauntlet of journos who spend the day jostling for soundbites, ever ready to give chase. As a rookie reporter, Louise Milligan used to be part of the Sydney court scrum, but when she arrived to give evidence in Australia’s ‘Trial of the Decade’, she had become the story. In her investigative work for ABC’s Four Corners – which begat the Walkley Book Award-winning volume Cardinal: The rise and fall of George Pell (2017) – Milligan had been the first person to hear one of the criminal accusations against the Vatican’s disgraced treasurer
... (read more)Louise Milligan is an investigative reporter for ABC TV's Four Corners. Her book Cardinal won the Walkley Book Award. She is also the recipient of the 2019 Press Freedom Medal. Her new book, Witness, is reviewed in the December issue.
... (read more)Barney Zwartz reviews 'Cardinal: The rise and fall of George Pell' by Louise Milligan
George Pell is the most polarising religious leader Australia has had in recent decades, certainly since Daniel Mannix – perhaps since Samuel Marsden. For most of his career he has been loathed or adored for his sternly inflexible defence of a Catholic orthodoxy predating the second Vatican Council, his robust and sometimes ...
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