I find that country people, especially those living on farms, have a certain kind of resilience. What stories are you finding fascinating right now? For more Kate McClymont gems, follow Kate on Twitter. theage.com.au — By Megan Gorrey and Kate McClymont February 26, 2021 — 8.23amPolice have discovered the remains of missing Sydney businesswoman and fraudster Melissa Caddick on the NSW South Coast more than three months after she vanished from her eastern suburbs home. Arriving late in journalism at 26, McClymont soon made up for lost time. You’ve told crikey.com.au that, while you were at university, you ran a busking booth in Kings Cross, whereby you would charge passers-by to receive verbal abuse from you. ... Kate McClymont takes the Walkley Award for print news in Canberra 2012. Revellers strolling through Kings Cross on a Saturday evening in the mid-1980s might have come across a surprising sight among the net-stockinged street-walkers, the hulking Tongan bouncers lounging outside the … Melissa Caddick disappeared on November 12, 2020. I wish that we had the American system, where public figures can really only sue for malice, because truth is no defence here in Australia. Kate McClymont “She is also an editor’s dream. See what Madeleine Gray has to say here. A corkboard with red string connecting incriminating photos? Do you support any charities? I am running for the Senate of Sydney University. It was subtitling for the deaf. The Beast has grown from 10,000 copies of a 40-page mag to a whopping 62,020 copy, 100-plus page behemoth - the largest distribution of any publication in the area. If any proof was needed that she became the unchallenged doyenne of investigative journalism look, no further than her chock-a-block trophy cabinet. That did it, in more ways than one. kate mcclymont: yes. I just think the demand for quality journalism has never been higher. It’s there for us all really. It truly was rivers of gold. You know it’s going to be a doozy, a ballbuster. I've spent most of my working life at Fairfax. It’s working more now, especially at The Washington Times and so on with Drumpf, but it hasn’t for a long time. 297 likes. They were secretly selling these poles overseas. “Blackie does such and such, revenge for blah blah blah…” and then there’s all these arrows going everywhere, and then it turned out the murderer was someone right on the outer tip of the whiteboard. This web page shows only a small excerpt of our McClymont research. I support Lou’s Place, which is a women’s homeless shelter. Kate McClymont delivering the keynote speech at the inaugural Australian Media Hall of Fame dinner, Sydney November 10 2017.. Revellers strolling through Kings Cross on a Saturday evening in the mid-1980s might have come across a surprising sight among the net-stockinged street-walkers, the hulking Tongan bouncers lounging outside the bars and strip joints, the heroin-dealers and the … Get news, events and competitions in your inbox. You can trust her with 100 per cent of your soul and 100 per cent of the company’s money when she comes to you with that little bit of a smile on her face. I first wrote about Eddie Obeid in 1999. Oh my God, it’s fascinating. Someone has just dropped in [name redacted]’s diary. Early History of the McClymont family. “No matter how stressful it was she was always enormous fun to work with,” says her former colleague and Walkley collaborator Anne Davies. It’s now 50 cents. Clearly a huge amount of work does go into every story, and obviously every story is different, but as a general rule, what does your investigative process look like? Unless someone in the family or someone else leaks it to you, you’re never going to get any tax records or get behind any trusts. It’s hard to say. As long as we don’t acquire anything ourselves, it’s sort of a bit like finders keepers. Like hello, how do you pay the mortgage on a $4.2 million dollar house when you and your wife only earn $120,000 a year? Once your name starts getting out there people come to you with stories. I just had a fold-up table and a milk crate for me and one for my guest. “We are extremely disappointed the Sydney Morning Herald’s Kate McClymont did not seek comment from Israel, his family or his church, for her story focussed on Israel’s church and its doctrine. View the profiles of people named Kate McClymont. Kate and her family also received death threats and were moved to a hotel for a few days. The private life of the billionaire gambler, widely believed to be the world's biggest, has long remained hidden - until now. September 5, 2019. It was about the goings-on of the rich and famous in the Eastern Suburbs. In 2000, for instance, I went through all of his property holdings and I found that he had had all these fires. I love Three Blue Ducks, and there is a new one that’s just opened that’s really nice as well, just around the corner, called Huxton’s at Bronte. I love the ATO stories with the Cranstons. Although children do have their uses. This was McClymont’s introduction to Sydney’s underbelly and the talent she honed on that sleazy sidewalk would not only serve her in good stead for the next 30 years, it would land her the ideal job. Can you elaborate on that side racket for us please? Oh no, I think it was that I had grown up in a household where news and current affairs were constantly consumed. The Freeman family were not pleased with the description and McClymont received the first of many death threats. Legal proceedings and jail time is the order of the day in Sydney now that the state is continuing its prosecutions against Eddie Obeid, Ian Macdonald, both former ministers in NSW ALP governments and those connected to them. So, with defamation laws, I think it’s really difficult. I generally start off with two documents: I have one I put down the notes on as I go along, and I also like to do a timeline because it always forces you to look at connections between things and you just think, “Oh my God! It was dire. You’ve ruined my life!” I thought then, and as I often think now, that even if you just write the truth, in the mind of the person you’re writing about, it’s always your fault. Catherine (Kate) Ensbey (born McClymont) was born in 1872, at birth place, to Martin McClymont and Mary Ann McClymont (born McCann). The Federal Court charges $50 to inspect court papers. By Kate McClymont. Oh, it was certainly the case. Above ground, below ground, in the air, on the water, there was no domain beyond Obeid's grasp. — Kate McClymont (@Kate_McClymont) July 25, 2018 "The merged company will be called Nine". He’d gotten a loan from the bank. Charlie Teo is adored by many Australians but his colleagues have raised serious questions. But anyway, that’s how it goes. And it was questions answered for 40 cents, arguments for 50 cents, and verbal abuse for one dollar. You graduated in 1981, but it wasn’t until 1985, when you were 25, that you started work at The Sydney Morning Herald as a graduate cadet. And what do you love about the Eastern Suburbs? The Eastern Herald’s office was in Hollywood Avenue, Bondi Junction, just around the corner. Not do other evangelicals escape perdition. Dead silence. It actually took a while to get over that and it always upsets me that rival publications often like to dance on the graves and misfortunes of other journalists. I did a piece on a marriage where George Freeman and his wife were in the bridal party, and I wrote what I thought was a funny thing about the bridal party wearing sequins, which I said was the closest fashion accessory to armour plating that you could get away with at the chapel at Kincoppal Rose Bay. Kate McClymont. Kate McClymont for Sydney University Senate. I didn’t realise until I moved here that it’s called “The Jungo.” I’d say, “I live in Bondi Junction,” and people would say, “Oh, you mean The Jungo?” I’ve been living in the Eastern Suburbs for 25-30 years now. Banished to the Eastern Herald supplement in the wilds of Bondi Junction for failing to take an assignment on soft furnishings sufficiently seriously, she found herself covering the wedding of a relative of the notorious crime figure George Freeman. But after my honours year I just thought, look, I’ll just work for a bit, have a bit of a life. Little is known and even less is seen of Zeljko Ranogajec. She was a stellar student – dux of the local primary school, matriculating in the top two per cent of the State’s HSC students, in spite of cultivating a reputation as a cheeky, outspoken kid with a wickedly mischievous sense of humour, something that she never lost. Biography KATE MCCLYMONT By BEN HILLS. Colleagues admire her fearlessness in the face of threats to her safety and her ability to pry information from reluctant sources. I’d love to go back. Tell us about journalism at the SMH back in those days. As kids we didn’t really do the hanging around malls thing or anything like that, and there was quite a lot of work to do, helping out on the property. In the end, I think the leading jockey of the time was disqualified for two years. A crowd would gather round as, inevitably, a drunken guy with a girl on his arm would hand over a golden coin and urge her to vilify his companion. Finally he looked up from his desk and said: “Look how pregnant you are. At a loss what to do after graduating, she tried her hand variously at captioning TV series such as Minder for the hard of hearing, and working for a publishing house where she was bored out of her brain composing entries for an Australasian encyclopaedia and resigned – although not before entering her own name, alongside Patrick White’s, as an Australian winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. See Photos. I love Ruby’s Diner, I think that’s really good. But every time I wrote something I thought, “This, this will be the nail in the coffin,” and it never was. Sign Up. Where are you originally from? You know it’s going to be a doozy, a ballbuster.” - Peter Fray. So why that decision to pursue the cadetship? Hello Kate, we’ll start at the beginning. Log in or sign up for Facebook to connect with friends, family and people you know. The Melbourne Press Club has been a key part of the city’s media community for more than 40 years. Historical records and family trees related to Christina McClymont. We had also put something in the story about Eddie Obeid offering money to the Bulldogs. Kate and her family also received death threats and were moved to a hotel for a few days. Well, I was doing Arts/Law, and in those days you could do an arts honours year three years in, and I did mine in English Literature, and then you had your two years of straight law left. Defamation is just the bane of our existence. People. Between 1992 and 2012 she won no fewer than five Walkley awards (including Australian journalism’s greatest honour, a gold Walkley for her coverage of the salary cap scam that saw the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs thrown out of the National Rugby League competition); she was named NSW Journalist of the Year for exposing the industrial-scale frauds that led to the jailing of both the pillaging union boss Michael Williamson and the NSW Cabinet Minister Eddie Obeid, guilty of ‘corruption not witnessed since the days of the Rum Corps’; she was awarded six Kennedys, NSW journalism’s highest distinction, as well as half a dozen other glittering prizes. Join Facebook to connect with Kate McClymont and others you may know. Anne Davies and I wrote a series of stories in 2002 about the Bulldogs using a proposed development with Liverpool Council to channel monies to their players outside the salary cap. In the autumn of 1985 she found herself sitting in an office in the rambling old concrete tower on Broadway that housed Australia’s most distinguished broadsheet, The Sydney Morning Herald, being auditioned for a job as a trainee journalist by the paper’s newly-appointed brilliant young editor, Eric Beecher, and Chris Anderson, the editor-in-chief. He didn’t just enjoy a lavish meal, she wrote, it was suckling pig, it was at Sydney’s fancy harbourside Catalina restaurant, it was washed down with a magnum of pinot noir, the bill was $1800, dessert was a call-girl called Tiffanie. I got so bored doing it, so I started breaking out into what I thought were more funny takes. I started getting death threats! Then I just started collecting information on Eddie Obeid and did a really long investigative piece. Ben Hills, an inaugural member of the Australian Media Hall of Fame, is a Walkley and Kennedy Award-winning investigative journalist, the author of six books and a three-time foreign correspondent. Revellers strolling through Kings Cross on a Saturday evening in the mid-1980s might have come across a surprising sight among the net-stockinged street-walkers, the hulking Tongan bouncers lounging outside the bars and strip joints, the heroin-dealers and the hoodlums. Which brings us to what annoys you about the area… Where are you living now? ... illegal casinos and even cheated members of their own family. It’s just the manner of distribution; I think the biggest mistake ever was publishers giving away their content for free and thinking that this would drive people to actually buy the product. Will we find her next sniffing bicycle seats in … Darling Harbour? Those girls aren't Fanny and Mina- note the swedish flag on their swimmers... M Hughes: SImon: I just want to keep doing what I’m doing, and I just hope that I can stay healthy and fit enough, and mentally acute enough, to keep doing it. Or do I admit I lied to the bank when I said, “I’m part of the Obeid Family and look at all these riches”? I’m living in Bondi Junction. I found that on the week that he joined Parliament, on the Wednesday he bought a property on Clovelly Road for $830,000, and the very next day he had sold it to the Housing Department for twice that amount of money. Waverley’s Water Women – Fanny Durack and Mina Wylie. Posted 1st November 2014. Are Australia’s defamation laws doing enough to protect the ability of journalists to do their jobs? Note the Swedish flags on the girls swimmers. He left it somewhere and, now that he’s in jail, they’ve just handed it over. Moses is in the witness box wondering which lie to tell. Here, The Beast talks with her about charging for verbal abuse in the Cross, dealing with defamation, and of course, whether or not journalism is actually dead. The McClymonts are an Australian country music trio comprising sisters Brooke McClymont (born 1981), Samantha McClymont (born 1986) and Mollie McClymont (born 1987), originally from Grafton, New South Wales.They have released one eponymous EP and six studio albums, Chaos and Bright Lights, Wrapped Up Good, Two Worlds Collide, Here's To You & I, Endless and Mayhem to Madness. Investigative journalist Kate McClymont tells Mamamia's daily news podcast 'The Quicky,' the woman had met Caddick on a skiing trip in Aspen in January, 2020. A gift to the headline writer - FROM PINOT TO PORRIDGE - was splashed across Macdonald’s picture on the front page the following day. LinkedIn is the world’s largest business network, helping professionals like Kate McClymont discover inside connections to recommended job candidates, industry experts, and business partners. One time there was a coup in Fiji and there weren’t any planes flying in so we hired our own. He Who Must Be Obeid by Kate McClymont and Linton Besser. We put this in the story and then Eddie Obeid sued, suggesting that we made him look corrupt, etc. In her report she noted in passing that the bride and her attendants were festooned with sequins, which she described as “the closest fashion accessory to armour-plating.”. It adds up. I worry about high rises going up in certain areas. It was great because people would pay for an argument and then other members of the crowd would start arguing and I would say, “Look, if you want to argue, you put your own 50 cents in.” People would pay you to abuse their girlfriends. They are likely members of the swedish team at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Employing her insider status and trademark wit, pace and intelligence, Kate McClymont unravels the complex business relationships between Michael McGurk and Ron Medich. I remember I really loved the work of David Marr. or. Kate McClymont is Australia’s best-known investigative journalist. That being said, I still think that there will be a resurgence somehow. Oh, sometimes you have white boards, especially if there’s a murder. Katie McCalmont. The best-selling book, He Who Must be Obeid, by journalists Kate McClymont and Linton Besser, alleged a former tourism taskforce (TTF) spokesman, Chris Brown, was … For coffee, I love Bellagio Tuckshop, which used to be called Nelson Road Tuckshop. She is Australian by nationality and belongs to the white ethnic groups. Kate McClymont AM is Australia’s best-known investigative journalist. Kate was also honored by Walkley awards for her hard work and talents. Do you have any favourite local haunts? 5 minutes with Kate McClymont. Is that a collective reimagining or was that actually the case? For more than 30 hours Anthony Koletti, the husband of missing Dover Heights woman Melissa Caddick, didn’t tell her family or police that his wife had vanished without taking her phone or … Then, people who had provided us with the information, and who said they would get into the witness box, didn’t. I remember he gave a lecture at Sydney Uni once, and I couldn’t believe when I later actually met him in the SMH office. Now we don’t properly service major issues in country towns unless they’ve got state significance. I took a photo of one we did recently, oh dear we were laughing. Growing up on an orchard near the NSW Central-West town of Orange, McClymont was blessed with ambitious parents – both university graduates – who took it for granted that their daughter would get a good education and make a mark in the professions, rather than settling down to raise a family with a neighboring farmer’s son. Was it the thirst for truth telling that you cultivated in your Kings Cross truth booth days? The Court of Appeal decided on December 18, 2013, that second-eldest sibling Claude Cassegrain had breached his responsibilities to the family … All this revolves around inside information that Ian McDonald, who was the then mining minister, is alleged to have provided to Mr Obeid and his family. I grew up on a farm there, and it was great. ... (born McClymont) was born to Robert (Bob) McClymont and Catherine (Kate) McClymont (born MacGillivray). I only earn $80,000 a year and my wife earns $60,000,” so the City of Sydney subpoenaed their bank records and there it all was. Kate McClymont reports that the Folaus in fact believe any baptisms done ‘in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’ are false and consign the baptised to hell. Other revelations led to a five-year jail term for former Labor MP Eddie Obeid. And it’s really expensive. They said that two boys had approached them saying, “Look, if you give us your City of Sydney contract, we’ll get you the Olympic contract.” The two engineers asked how, and the boys said, “Our Dad is Eddie Obeid.” And they, like me, thought, “Who is Eddie Obeid?” So I wrote on that, and then people began to send in little bits of information. British Royal Family. Every lawsuit that comes in is just like a blow to the heart because you know of the amount of work that goes into it. Kate McClymont of the Sydney Morning Herald has been one of Australia’s top investigative reporters since the early 1990s. She won five Walkleys between 1993 and 2012. Her story caught the eye of Valerie Lawson, the editor of Fairfax’s hard-hitting investigative weekly The National Times, and she was summonsed back to Broadway to work alongside such big-league mentors as Wendy Bacon, Marian Wilkinson, Brian Toohey, Robert Haupt and Colleen Ryan. These days my generation thinks of it as this rich journalistic utopia. I also like the Cook and Baker down on Oxford Street at Bondi Junction. So I’m going through all his business dealings for the last couple of years. What did you do in the interim? ... All of them were secret money-spinners for Obeid and his family. I then went to work as a researcher for two years at Four Corners, and I did a lot of work with Paul Barry. There’s the Lionel Murphy things. Log In. Look, he may have been a fantastic judge… well, actually, I don’t think he was a fantastic judge. Finally, in an ideal world, what does the future hold for Kate McClymont? So there it was in the bank records, all of what we had been trying to find for all these years. They didn’t own the licence or the intellectual property to do it. Sometimes I regret not finishing my law degree, but mostly I just think that I am so unbelievably lucky to have found something that I really love doing. 4mins 37secs Former MP's evidence "ludicrous, implausible:" Kate McClymont 3mins 58secs "Legacy caseload:" Sri Lankan family fight deportation … Martin was born in 1829, in Auchard, Inverness, Scotland. Nowadays, you have to get a bus to Canberra. It was quite fun. So I was a cadet writing about underworld figure George Freeman in the column of Chums. Kate and McGurk received intel that he was going to be ‘hit’. It was great meeting these people who’d been only a byline on a page, and then seeing that they are full of foibles and idiosyncrasies like everyone else. Site powered by Master Publisher. Find your friends on Facebook. I remember spending all night in someone’s office getting all these phone transcripts of these organised crime groups and jockeys fixing races. What was the first big story that you broke? 1200 hopeful youngsters applied for 30 jobs across the Fairfax mastheads that year. Records may include photos, original documents, family history, relatives, specific dates, locations and full names. Funnily enough, after I started at The Herald, I think my first job was doing something called Style Magazine, about cushions and pillows and things like that, and then I got sent to The Eastern Herald. I had to write this gossip column called ‘Chums’. She remembers sitting up in her hospital bed the day after giving birth to her first, Phoebe, subbing a great ream of teleprinter copy – her expose of the crime lord Bruce ‘Snapper’ Cornwall, later jailed for 24 years for his part in organising Australia’s biggest drug importation, $20 million-worth of Colombian cocaine. ", Eddie Obeid (after, outrageously, he won a $162,000 defamation award over McClymont’s first expose of his corrupt activities): “She has become the journalistic equivalent of a gun moll with glittering associations with the not so well-to-do.”, Champion jockey Jim Cassidy, after Kate linked him to a massive race-fixing scandal known as the Jockey Tapes, spat on her legs and said: "You fucking bitch, you've ruined my life.". I ended up getting a cadetship at The Herald. Read More Mary was born in 1830, in Leitrim, Longford, Ireland. I can’t see me retiring. Still with her nose to the grindstone a fortnight before the birth of her third child, Sophie, she took the Jockey Tapes story to Richard Coleman, Fairfax’s veteran in-house lawyer, for vetting. Absolutely. But I do think people have a right to sue for harm to their reputation. One of the jockeys, Jim Cassidy, spat on my back and said, “You fucking bitch! These allegations, Evatt said, were false. Apart from two years as a researcher with the ABC’s Four Corners program, McClymont has spent her entire professional life at the Herald, somehow finding time between investigations, death threats and fending off the all-too-frequent libel writs, to marry and raise three children. Her speciality is uncovering corruption, cronyism and nepotism in union, sporting and political circles. Katherine Kuame McCalmont. It never ceases to amaze me how beautifully glorious it is. The Folau’s reportedly laughed at the idea of Prime Minister Scott Morrison as a Christian. McClymont was sent to The Eastern Herald as a cadet reporter , and while there she covered the wedding of a relative of crime boss George Freeman. Not a thespian, a barrister nor a vice squad detective – though she would have done brilliantly at any of these – but a calling which combines all those skills and then some. You’d just say to the girlfriend, “You have got shocking taste that you would be with anyone who would pay to have you abused,” and then people would add their two cents. I went overseas for a year and then I worked at Bay Books, which was a publishing company. But when she told them of her street performances in Kings Cross, that got their attention. Before the two could meet, McGurk was murdered. And now he is a friend. They’ll put (editor-in-chief) John Alexander in jail before you. I worry about overdevelopment. She wrote that th… Anyway, I left there and I went overseas for a while, and then I came back and I was working. Warning: please be advised this episode contains graphic content. I was there for 18 months, and we were doing this book on the ‘A-Z of Australia and New Zealand’. Kate and McGurk received intel that he was going to be ‘hit’. What else am I doing? You can trust her with 100 per cent of your soul and 100 per cent of the company’s money when she comes to you with that little bit of a smile on her face. When the story came out, Liverpool Council got dismissed, and the Bulldogs went from the top of the competition to the bottom just before the finals. I used to make about 17 dollars an hour on a Saturday night in the Cross! He confided in our guest, legendary journalist Kate McClymont about who he thought might kill him just 10 days before his death. After graduating from university McClymont worked for a publishing company and then the Australian Caption Centre; in 1985 she applied for a job at The Sydney Morning Herald. "She finds out that she's a financial adviser. The Melbourne Press Club proudly presents, 2017 Australian Media Hall of Fame launch. That company was registered two days before they bought that land.” That’s probably the major tool of my trade: being able to do ASIC searches, property searches. And there is always that forensic attention to detail that brings McClymont’s stories to life. The thing that I love, I think more than anything else in the world, is doing the morning walk from Bondi to Tamarama. The Melbourne Press Club Hall of Fame wishes to acknowledge the generous support of: Copyright © 2021 Melbourne Press Club. It was the beginning of the end of Alan Bond, and we just did programmes that took weeks and weeks of research. Orange, in central New South Wales. [2] [5] McClymont left The Times on Sunday for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation 's Four Corners program as a researcher for two years, [1] [5] before returning to The Sydney Morning Herald in January 1990. In fact, I constantly feel stressed that people ring you up and they’ve got a story and you just can’t do it. She was bitterly disappointed when the editors discovered her prank prior to publication and stripped her of the honour. View Kate McClymont’s professional profile on LinkedIn. Kate McClymont presents the 2014 Andrew Olle Lecture. Kate Mcclymont has released her many books like Deadman Walking, He who Must be Obeied, and Sydney Inc. She is a married woman but, info regarding her husband and children is still mysterious. We could have never got what they got. I think he was a complete crook myself. Kate McClymont Verified Investigative Journalist ... the whereabouts of missing fraudster Melissa Caddick and the millions of dollars she misappropriated from her family and friends. I’ve also got the diary of a bagman [an agent who collects or distributes the proceeds of illicit activities], which is showing payments to a politician, so that’s on the boil. One of the first big ones I did was on the eve of the Golden Slipper. Speaking of which, defamation is something feared by all journalists, both for economic and professional reasons. With English literature, I just loved it, and still do. So let’s do it.”. If my phone didn’t ring between now and the rest of the year, I’ve got enough stories to do. You might be sick of talking about it, but if you’re not, could you tell us little bit about your work looking at Eddie Obeid?