Estelle Blackburn

Estelle Blackburn is the award winning investigative journalist and author whose unflinching determination succeeded in breaching the seemingly impenetrable wall of the justice system.

Often Described as Australia’s Erin Brockovich, she has an amazing story to tell about motivation and determination. She listened to a stranger’s cries for help and was the first beyond his family to believe him and pursued his case tenaciously until she succeeded in the seemingly impossible.

Her six years of painstaking research achieved what the best lawyers in Western Australia could not achieve 40 years ago when a total of seven appeals failed to prove the innocence of two men wrongly convicted of brutal killings.

In a landmark legal case in 2002, John Button was finally exonerated of the killing of his girlfriend in 1963. Never before in Australia has such a longstanding conviction been overturned.

To further her work on overturning wrongful convictions, she fly to Toronto to attend the conference of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, at which she met Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, resulting in her speaking on the same platform as this famous wrongly-convicted world champion boxer at a motivational conference in Melbourne in January 2003.

Estelle was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2002’s Queen’s Birthday Honours List for community service through investigative journalism.

She has also won journalism’s highest honour, the Walkley Award for the Most Outstanding Contribution to journalism.

Previously she won WA’s Clarion Award for the most outstanding contribution to journalism and the Perth Press Club award for Sustained Excellence in Journalism. Her book, Broken Lives, also won the Australian Crime Writer’s Association Ned Kelly Award for Best True Crime Book in Australia, and the 1999 WA Premier’s Award for non-fiction.

Estelle was Press Secretary to the Premier of Western Australia from 1990 to 1990 and various WA Government Ministers from 1985 to 1990.

Estelle has addressed many corporate and community functions since the publication of her best selling book in 1999.