Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Friday 20 October
8:00 PM - 9:00 PM
What are the threats to press freedom in the West and around the world? How do real and anticipated acts of terrorism curtail freedom of speech? And how can we hold powerful people to account when journalists, and media institutions, are compromised? These are questions that matter to Peter Greste.
After 20 years as a distinguished foreign correspondent, covering conflicts in some of the most dangerous places on the planet, Greste became a household name in Australia in 2013. He and two Al Jazeera colleagues were charged with spreading ‘false news’ and accused of helping the banned Muslim Brotherhood. Greste spent 400 days in jail.
In his riveting and heavily researched new book, The First Casualty, Greste examines the issue of global press freedom in the volatile 21st Century. Drawing on his own experience of reporting, including his incarceration and trial in Egypt, Greste also looks at the nightmare of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, Australia’s own metadata laws and Trump’s campaign against journalists in the US.
At Kyneton Town Hall, Greste joins Rafael Epstein for a discussion of the changing nature, and challenges, of investigative journalism in the age of terrorism.
Presented in partnership with Macedon Ranges Shire Council.
Featuring
Peter Greste
Professor Peter Greste is an Australian-born journalist, author, media freedom activist and academic. He is a founding member of the advocacy group, the Alliance for Journalists Freedom, and the UNESCO Chair in Journalism and Communication at the University of Queensland. He is also a regular contributor to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Conversation and The Guardian.
Before joining the university in January 2018, he spent 25 years as a foreign correspondent, starting with the civil war in Yugoslavia and elections in South Africa as a freelance reporter in the early '90’s, before joining the BBC as its Afghanistan correspondent in 1995. He went on to cover Latin America, the Middle East and Africa for the BBC.
In 2011 he won a Peabody Award for a BBC documentary on Somalia before joining Al Jazeera as its East Africa correspondent later that year. In December 2013 he was covering Egypt on a short three-week assignment when he was arrested on terrorism charges. After a trial widely dismissed as a sham, he was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison.
In February the following year, after 400 days behind bars and an intense international campaign, he was deported under a presidential decree. As a result of the letters he wrote from prison in the defense of freedom of the press, he won a Walkley Award in Australia in 2014, and Royal Television Society and Tribeca Disruptive Innovator’s Awards in 2015.
He has also been awarded the International Association of Press Clubs’ Freedom of Speech Award; Liberty Victoria’s 'Voltaire Award', the Australian Human Rights Commission Medal (all in 2015), the RSL’s 2016 ANZAC Peace Prize, and the Australian Press Council’s 2018 Press Freedom award.
Peter has co-authored his family’s account of their struggle to get him out of Egypt, Freeing Peter, and written his own book on journalism and the War on Terror, The First Casualty published in 2017. He remains an avid advocate of media freedom and journalist safety.
Rafael Epstein
Rafael Epstein is a journalist who has worked in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Timor, Indonesia, Europe and the Middle East.
He has covered national elections in the UK and Australia, East Timor’s vote for independence in 1999, the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, the 2005 London bombings, and the arrest of several high profile war crimes suspects in the Balkans.
Rafael won a Walkley Award for his reporting on the links between police and Melbourne’s underworld wars. He won a second Walkley for his coverage of the Mohammed Hanif case, the Indian born doctor charged over his connections to the failed bombings in London in 2007.
He has also worked at the Investigative Unit at the Age, focusing on politics as well as Australia’s special forces and their role in Afghanistan. Rafael currently hosts the Drive program on 774 ABC Melbourne. His first book Prisoner X is published by Melbourne University Press in March 2014.