Louise Milligan is an Australian author and investigative reporter for the ABC TV Four Corners program. As of March 2021, she is the author of two award-winning non-fiction books. Her first novel, Pheasants Nest, was published in 2024.
Early life and education
Born in Dublin, Ireland,[1] Louise Milligan grew up in the Roman Catholic faith.[2] She moved with her family to Australia when she was six.[1]
In March 2024, Milligan reported for Four Corners on a toxic culture for female staff at Cranbrook School in Sydney as it prepared to transition from boys only to co-ed.[5]
As of May 2024[update] Milligan is an investigative reporter the ABC TV program Four Corners.[1]
Long-form writing
Melbourne University Press (MUP) published Milligan's first book, Cardinal, in May 2017. A month later MUP withdrew the book from bookshops across Victoria in response to Victoria Police charging Cardinal George Pell with historic sex assault.[6]Cardinal was returned to Victorian bookshops in February 2019.[7]
In 2022, she published Witness,[8] which critiques the criminal justice system in sexual assault trials. It includes interviews with prosecutors, defence counsel, solicitors, judges, and academic experts, and also highlights two high-profile cases which she had covered as a journalist. Milligan reveals how plaintiffs often feel as if it is they who are being tried, and legal practitioners also find it very stressful because of its adversarial nature. In the book she also describes how she was cross-examined in the Pell committal by Robert Richter, realising that she was not sufficiently protected by the Evidence Act s 41, and puts a strong case for legal reform in this area. QUT law professor Ben Mathews called Witness balanced, and "a triumph of intellect and empathy".[9] The book was generally well-received,[10] although Aboriginal writer Ellen O'Brien, writing in the Sydney Review of Books, points to its deficits in coverage of the additional complexities involved when Aboriginal women are the victim-survivors.[11]
In March 2024 Milligan published her first novel, Pheasants Nest, a crime fiction thriller.[12] The book was influenced by the rape and murder of Jill Meagher in Melbourne in 2012, after Milligan was the first journalist to interview Meagher's husband, and explores the idea of a woman in a similar situation who survives such an attack. The name is derived from a notorious suicide spot, Pheasants Nest bridge, which in on the Hume Highway and crosses the Nepean River in New South Wales. It also includes themes of police officers' untreated PTSD. Milligan started writing the novel in 2015, and returned to it in 2022, when she took a break from journalism.[1]
Other activities
In 2019, she was invited to give the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law annual lecture. Her talk was titled "A journalist's defence of trial procedures".[13]
2017 Sport Australia Media Awards for Best Reporting of an Issue in Sport, winner with Lisa McGregor and Trish Drum for "After the Game" (Four Corners)[15]
2017 Law Reporting Award presented by the Sir Owen Dixon Chambers[16][4]
In March 2021, the Australian Attorney-General Christian Porter commenced defamation proceedings against Milligan for an article published on 26 February 2021 which he says made a false rape allegation against him.[28] Porter discontinued the action in May 2021 after the ABC agreed to post an editorial note to the original publication and to pay mediation costs.[29]
In June 2021, federal MP Andrew Laming commenced defamation proceedings against Milligan for four tweets sent on 28 March 2021.[30] He alleged one tweet implied he admitted to illegally taking a photo of a woman's underwear as she bent over in Brisbane in 2019. In August 2021 Milligan agreed to pay Laming approximately A$130,000 in damages and fees.[31][32]
