Excited and honored to be a finalist in the Walkley Foundation Mid-Year Media Prizes for 2025 Freelance of the Year. The nominated stories are for a body of work titled “Fighting for the future”: The people at the front line of a changing planet’. They ran in Nature, Yale Environment 360 and The Monthly magazine. … Continue reading
It’s two years since I climbed into a dinghy with Yolarnie Amepou to visit some of the communities in the Kikori delta PNG where she advocates for humans and other creatures grappling with fast rising seas, climate devastation & the fallout of an exploding fishery. Since then, I’ve taken a deep dive into the mysterious … Continue reading
A while back I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days with the awesome Yolarnie Amepou – zoologist, turtle mama and tireless activist for threatened humans and non-humans – as she went about her business in the Kikori Delta, Papua New Guinea. I’ve previously written about what she showed me of how rising … Continue reading
The landslide catastrophe in Enga, PNG, will reverberate for years after the emergency phase. I was invited by the 7am podcast to talk briefly about the broader context of an event like this in the highlands. The things I tried to highlight are the remoteness/lack of basic services; how years of tribal fighting will complicate … Continue reading
Very chuffed to be a finalist in the 2023 Melbourne Press Club Quills Best Feature for my story “Climate justice in the Pacific” for The Monthly magazine. Congratulations to fellow finalists (below) in this and all categories. And good luck also to our Unimelb Master of Journalism alum and superstar talent Sasha Gattermayr who is … Continue reading
(Photo: Vlad Sokhin) I’ve been travelling and storytelling from Papua New Guinea since 2009. I first visited for The Age/SMH, reporting on the catastrophic maternal death rate, and on the impacts of the then new and much hyped ExxonMobil-lead PNGLNG project in the highlands. On numerous return visits, I’ve circled back often to go deeper … Continue reading
“It strikes me, after 14 years (on and off) reporting from all over PNG, that climate damage is the most tangible return many grassroots people have ever known on those gazillions of gallons of extracted fossil-fuel wealth.” I spent a couple of weeks last year visiting three villages in PNG dealing with climate impacts – … Continue reading
Last month, a Queensland archeology professor and his three PNG colleagues, all women, were kidnapped from their field site in remote Western Province and held for ransom. PNG Prime Minister James Marape described the hostage-taking as unprecedented, a “random, opportunistic crime”, but there’s rather more to it. The backstory is interwoven with political, economic and … Continue reading
I was lucky to make a couple of reporting trips back to PNG in 2022. One visit coincided with the 2022 election & produced a couple of pieces for The Guardian about women candidates and the push for women’s representation. I came back with lots of thoughts swirling on a decade of conversations on women … Continue reading
I returned to PNG in September – thanks to the Walkley Foundation/Sean Dorney Pacific Journalism Grant – to collect field reports and interviews for a forthcoming story for The Monthly on climate justice. But as always in PNG, I came across so many other urgent and important stories. This was one of them. I was … Continue reading
Notebook & Narrative by Jo Chandler 