As a young reporter for the Melbourne Age, John Hamilton (b.1940 UK, migrated to Aust. 1948), achieved the rare and still unequalled honour of winning the W. G. Walkley Award for the Best Newspaper Report in Australia consecutively in 1967 and 1968. These were for stories on the February 1967 bushfires in Tasmania and the December 1967 disappearance of Prime Minister Harold Holt.Hamilton joined The Western Australian as a cadet journalist in 1959, and after a stint in Kalgoorlie as Goldfields correspondent (1961), moved to The Age (1962). He joined the herald in 1970, soon becoming the paper's senior reporter. He had postings to Washington as White House Correspondent (1975) and London as European Editor and Bureau Chief (1979). He won the Rothman's Award for Best Reporting of the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane (1982) and the National Press Club Canada Award for International Reporting (1984).
