When Lilly McKenzie signed onto the Griffith University Student Media Centre at the GC2018 Commonwealth Games and discovered a group of Indigenous protesters had set up camp near Surfers Paradise, she immediately asked to cover the issue.
“I asked whether we could join the protesters, so got in touch with the organisers and told them we’d love to stay if we could,’’ the final-year journalism student recalls.
“They wanted media coverage and because we were student journalists they knew we didn’t have a particular agenda.”
As it turned out, Lilly and fellow student Dylan Crawford, were the only journalists on the ground reporting from the actual protest site. Their resulting story and photographs, published in the Sydney Morning Herald and Brisbane Times, have earned them a Walkley Young Journalist of the Year nomination in the Student Journalist category.
“The police cordoned off the area when the protests started during the Queen’s baton relay and
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News and other stories about real people, places, and events in Mount Gravatt and nearby suburbs.