Newspaper Editor, Journalist

Jack is Editor-in-Chief of the Canberra Times. He is also Adjunct Professor of Journalism at University of Queensland.

Jack Waterford has been a journalist for almost 30 years, having written primarily about law, politics and public administration, the three arms of government. He has worked primarily for The Canberra Times, where he started as a copyboy in 1972. He was appointed Deputy Editor in 1987 and Editor in 1995.

Born on a sheep station in western NSW and educated at boarding schools in Sydney, he attended the Australian National University and has a degree in law.

In 1977, he took a few years' leave of absence to work, first as a consultant to an Aboriginal health service, helping to develop services in Central Australia, and later as an organiser, under Fred Hollows, with the National Trachoma and Eye Health Program, whose report he helped write.

He was the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year in 1985, for his work with Freedom of Information Act legislation, and was a Jefferson Fellow in the United States in 1987. He is a regular columnist with Eureka Street and a sometime writer for the Independent Monthly, and a regular commentator on politics for ABC radio. He has written substantial chapters in a number of books on subjects as diverse as Aboriginal health, public administration, the High Court and freedom of expression, and the Petrov Royal Commission of the 1950s.

His manias are reading - particularly 17th century British history, of war, of colonial government, and of colonial Australia - and children of whom he has four (daughters) as well as a granddaughter.

Jack's recollections of life at St Joseph's College can be found in the Oxford Book of Australian Schooldays published in 1997.

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phone 6280 2203
fax 6280 2282