Environment
Goodbye Simon Bevilacqua
Hag
TASMANIA’S best investigative journalist of the past 20 years will no longer be writing in mainstream media.
Today Simon Bevilacqua’s last articles are published in The Sunday Tasmanian:
AN official delegation visiting a Swedish pulp mill was forced to flee because of an overwhelming stench. A senior Tasmanian official with mild asthma almost collapsed and had to be helped back to the tour bus. The factory was touted as world’s best practice and an “odour-free” pulp mill. The incident has been confirmed by two members of the Resource Planning and Development Commission pulp-mill assessment panel who toured German and Swedish mills last year.
( And:
Delay in promised testing
A tattered system
Love of history saved the bay )
Perhaps he is wearied of being extruded weekly through the grids of mainstream Tasmanian journalism …
Whatever his reasons, at least it will be a relief not to see various spinners scurrying up The Mercury stairs to complain about yet another Bevilacqua truth-telling exercise. No more, Hello Barry.
At least you won’t see Bevilacqua heading for a higher paying job in the Government media unit — somehow I doubt they would have him anyway — or occupying federal MPs’ plush parliamentary PR seats.
Bevilacqua is a lifetime journalist. He’s going sub-editing on The Mercury … and Hag has no doubt that his superb forensic analyses and writing skills will surface in another time and another place … He’s too naturally inquisitive not to keep writing about his beloved, too-often trashed Tasmania.
Meanwhile Hag mourns one thing. Bevilacqua has never been awarded Tasmania’s top journalistic gong: The Keith Welsh Award for Oustanding Service to Journalism. This is a travesty.
So, in some way towards rectifying this gross injustice, Hag herewith bestows on you her own esteemed gong: The Green Fairy Absinthe Award.
You’re a ripper!
Cheers, Mate!