Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

Dart Centre Asia Pacific

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  Cait McMahon

  Managing Director

  email

  Cait McMahon PhD (Cand.) is a registered psychologist and fulltime managing director of Dart Centre Asia Pacific, with headquarters in Melbourne, Australia and activities throughout the Asia Pacific region. McMahon has been interested in the nexus of journalism and trauma since working as staff counsellor at The Age newspaper in Melbourne, Australia in the mid ‘80’s and 90’s. This interest resulted in postgraduate research in the area in 1993 with subsequent publications.

  To date, Cait is the only Australian psychologist to be published in the area of journalism and trauma. She has a significant history of clinical private practice, organisational development consulting and employee assistance programs.  Cait continues to pursue further research at Swinburne University in Melbourne into journalism and trauma, focussing on both post-traumatic growth and post-traumatic stress experienced by news media professionals.

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  Gary Tippet

  Director

  Gary Tippet is a senior writer for The Age in Melbourne, Australia. He was the first Australian to be awarded an Ochberg Fellowship, in the year 2004.

  Gary began in journalism in 1972, at the Sun News-Pictorial and joined The Sunday Age in 1993, moving to The Age when the two papers merged in 1998. In the time since, he has have covered some of Australia's biggest stories including the East Timor crisis of late 1999-2000, the Thredbo ski resort landslide, the Moura coalmine collapse in Queensland, and a number of major crime stories including the disappearance and murder of Jaidyn Leskie, the Port Arthur massacre and the Bega schoolgirls murder trial. In 2000 he covered the military coup in Fiji.

  Much of Gary’s writing has focused on trauma and its victims.

  In 1997 he won a Walkley, for Slaying The Monster, an account of an abused child who, 30 years later, returned to kill his molester with an axe, and has won two Quill's and three Legal Reporting Awards.

  In recent years, Gary has written a number of articles on motor vehicle trauma, includinh Fatalities #74 and #75; April's Story and Sudden Impact, in which he spent three months following the victim of a serious injury road accident, from crash to recovery. The result was a 10,000 word, four broadsheet page special report, which won the 2002 Transport Quill Award.

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  Lisa Millar

  Director

  Lisa Millar is a senior journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, working in both radio and television as a journalist and presenter. She won a Walkley Award for investigative reporting in 2005, and in 2007 was named an Ochberg Fellow.

  She was a foreign correspondent for the ABC in Washington, D.C., for three years and has covered major stories in Asia, London and America, including the 2005 Bali bombing and the controversial hanging of an Australian drug runner in Singapore.

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  Jon Stephenson

  Director

  Jon Stephenson is an Auckland-based investigative journalist and foreign correspondent, with extensive experience reporting conflict and trauma. In addition to the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, Jon has reported on the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon, and from Gaza, East Timor, and Zimbabwe, as well as on natural disasters such as the 2004 Asia-Pacific tsunami, the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, and the 2008 earthquake in China's Sichuan Province.

  A graduate of the University of Auckland in history and philosophy, Jon has received numerous awards for his journalism, including the Prix Bayeux-Calvados des Correspondants de Guerre. He was a 2008 Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, is a trustee of the Bruce Jesson Foundation, and is a Research Associate at the Auckland University of Technology's Pacific Media Centre.

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  Kimina Lyall

  Director and Company Secretary

  Kimina Lyall is currently the Group Executive for Corporate Development at Australian Unity, a company with business operations in healthcare, financial services, aged care and retirement living. Before joining Australian Unity, Kimina spent almost 15 years as a journalist, including a period as Southeast Asia correspondent for The Australian.

  Her experiences during that posting led to a Walkley award nomination, along with the publication of her first book, Out of the Blue - Facing the Tsunami. Along with her work with the Dart Centre, Kimina is a board member of Great Connections, an organisation which aims to connect retired volunteers with high-level management skills with the not-for-profit sector.
   
  Prior to her study and work as a journalist Kimina spent time in the community sector including working in youth housing and on policy issues concerning young women and care and protection issues. Kimina has also been involved in volunteering at several community radio stations in Melbourne.

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  Matthew Ricketson

  Director

  Matthew Ricketson is a journalist and academic. In 2009 he took up a position as the inaugural professor of journalism at the University of Canberra after being Media and Communications Editor at The Age. Before that he ran the journalism program at RMIT for 11 years. He is the author of a biography of Australian author Paul Jennings, a textbook about journalism and the editor of a collection of profiles. His PhD, about long-form narrative journalism, was awarded by Monash University earlier this year.