AWARD WINNING NEWSHOUND JOINS STREETWISE

ONCE a journo, always a journo … Michael Southwell reckons he was born to be a reporter.
He was half way through a journalism course at Curtin University (then WA Institute of Technology) when he was sent for a week of work experience at the Perth Saturday newspaper The Western Mail. The eager cub was offered casual reporting work, then eventually a full time gig: “I was the work experience kid that never left.”
When Western Mail owner Robert Holmes-a-Court bought The West Australian, Southwell and his contemporaries (including StreetWise editor Carmelo Amalfi) joined the daily to pursue careers in journalism.
Southwell became West bureau chief in Melbourne at the age of 25. Two years later, he joined the West team covering WA State politics. He later reported for The New Paper in Singapore and returned to WA where he joined Perth’s Nine News as political reporter before returning to The West.
In 2002, Southwell won Australia’s top print journalism award for a three-year long investigation into health and environmental issues surrounding Alcoa refineries in Wagerup, Yarloop, Pinjarra and Kwinana.
(While Southwell focused on issues related to the impact of Alcoa’s emissions on residents’ health and political fallout over Alcoa operations, Amalfi as science writer investigated the impact on workers’ health, particularly at Kwinana).
Southwell continues to report on Alcoa’s operations including at www.streetwisemedia.com.au (‘Alcoa’s Dirty Secret’, April 4, 2023). Southwell and Amalfi will pursue further reports drawing on decades of reporting and investigations.
Southwell left newspapers to work in business and raise a family in the South-West. With a natural interest in politics, he joined Bridgetown Shire Council after successfully leading a community campaign to see off a proposed biomass plant near the town.
After moving to Gelorup, near Bunbury, he became a Capel shire councillor and served as shire president from 2019 to 2021.
Southwell maintains an active interest in both journalism and local government, as well as a desire to see important issues in the community made public as local newspapers shrink and die.
“We plan to give readers that outlet … stay tuned.”
As West political columnist and former editor Paul Murray wrote in 2018: “Like a lot of the best investigative journalists, Southwell can be a difficult bugger. He is driven by a relentless curiosity, a probing nature that led a former premier to say he ‘smelled cabbage cooking in every corridor’ and a cantankerous rebelliousness when he thinks he is being obstructed.”

Streetwise

A CURTIN graduate with degrees in journalism and mass communications,  Amalfi joined The West Australian in 1986 after short stints at the former Daily News, Western Mail and Geraldton Guardian newspapers.
In 2001, Amalfi joined a seven-member team of shipwreck hunters who discovered English buccaneer William Dampier’s Roebuck at Ascension Island in the Atlantic and French explorer Louis de Freycinet’s Uranie in the Falkland islands off Argentina. A new award, the Perth Press Club Prize, was created just to accommodate Amalfi’s firsthand accounts and images (under trying conditions!). The story is still told at the WA Maritime Museum in Fremantle.
Amalfi reached new heights when he won (twice) Australia’s top science and environment award, the Eureka Prize. He received the 1999 Peter Hunt Eureka Prize for Environmental Journalism after a six-month investigation, ‘WA’s toxic waste exports’, which forced the British Government to close the door on toxic waste imports from WA and force the State Government to dispose of its waste in France where Greenpeace protestors clashed with local police as they blockaded the port. The coverage went international.
After senior positions as deputy and night chief of staff, Amalfi left The West in 2005 to pursue a career in freelance writing and teaching journalism at Notre Dame, Curtin and Murdoch where he helped developed the universities’ first online newsrooms.
In 2012, Amalfi’s freelance work earned him a berth as a finalist in the WA Media Awards’ health reporting category for his series of exclusive reports on mental health issues in Fremantle.
A lifelong member of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance with accreditations in sub-editing and defamation law, he also is a founding member of the Australian Science Communicators and ScienceNetwork WA.
In 2015, Amalfi launched Freo StreetWise, a free quarterly magazine filled with unique content and images of the port city, his adopted home since the age of 11 months (1967). Fremantle’s only independent print and online publication celebrated 10 years in 2025, its treasure trove of stories available free at www.streetwisemedia.com.au.
The first two editions were produced in the former South Fremantle Football Club administration building on Norfolk Street. A construction site in 2016, Amalfi used a $2 battery lamp from 7-Eleven on Queen Street and laptop recharged at the nearby Esplanade Hotel because the building had no power or water, “Sometimes you have to do what needs to be done”.