When the pair took reporters' berths on a flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip in 2010, the same spotlight shone on the Israeli military and its blockade of the strip's Palestinian population, and this time they were arrested, blacklisted and deported for their journalism, later honoured with a Walkley Award.

Paul McGeough looks down at one of the many felled Saddam Hussein statues in Baghdad during the 2003 invasion. Credit:Kate Geraghty

It was McGeough's eighth Walkley over a period of 27 years. He had been honoured for his work in war zones in 2003, and at the time the Walkley Foundation's judges drew attention to something he rarely mentioned: the risks he had taken to bring us such news. In 2001, he was one of a group of journalists travelling through Takhar province in northern Afghanistan who came under Taliban attack. German journalist Volker Handloik and French journalists Johanne Sutton and Pierre Billaud were killed. In 2003, he reported from Baghdad as the US invasion began and was later partially deafened by a truck bomb driven into the ground floor of his hotel.

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The real reward, particularly during his years in the Middle East, was extraordinary access to and coverage of the region's key players that has been read around the world. His reporting on Australia's military presence in Iraq, considered controversial at the time, was vindicated years later by the revelations of an internal Defence report on the conflict. When the country was gripped by sectarian bloodshed in 2006 - a conflict he had foreshadowed in a 2004 Quarterly Essay - McGeough spoke to Sunni leaders and to the feared Shiite warlord Abu Deraa. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks he interviewed Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence, on his 1990s negotiations with the Taliban over custody of Osama bin Laden. A series of encounters with Khalid Mishal, the head of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, resulted in an award-winning book on one of the most extraordinary assassination attempts in history.