David Williams (journalist)
journalist with The West Australian in Perth, Western Australia
David Williams is an author, journalist and theologian, based in New Zealand.
He gained notoriety following the publication of his 1989 account of the failed drug run and subsequent execution of Australian drug runners, Kevin Barlow and Geoffrey Chambers. Titled This Little Piggy Stayed Home: Barlow, Chambers and the Mafia the book was one of the more controversial publications of Panorama Books. The book was never printed again following its initial release, despite continued demand, because of fears of litigation. It caused a stir in the large Italian community based in Western Australia and, for a time, was roundly rejected as an accurate account of the mafia's existence and operation in WA. That changed when famed mafia hunter, Judge Giovanni Falcone, used Williams' book to describe the formation of the mafia in the state around cells of influence. Falcone was assassinated on 23 May 1992, in a massive car bomb attack – not six months following his vindication of Williams' work.
Williams took an extended break from journalism after reporting on the deaths of nine people in the Gracetown cliff collapse in 1996. Gracetown is a small coastal community on the south-west coast of Western Australia, near Margaret River. His piece was the only eyewitness journalistic account of the events following the tragedy, but it was his own involvement in the community effort to recover the bodies from beneath the sand that led to his disenchantment with media.
Williams pursued theological studies for some years and eventually earned a PhD. He took up an academic role at Laidlaw College, in Auckland, New Zealand, where he designed a new counselling degree programme.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “David Williams (journalist)” is journalist with The West Australian in Perth, Western Australia. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through David, Williams and journalist, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “journalist with The West Australian in Perth, Western Australia” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 16, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5241147. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1989, 1992 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “David Williams (journalist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.