IT HAS been a busy week for Katherine Wilson.
On Tuesday the hoax she orchestrated against the Quadrant editor Keith Windschuttle was finally made public after months of planning. Then yesterday she was revealed as the person behind the bogus article on genetic engineering Windschuttle had published.
But Wilson had other things on her mind. When The Age visited the freelance journalist and environmental activist at home, a heavily pregnant Wilson was having contractions and said she could not comment on the elaborate ruse.
Bloggers "outed" Wilson as a likely candidate for the hoax after the online news site Crikey posted the story of how Windschuttle had published her article on genetic modification with only a cursory checking of the facts.
Bloggers familiar with her work and, in particular, her stance on genetic modification, quickly joined the dots and linked them to numerous articles Wilson has written - including pieces for Crikey - on GM and comments she has made about Windschuttle and Quadrant .
On her blog Wilson describes herself as "a mother, urban farmer and PhD scholar, and between them I sometimes dabble in journalism". She has written for The Age, The Australian, The Courier-Mail, Good Weekend, Art Monthly, Griffith Review and is a former editor of the left-wing literary magazine Overland .
Margaret Simons, who first broke the news of the hoax, confirmed Wilson's identity on Crikey yesterday.
Wilson said in an email to Simons: "I've no more to say on the content of the hoax: I've said what I wanted to say, and it's had a good run. Despite its flaws, it has achieved many of its aims."
She later told The Age : "The author is not the story here."
The Crikey editor Jonathan Green said he was told about the hoax the day before Simons published the story but did not know Wilson's identity until yesterday. He did not rule out publishing Wilson's work in future but said he did not condone her actions.
"I think she's made it a difficult place for herself as a journalist. She sees a particular overlap between advocacy and journalism that I don't see … But we're not her co-conspirators, we're not part of this process; we're simply reporting on it."
In her blog, Diary of a Hoax, Wilson detailed the process of writing and having her article accepted by Quadrant . She wrote that her intention was to submit an article employing "some of Quadrant's sleight-of- hand reasoning devices to argue something ludicrous - something like the importance of putting human genes into food crops to save civilisation from its own ills, and how this sort of science shouldn't be scrutinised by the media, because, you know, it's empirical".
Windschuttle, who has famously criticised historians for exaggerating, and even fabricating, the conflict between Aborigines and white settlers, admitted that he had done a "basic fact-checking job" when the story was submitted in November.
He did not know Wilson before her identity was revealed, he said, and hoped for an end to the coverage. "I think it will die pretty soon. The story's got no legs."
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