Whitton’s accolade came from Inspector Jack Ford, of the Victorian police, after he read a story in Melbourne’s Truth newspaper. Asked, in conversation with a prominent gynaecologist’s receptionist what the story said, Ford exploded: “ ‘We paid off the cops, by Evan Whitton’, f---ing mongrel bastard.” A taped recording of the conversation was played in court.

Whitton chuckled when recounting this story. He could tell other important stories, such as how Australia got into the Vietnam War. The Menzies government persuaded enough Australians to fear that Chinese communism would invade the continent if North Vietnam won the war. Menzies said South Vietnam had requested Australian help. Whitton demonstrated in The National Times in 1975 that Australia had lobbied the United States and asked South Vietnam to formally request Australia to join in.

He could tell how his work with Noela McMahon, who was to become his wife, had helped free Rupert Maxwell Stuart, an indigenous man wrongly convicted of raping and murdering a girl of nine in South Australia. And he could speak of the Fitzgerald inquiry into police and political corruption in Premier Joh Bjelke Petersen’s Queensland, as “the biggest and most important story I ever worked on, the experience of a career”.

Whitton won five Walkley awards for ground-breaking journalism and the Graham Perkin Australian journalist of the year award in 1983 for “courage and innovation” in reporting for The Sydney Morning Herald the Street royal commission. This examined allegations that chief magistrate Murray Farquhar had tried to influence a court case against rugby league boss Kevin Humphreys and that NSW premier Neville Wran may have influenced Farquhar. Wran was cleared, Farquhar jailed and Humphreys convicted.

He wrote about the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the last such execution in Australia, before receiving a letter from the dead man and another, later, from the hangman, criticising Whitton’s report. He wrote, perhaps for light relief, about sport, particularly rugby. And, as the Herald’s European correspondent, he wrote about the Queen’s garden party.

Evan Whitton’s father, Thomas Evan Whitton, worked in a grocery store in the Riverina and was a professional footrunner. He went to Gallipoli at 23, was wounded at Pozieres and had both legs amputated. A padre was called. “Bugger the padre,” he said. “I won’t see him.” He lived another 50 years.

He married a nurse, Bernice Collopy, ran a newspaper in Muswellbrook, where Evan Morn Whitton was born on March 5, 1928, then a newsagency and stationery in Murgon, a small town 270km north-west of Brisbane. Evan and elder brother Thomas Richard were raised there.

About 1936, Evan was buying bread from the baker, when red-haired Noela McMahon cycled past. She smiled. It was the start of a story as big as some of those about which he wrote. He went to Downlands College, a Catholic boarding school in Toowoomba. Later, as teenagers, he and Noela exchanged letters and went out at weekends. He went to teachers college, became senior English master at Downlands and coached the rugby XV. She taught speech and drama, including at Kingaroy.

Evan wrote letters to the Kingaroy hotel but the manager destroyed them. Noela thought Evan had lost interest. Visiting Toowoomba with friends, she telephoned from a service station and told him she was to marry. He told her to stay at the phone but she couldn’t. When he reached the phone, she had gone. Whitton married Irene Patricia Wilkes and had three children. Noela had four with her husband, a World War II veteran.

Whitton became a journalist at the Toowoomba Chronicle before moving to Truth in 1966. His editor was Sol Chandler, from London’s Fleet Street, whom Whitton admired. He adopted Chandler’s advice that the oldest rule of journalism was to tell their customers what was really going on. Chandler also advised that drink be taken as an aid in the news gathering process, helping to lubricate tongues.

The story of police corruption and abortion made Whitton’s name but, when not busy with such serious matters, he wrote what he called soft porn for the paper that thrived on both substance and sex. With both marriages ended, Evan and Noela moved in together and he moved to The Sunday Australian in 1971.

He and Noela investigated the Stuart case. She interviewed Stuart in jail but neither the Australiannor Truth, both Murdoch papers, was interested. Rohan Rivett, editor of Murdoch’s Adelaide paper, The News, had campaigned for Stuart. The case involved court appeals and a royal commission. Thomas Playford, South Australian premier, had commuted the death sentence to life but he brought legal actions against the paper. Although his case for seditious libel was thrown out, the parties reached settlement on another matter.

When the Murdoch papers rejected the Whitton's story, they took it to The Digger, an alternative journal whose front page report aroused national interest. The new Don Dunstan government freed Stuart in 1973. The Arrernte elder formally welcomed the Queen to Alice Springs in 2000.

At The National Times, Whitton produced acclaimed post mortems on the Petrov affair, the HMAS Voyager disaster and Vietnam. The Herald had editorially supported Australia’s presence in Vietnam as self-defence against communist expansion and maintenance of the US alliance. In 1975, after about a year’s research, Whitton produced 26,000 words in three articles. He began writing in February and published in the last week of April, a day before the last Americans left Saigon.

Next day’s Fairfax board meeting began with the Times story. Sir Warwick Fairfax, chairman, said Whitton’s approach was dishonest and “typically communistic”. He could not remain as assistant editor; Vic Carroll, managing editor, was responsible and Max Suich, editor, to a lesser extent; if they supported Whitton, “we would have to deal with them”.

B. A. Santamaria, the right wing polemicist, wrote a rebuttal, illustrating Fairfax’s penchant for diverse opinions. Whitton wrote a rebuttal to the rebuttal, won his fifth Walkley and edited the paper for three years from 1978.

Whitton had led development of a form of new journalism – writing non-fiction as a meticulously researched narrative, linking detail of characters and events into patterns with dialogue, atmosphere and tone. His stories could be challengingly long but he broke them up “with a joke every 30 pars or so”. He used this technique at the Street commission and the Fitzgerald inquiry.

The Herald’s chief reporter became European correspondent in 1984. Evan and Noela finally married, at the Australian embassy in Paris, with Gough Whitlam, ambassador to UNESCO, as best man and Margaret Whitlam matron of honour.

He became a reader in journalism at the University of Queensland and wrote for Justinian, the online legal journal, until May. Much of his recent work was an attack on the adversarial Anglo-Australian legal system which, he argued, did not seek truth and justice but kept criminals out of jail and lawyers rich. He preferred the European inquisitorial system that has judges sitting with jurors and a higher conviction rate.

His books include Can of Worms, Amazing Scenes, The Hillbilly Dictator and Our Corrupt Legal System.

Evan Whitton leaves Noela, their seven children, seven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.