It was May 1999 and Derryn Hinch had been called into the manager’s office at Adelaide’s 5DN. The ratings for his morning program had been tumbling, and after less than a year on air he was told to pack his things.
At the time, I was writing a profile of him for The Australian newspaper and happened to be in his office as he gathered his belongings. He told me that after the station manager broke the news he responded with two demands: the biggest possible payout, and the right to tell the press the truth about why he’d been sacked.
According to Hinch, 5DN offered him an “out” to give to the media. The station was happy to say he’d resigned to write a book. But Hinch was having none of it. “Nothing annoys a journo more than being bullshitted,” he said.
As well as being the “human headline”, Hinch was known for his towering ego and unfailing tabloid news sense. But those who knew him well also say he was a straight shooter, immensely likeable and, as he demonstrated after his fifth sacking in seven and a half years, also disarmingly self-deprecating.
“I’ve been to more stations than the Southern Aurora,” he joked.
Principled, in his own way
I first met Hinch in the early 1990s in the studios of Channel Ten, where he’d taken his eponymous current affairs program after it had been dropped by Channel Seven. He let me observe the production process for a documentary for Radio National’s Media Report.
Frankly, some of what I saw behind the scenes was shocking, including one of the program’s reporters faking footage because they’d got to a story late and missed the action they were there to cover.
But the most memorable moment was sitting next to Derryn as he wrote his tub-thumping nightly editorial with which he famously began each show.
That night he was accusing a judge of being too lenient because he’d given a sex offender a light sentence. As I watched him pounding away on the keyboard, I noticed his source was a three-paragraph news brief on a ripped-up piece of newspaper sitting on his desk.
I questioned whether he knew enough about the case to be so judgemental? Perhaps the judge might know more about the circumstances of the case than he did? Perhaps a light sentence was appropriate in this case?
No way, replied Hinch. Too many judges are too lenient, they all need to toughen up, too many offenders are getting away with appalling crimes. I asked whether he had sought a comment from the judge himself. Of course not, he replied, there’s no point doing that, they won’t talk to the Hinch program.
That was Hinch. Endlessly outraged and untroubled by the norms of balanced or considered reporting. But also principled in his own way, especially on the issue of sex crimes and the abuse of children.
It was the cause for which he was imprisoned in 1987 for contempt of court after disclosing the prior convictions of paedophile Catholic priest Michael Glennon, who was then facing trial. He was also convicted of contempt of court in 2011 after defying several suppression orders, and sentenced to home detention. And he was convicted again in 2014 for detailing the criminal history of the man who murdered Melbourne woman Jill Meagher.
Hinch’s friend and colleague Steve Vizard – who regularly impersonated Hinch as a bearded zealot crying “shame, shame, shame” down the barrel of a camera – told ABC Radio today that Hinch’s disregard for the legal process increased the possibility of guilty sex offenders walking free.
“If you derail a trial you’re inflicting your own verbal punishment in substitute to proper legal punishment,” he said.
However ill-conceived it was, Hinch’s commitment to the cause was heartfelt and drove his move into politics at the age of 72 as a senator for Victoria between July 2016 and June 2019.
A series of short-lived stints
Hinch was born in New Zealand and worked for the Taranaki Herald before moving to Australia to become police roundsman for the Sydney Sun. He later edited the paper after 11 years working in the United States and Canada.
In 1978 he worked for Melbourne radio station 3XY before joining 3AW as the morning presenter the following year.
In 1987, Seven’s then owner Christopher Skase walked into his office and told him “I want to make you the Walter Cronkite of Australia”. The idea appealed to Hinch’s outsized ego and soon his racy current affairs program was born.
In 1992 he moved to Network Ten, but that only lasted two years before he was recruited by Nine to present the Midday Show.
Sacked after just a year, he moved to 2GB, which also fell apart quickly, as did a stint at Melbourne’s Gold FM and then Adelaide’s 5DN.
His ratings in Adelaide had fallen to just 4.5%, suggesting he’d either lost his once-famous tabloid news sense or that he was too “eastern states” for Adelaide listeners.
On that occasion, Hinch was sanguine. He conceded he had no one to blame but himself, unlike his dismissal from 2GB, which he attributed to a falling out with owner John Singleton.
At the time, his longtime friend and former producer, Paul Barber, concluded that Hinch’s saturation coverage meant he had gone the way of TV personalities such as Bert Newton and Don Lane. “People become so totally over-exposed that the public become exhausted and doesn’t bother anymore, we’re all becoming Derryn’d out.”
But apparently not.
Bombastic but genuine
In February the following year, 3AW called a press conference to announce that Hinch was back, as the presenter of the station’s popular Nightline program.
At the press conference, I asked him whether he was still drinking heavily. It seemed like an appropriate question as this was the sort of thing he routinely asked others and because his excessive drinking had been a theme throughout his career. His excessive alcohol consumption would be the primary cause for the cancer and cirrhosis of his liver which led to a liver transplant a decade later.
Despite this, he assured the media he had his drinking and infamous long lunches under control.
His return to 3AW made him the surprise winner of the cash-for-comment scandal that had rocked the commercial radio industry, especially Sydney’s 2UE, and had claimed the scalp of longtime 3AW presenter Bruce Mansfield.
Hinch knew he was lucky to be back and had even accepted a smaller salary. He promised not to waste the opportunity, but it too didn’t last long.
Today, former colleagues and friends have spoken about Hinch with great fondness. They agree that unlike the fearsome public persona he once had, he was in fact extremely likeable.
Up close he was personable, a superb listener and, most endearingly, open to criticism and scrutiny. He was quite used to the rest of the media criticising him for his tabloid style and didn’t seem to mind it at all.
His longstanding and always-busy lawyer, Nic Pullen, told ABC Radio Hinch was bombastic and larger than life, but also humane and genuine. It’s these traits that makes his death at age 82 “a sad day for Australian journalism”.
