Photo Courtesy: Rob Baird | Source: Herald Sun
The year 2010 was a big one for Derryn Hinch, both personally and professionally. In January he passed a milestone. He celebrated his 50 years as a journalist. In September he was diagnosed with liver cancer and told he had only12 months to live unless he received a donor organ.
The year 2011, possibly his last, proved to be an even bigger one. Especially the month of July. On July 6, with only a few weeks to live, he received a life-saving liver transplant.
Two weeks later he sat in a Melbourne courtroom to be sentenced to five months under house arrest for breaching suppression orders and naming two serial child sex offenders at a Name Them and Shame Them rally on the steps of Parliament House and also on his old hinch.net website.
For 153 days he was banned from leaving his house except for medical appointments. Banned from broadcasting his radio program. [In fact, banned from any ‘gainful employment’].And prohibited from using Twitter, emails, Facebook, granting interviews or having any contact with journalists.
He was even stopped from advertising his latest book, Human Headlines- My 50 Years in the Media even though it was published months before his sentencing.
Hinch used to threaten that he would eventually write an autobiography and call it Famous People Who Have Met Me. He was joking.
Eventually he wrote three. The first, a kind of personal biography about the private thoughts of a public person with his sign-off line That’s Life as the title. The second, his fall from professional and financial success, called The Fall and Rise of Derryn Hinch. His (tenth) book on life and love You Are So Beautiful, The passion and the pain of relationships was published in 2006. And his personal story about alcohol abuse, called I Beat the Booze – And you can too, was published in 2009.
A national magazine once referred to him as ‘the former Derryn Hinch’. And there have been a lot of ‘former’ situations in his life. He is a former police rounds reporter, former foreign correspondent, former newspaper editor, former host of national current affairs shows, former novelist, former radio host in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide, former Midday host and former jailbird.
In 1986, Hinch was sentenced to six weeks jail and fined $25,000 over a contempt of court charge when he deliberately revealed the name of a convicted child molesting priest. He spent 12 days in Pentridge and Morwell.
For eleven years Hinch covered both North and South America for the Sydney Morning Herald and other Fairfax papers as well as Macquarie Radio .
He was there on the spot at Cape Canaveral when man first went to the moon.
He was there for such turning points in history as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Bobby Kennedy. He was there when President Nixon resigned at the peak of the Watergate scandal.
Hinch has reported from China, India, Africa, Canada, the Caribbean, England, Europe, the United States. Covered events like the famine in Ethiopia where he saw 25,000 people die.
In sports he covered the U.S Open, the PGA and The Masters in golf and the U.S Open in Tennis.
He spent so much time in Newport covering the America’s Cup that he wrote a thriller novel about it called Death in Newport.
In politics Hinch has met every Australian Prime Minister from Bob Menzies to Julia Gillard. He has been in the Oval Office at the White House. Interviewed such diverse politicians as Senator Edward Kennedy and Andrew Peaco
In entertainment Hinch has interviewed such big names as Meryl Streep, Elizabeth Taylor, Geena Davis, Richard Burton, Sophia Loren, Harrison Ford, Catherine Deneuve, Mae West, Peter Finch and Rod Taylor. And he was the Dalai Lama’s choice for his only Australian interview in 2007 when Hinch talked to him for the third time in twenty years.
At home here in Australia he has interviewed every major male and female star over the years — and was also married to a national icon, Academy Award nominee Jacki Weaver, for fourteen years.
He was the first person in a decade to interview fugitive businessman Christopher Skase in Majorca after he fled Australia.
Hinch has a unique, opinionated, often controversial view of history.
And he can talk about it lucidly, colourfully and entertainingly.
Despite the sometimes gruff exterior that beamed out of the television set into your living room in prime time for all those years he does have a sharp, sometimes shrewd sense of humour.
His appeal apparently bridges the so called generation gap.
He has made several national appearances on Triple J Radio and with Hamish and Andy on FOX-FM and when he won an Adelaide nightclub competition as Adelaide’s Most Popular Personality he asked several how they even knew him. One 19-year-old said “You’re a Ledge, Dezza”. Apparently that means ‘legend’.Another explained that when she was growing up her mother would say ‘hurry up and finish your dinner. Hinch is on in ten minutes’.
Derryn Hinch first joined 3AW in 1979. He went on to become the undisputed King of Melbourne radio – with the highest morning ratings ever achieved then or now --before leaving to start the top-rating HINCH on the Seven Network and then the Ten Network. He re-joined 3AW for the third time (after a year doing Nightline in 2000) in February 2003.
He’s still there doing what he does best: breaking news, sometimes making news, expressing his opinions on issues across the street and across the world and hoping to make people think.
Hinch has his own website www.humanheadline.com.au on which he posts daily editorials. It also features his Hungry Hinch restaurant reviews, travel articles, showbiz reviews and book offers. In 2010 the website had more than eleven million hits.
Derryn Hinch makes rare appearances at conferences and as an after-dinner guest.
He is an entertaining, informative guest speaker on the media, on life, on politics, on food [he wrote the bestseller The Derryn Hinch Diet] and on relationships. He is fast on his feet and is happy to answer any and all questions.
Maybe don’t ask him for advice on career moves. He’s been sacked fourteen times!