Felicitations, Old Friend

And happy birthday 3AW. Eighty years old today. Will bring back a lot of memories for loyal AW listeners and it certainly has for me. The station’s unofficial historian, Simon Owens, has dug up a heap of memorabilia and showed me one piece last night. A full-page ad in The Age  from January 1979 when I first  hit Melbourne. A  Sydney carpetbagger. A newspaper journo. Not to be trusted. A radio novice. And with the worst voice of anybody on the wireless.

The ad said: The Making of a Precedent. A campaign later echoed on the sides of trams and on taxi backs. Later followed by a steal from Gone With the Wind. ‘Hinch: Frankly, I give a damn’.

The newspaper ad immodestly crowed about the things I’d done at 19 and overseas as a callow 22-year-old. But the line that caught my eye: ‘Now 35, he’s Derryn Hinch on 3AW adding spice to the life of the city’. Well, I may have added a little spice to the night life back then.

Thirty-five. That was 33 years ago. Nearly half the life of 3AW itself. People call that ‘the Golden Age’ of radio. But as I have told people around the station: There was a Golden Age before us.  We are going through another top-rating one now. And there’ll be a different Golden Age after we’ve all gone.

Probably my finest moment on AW was before I even joined it. A decade earlier in 1969 when I broadcast live from Cape Canaveral the Apollo 11 blast-off for the moon.

There were crazy moments in the old LaTrobe street building which I nicknamed Colditz Castle. The armed guard they provided me with when I took on the Painters and Dockers and Putty Nose Nicholls.  The studio invasion by Norm Gallagher’s thugs when I nicknamed the BLF the Bludgers and Layabouts Federation. The studio invasion by my own station managers when I defied the electronic media blackout before elections. They called it a 48-hour blackout against political news but it was really 66 hours – from midnight on the Wednesday until the polls closed on the Saturday. 

 I first did it before the state election in May 1979 and the final one was the federal election in 1983 and then Bob Hawke dropped the stupid law.

Got suspended a lot during all that. Got suspended for other things too. Like when I quoted Bob Hawke using the F word. That copped a three-day suspension. I got a young bloke called Neil Mitchell to fill in for me. Had to pay him out of my own pocket too.

And, along the way, I went to jail over the paedophile priest, got sentenced to community service over protesting another bad law – now gone – about rape in marriage. And recently did five months under house arrest over sex offenders’ suppression orders.

Through all that, spanning more than three decades and different owners, 3AW has stood by me. Management has never told me what to say. And more importantly, never told me what not to say.

One complaint about 3AW is that you walk into the foyer and it is filled with photos of men. Middle-aged, even old men. You know why?  We may be old but we are also very good at what we do.

A bit like this radio station. Happy Birthday, old friend.