FIFTY YEARS ON

A new year in a new decade. New resolutions. New issues. New contract at 3AW. But the same old Hinch. And it was a special day for me today. Monday, January 11th 2010. Because, on another Monday, January 11th I started a new job. My first job. Monday, January 11th 1960. On a small newspaper called the Taranaki Herald – circulation 11,000 – in the town of New Plymouth, New Zealand. Covered a bit of ground since then.

So today I celebrated 50 years in the journalism business. Five decades in newspapers and television and radio. I’ll get it right soon.
 
I was asked by Luke Dennehy in the Sunday Herald Sun to name some of the highlights of half a century in the media. Got me thinking. And I’ve come up with ten. Not in order if impact or importance.
 
Certainly Apollo 11. Watching men go to the moon from Cape Kennedy in 1969. That was awesome.
 
Covering the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy within eight weeks of each other in 1968.
 
Exposing that paedophile priest Michael Glennon -- even though I went to jail before he did in 1987. And I again face the possibility of jail next month over naming serial rapists and recidivist paedophiles.
 
Getting that electronic media blackout ban before elections scrapped in 1983
after defying an undemocratic law for four years.
 
Chartering a jetliner full of food and blankets donated by 3AW listeners and taking it to famine victims in Ethiopia. And seeing 25,000 people who all died.
 
Making the first live broadcast from China to the West 25 years ago. Won the Grand Prize at the International Radio Festival awards in New York for that one.
 
Having a Victorian law abolished that claimed a man could not be charged with raping his wife under a 300-year-old British law.
 
At 32, being made the youngest editor of a major Australian newspaper, the Sydney Sun, in 1976 and cleaning it up.
 
Changing TV current affairs with HINCH on Channel Seven and Channel Ten.
 
 And being the first newspaperman (with the worst voice) to host primetime talkback radio. Trailblazing for Neil Mitchell, Mark Day, John Jost, Doug Aiton, Ranald Macdonald and others.
 
Along the way I got sacked 14 times. And wrote a dozen books. Thinking of today I played my Frank Sinatra theme song right through.

I've been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate,
A poet, a pawn and a king.
I've been up and down and over and out….

I don’t know about a puppet or a pawn but I have certainly been up and down and over and (nearly) out. Not time to ‘draw the final curtain’ (as Sinatra says in another song) neither personally nor professionally.

All of this is far too long for an epitaph. Looking back, I’d prefer two words: ‘He tried.’

I know that I did…. and I know I still do.

January 11, 2010

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009