By Callum Godde and Don Woolford

They weren’t always good, but Derryn Hinch made headlines.

The broadcaster turned late-life senator, who embraced his moniker as the Human Headline and one-time “King” of Melbourne talkback radio station 3AW, has died aged 82.

His demise could have come much sooner when he went under the knife in 2011 for a life-saving transplant after being diagnosed with liver cancer and cirrhosis.

Hinch, who at one point was drinking as many as four bottles of white wine a day, said he clinically “carked it” on the operating table.

But doctors brought him back to the land of the living, where he maintained his stomach for controversy and contempt for suppression orders.

After serving five months home detention for naming two convicted child sex offenders in 2008, he was jailed for 50 days for refusing to pay a $100,000 fine for revealing the criminal past of Jill Meagher’s killer Adrian Ernest Bayley in 2013.

On a more personal level, Hinch promised to give up the drink before picking up the bottle occasionally in his later years, causing a falling-out with the family of his liver transplant donor.

The Kiwi-born Australian started his scoop-happy media career after dropping out of school at 15 to become a cadet for New Zealand’s Taranaki Herald.

He sold his first car, a pink 1948 Morris Series E, to fund his journey across the Tasman in 1963 and was hired by Sydney’s now-defunct evening tabloid The Sun.

The rising star wasn’t in Australia for long, reporting from the US for United Press International, Fairfax newspapers and Macquarie Radio for more than a decade.

In a live cross back to Australia in 1969, Hinch commentated the moment NASA launched Apollo 11 to the moon.

He came back to be assistant editor of The Sun and quickly became editor after, by his own admission, white-anting the incumbent.

Hinch joined 3AW in 1979, leading the ratings with his aggressive style and remaining a host until 1987.

That same year, he spent 12 days in jail for reporting the prior convictions of a priest on trial for a similar offence.

An unrepentant Hinch, who suffered an incident of sexual abuse when a child himself, called his action “the thing I’m most proud of in my life”.

Television still came calling for Hinch.

Among his shows was current affairs program Hinch, broadcast by the Seven Network for four years before he moved it to Network 10 for two more years.

Hinch replaced fellow broadcast legend Ray Martin as host of Nine Network’s Midday program in 1994, and two years later Sydney radio station 2GB splashed out to hire him on a reported $500,000 salary.

He was dumped seven months later, one of 17 sackings he reckoned across his career, but returned to 3AW in the new millennium.

Hinch’s final show in 2012 opened with Bob Valentine singing That’s Life, a favourite phrase, and blaming his dismissal on management considering him a “rebel with too many causes”.

Taking a page from French philosopher Voltaire, Hinch swore by the journalistic mantra that “all history owes the dead is the truth”.

But in his quest for truth, he didn’t always get it right.

Hinch incorrectly told listeners on his talkback show in 2005 that Graham Kennedy, known as The King of Television, “died with AIDS”.

The shock jock had previously outraged both his colleagues and Australia’s cricket fraternity by revealing David Hookes was separated from his wife after the former batsman was killed in a fight outside a Melbourne pub in 2004.

Hinch had four wives of his own, including two-time Oscar-nominated actor Jacki Weaver.

The larger-than-life media personality also dabbled in acting, appearing alongside Weaver in the film clip for John Farnham’s 1986 hit You’re the Voice.

He later played himself in Underbelly and called Mick Gatto “scum” in a famous on-air exchange in which the underworld figure wished him dead.

Speaking to Nine newspapers in 2024, Hinch acknowledged he “drank too much” for too many years.

“That affected my life – and my marriages, too,” he said.

Perhaps his biggest non-health struggle was being falsely accused of sexually assaulting former business partner Mary-Ann Martinek, who issued an apology for the allegations in a letter read aloud in court in 2008.

Hinch also retracted a confession in a 2004 autobiography that, while in his thirties, he slept with a girl he thought was 25 but later found out she was 15.

She was 17, it was clarified years later.

His life-saving transplant in 2011 allowed for a brief foray into politics, having campaigned for decades for a national sex offender register.

He formed Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party in 2016 and was elected to the Senate at the ripe old age of 72.

Hinch suggested he was the oldest person elected to the Senate for the first time, but that record belongs to Frederick Ward, who was 75 when he took office in 1947.

The Victorian senator was booted out three years later, but not before convincing the coalition government to introduce laws restricting overseas travel for convicted pedophiles.

Hinch remained the party’s figurehead until it dissolved in 2023 after both its Victorian MPs lost their seats at the 2022 state election.

He continued to add to his wide-ranging published works that includes novels, autobiographies, diet and health books, and a collection of short stories.

Using a walker to get around, Hinch told A Current Affair in late 2025 he had fallen 30 times in the past year and spent three weeks in hospital after one that left him lying immobile on the floor for hours.

The long-time atheist hadn’t lost his sense of humour, throwing up the suggested headline of “thank God” when he did bite the dust.

“I’ve had such an incredible life,” Hinch said.

“I never dreamed it, you know, an aisle seat on history – it’s pretty good.”

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