Australia Farewells Derryn Hinch, the ‘Human Headline,’ at Melbourne State Funeral
MELBOURNE, Australia — Australia said goodbye to one of its loudest and most recognizable voices on Monday. Derryn Hinch, the outspoken broadcaster and forme...
MELBOURNE, Australia — Australia said goodbye to one of its loudest and most recognizable voices on Monday. Derryn Hinch, the outspoken broadcaster and former senator who spent decades needling the powerful from behind a microphone, was farewelled at a state funeral in Melbourne, ten days after his death at the age of 82.
Crowds gathered through the afternoon at The Timber Yard in Port Melbourne for the service, which was telecast nationally. Hinch died peacefully in his sleep on July 10, after a long battle with a series of infections stemming from a bad fall last year.
His brother remembered a "colourful, constantly changing" life — a fitting description for a man known to generations of Australians simply as "the Human Headline."
The service itself bore Hinch's fingerprints. Long-time friend and 3AW broadcaster Darren James led proceedings as master of ceremonies, while veteran journalist Ray Martin delivered a special tribute. The two men had forged their friendship over years in the media trenches. Close friends and former colleagues carried the coffin as pallbearers, and Australian country artist Bob Valentine performed the final song of the service.
One speaker told mourners how Hinch himself would have wanted the ending handled: keep it short, keep it simple, and thank everybody for watching. After all, the service heard, "it's being telecast around Australia you know, that doesn't happen for everybody." His final instruction to those left behind was simpler still. Have a drink. Tell a few stories. And remember that "he tried."
The farewell he scripted himself
Hinch, characteristically, had planned his own exit long before Monday. Less than four months before his death, he sat for a 90-minute conversation with former 3AW host Tony Tardio and laid out exactly how he wanted to go out: a funeral at Melbourne's Comedy Theatre, James on the microphone as emcee, and Frank Sinatra's "That's Life" playing as he was carried out.
He even intended to record his own valediction to be played at the end: "I'm Derryn Hinch. That's life. Goodbye." And that, he figured, would be the end of it.
"That's life" had been his signature sign-off across decades on television and radio — two words that became inseparable from his public identity. Monday's service took place at The Timber Yard rather than the theatre he had once imagined, but the spirit of the production he described was unmistakable.
'His proudest achievement'
Annette Philpott, Hinch's long-time friend and assistant, thanked those who had supported her in the weeks since his death, and through the couple of years of ill health that preceded it.
"Senator Hinch – that was his proudest achievement," she told the gathering. "He called it magic, and he achieved a lot."
The elevation to parliament capped an extraordinary second act. Hinch had already spent decades in the media — first in print and radio, then as one of the defining figures of Australian current affairs television — before voters sent him to the Senate, where his knack for turning a cause into a campaign travelled with him.
The controversies left mostly off the podium
Monday's service lingered on Hinch's triumphs in journalism and politics. It spent less time on his tribulations — among them, jail stints for breaching contempt of court laws in connection with his relentless public campaigning on sex offenders.
Those legal battles made him a polarizing figure well beyond Australia's media circles, and turned him into an unlikely standard-bearer in the country's long-running argument over how far courts can go in restricting what is published. Admirers saw conviction. Critics saw grandstanding. Hinch, by most accounts, was untroubled by the distinction.
State funerals in Australia are reserved for figures of genuine national standing, and the decision to grant Hinch one underlined the peculiar place he occupied: a journalist who became the story, then a politician who never quite stopped being a journalist.
'Good night, nurse, goodbye, world'
Melbourne newspaper The Age, which chronicled the funeral in a live blog, offered its own assessment of the man: a "big, bold, impassioned, principled, messy and marvellous life." They don't make them like Hinch any more, the paper wrote — in truth, they never made many of them at all. An outlier, it called him, whose determination to grab life by the horns demanded a kind of admiration, even from those who were never fans.
Hinch had, as ever, already supplied his own epitaph. In a television interview late last year, seated on his balcony on St Kilda Road and reflecting on his approaching death, he signed off one last time: "Good night, nurse, goodbye, world."
As the mourners drifted out of The Timber Yard on Monday, the broadcasting awards and the Senate speeches had all been duly honoured. What came next was the part Hinch had asked for himself — glasses raised, stories traded, and a sign-off repeated around the country one more time.
