He wasn't perfect, but Hinch confronted darkness when others turned a blind eye

It was a classic Derryn Hinchism: "Who's looking after the children?"

Verbose? Certainly. Self-aggrandising? Perhaps a little. But when Hinch first started asking it in the 1980s, too few others who possessed the megaphone of mass media seemed to give a single damn.

With Hinch's death on Friday, a large and remarkable chunk of Australia's tabloid media history died with the "Human Headline". Obituarists will grapple with a confusing legacy but permit me the personal perspective of a present-day journalist who recently had a meaningful opportunity to reappraise Hinch's efforts for sexual abuse survivors.

A few years ago, when ABC Investigations started unravelling the horror story of the Victorian Education Department's multi-decade cover-up of rampant child sexual abuse, we were stunned to realise that a scandal so widespread and devastating could have passed with so little media attention.

Thanks to a series of government inquiries, we now understand it as a crisis to rank with the worst excesses of the Catholic Church: for decades, sexually abusive teachers were shuffled all over the state rather than being sacked and reported to police; for decades, the government effectively covered it up; for decades, the reputation of the school system was put ahead of child safety, and the societal consequences were disastrous.

But before all that, a most glaring question had presented itself: if so many people had known this human tragedy was unfolding in plain sight, why had nobody in the media shouted it from the rooftops?

Actually, we were amazed to discover, one man had: Derryn Hinch.

A scenario that seemed too crazy to be true

During our investigations, a former detective in one of Victoria Police's nascent child protection units told us that due to the 12-month statute of limitations to press charges against offenders in the 1980s, not to mention the inaction of the education department, he and colleagues often felt powerless in their attempts to take down sexually abusive government school teachers. In such situations, he said, their last resort was Hinch.

Which is how readers of The Sun newspaper were greeted one Saturday morning in June, 1990, by a blistering Hinch editorial that began: "I want to accuse some of the top echelon of the Victorian Education Department of negligence."

Decades before the inquiries, long before anyone else cared, Hinch explained a scenario that seemed too crazy to be true: in the full knowledge of the Victorian government, the principal of a primary school in Melbourne's western suburbs had been allowed to sexually abuse children for an entire decade. This was despite a written warning from Victoria Police that he was a danger to children.

The rampant, decades-long sexual offending of Braybrook Primary principal Richard "Dick" Ross is now a notorious case in Melbourne legal circles. His crimes have cost the Victorian government many millions of dollars in compensation payouts to survivors.

But even 36 years on, the specifics of the case as outlined in Hinch's article still have the power to stun.

"[Ross] pleaded guilty in court this week to charges of sexual penetration of a child under the age of 16 and indecent assault," Hinch wrote.

"Apparently a lot of people knew he was a perv — including the Education Department. But year after year, nothing was done about it.

"His offences against children — the ones he pleaded guilty to — happened since 1980. An important date because the Education Department — the supposed protector of your children during school hours — knew about his habits in February 1981.

"They knew because a senior police officer wrote to the department and explained in explicit detail what the headmaster of the school had been up to in 1980."

For Hinch, Richard Ross's prosecution and sacking from his job had been far too long coming and the affair was not without its own complications for Hinch and Pamela Graham, a reporter on Hinch's eponymous TV program.

Their stories had commenced six months earlier, but rather than serving as a clarion call to other media outlets who should have followed them up with vigour, they resulted in Hinch and Graham being lashed: the Australian Journalists Association ethics committee fined Graham $500 for her methods in obtaining the original story in 1989.

Without such fearless reporting, Ross undoubtedly would have gone on abusing children. Even with it in the public domain, the opportunity to confront the full horror of the Victorian Education Department's system of cover-ups was inexcusably missed.

It was, Hinch later told us, a case of weary rivals saying: "it's just Hinch being Hinch". There are former journalists of Hinch's vintage who now grimace to consider it.

Age did not quell Hinch's sense of injustice

Whatever one might think about Hinch's propensity to shoot his mouth off before thinking, or his reckless and often counterproductive forays into vigilantism, his willingness to stand up for society's most vulnerable clearly derived from a strong and unwavering moral conviction.

When ABC Investigations sat down with him to talk about the Richard Ross case, not even the passage of 35 years had quelled Hinch's sense of injustice. An old, ill and quite frail man by then, he still bristled with anger and outrage as he recounted the story. In my head, I can still hear him berating the faceless bureaucrats: "It was an absolute disgrace!"

Had he screwed a few things up along the way? Undoubtedly, Hinch said. We told him that some survivors of Paul Bussey, another sexually abusive Victorian government schoolteacher, still lamented Hinch's decision not to blur their faces in a TV story about Bussey's crimes.

Hinch said he could understand where they were coming from. During his childhood in New Zealand, Hinch suffered sexual abuse himself — an episode he later recounted in his memoirs, and whose specifics seem a kind of template to his career. Hinch's parents found out almost immediately, believed him and with a fury that clearly lingered in his subconscious, chased his abuser out of town.

Hinch, we must now assume, learned that even if those who harm children are sometimes destined to evade the law, the rest of us should not give up the fight to expose their wrongdoing. A Melbourne lawyer once said that Hinch had never turned down an opportunity to appear in court on behalf of a survivor of sexual abuse.

Who's looking after the children? Say what you like about him, but Derryn Hinch tried.