1976 Sun City to Surf Race. Sun Editor, Derryn Hinch, and his wife, Eve Grzybowski

“That’s the worst tie I’ve ever seen.”

I noticed him before he noticed me — an enthusiastic, bearded journalist bounding up the boarding stairs. I handed him a glass of champagne, and, nervous as anything, blurted out the first thing that came to mind: “That’s the worst tie I’ve ever seen.

Without missing a beat, he said, “You reckon? You wanna have dinner?”

That was Derryn Hinch, and that was 1973.

Derryn died recently, after being unwell for a long time — struggling, in fact, though I don’t think he was ready to go. We all want a good death, don’t we? Not painful, but peaceful and Derryn got that. He died in his sleep.

At his state funeral in Melbourne, I heard him described in eulogy after eulogy, as a great man. Not without flaws — but flaws that contributed to his humanity.

People still find it surprising, sometimes outright shocking, that Eve the Yoga Teacher was married to Derryn Hinch. To some, he was simply a shock jock, an iconoclast. Someone once told me that they’d always assumed he was a chauvinist — which was the complete opposite of how I experienced him. Our romance faded decades before he died, but he never stopped being, to me, lovable, and a good man.

I’ve been asked more than a few times since he died how we met. So here’s the story.

I was a flight attendant out of JFK, flying for Trans World Airlines. I had been newly assigned to Presidential Charters — the flights that accompanied Air Force One on the President’s diplomatic missions. Our passengers were the foreign and American press corps. It was the era of Vietnam and Tricky Dick, and journalists were having a field day.

Derryn was the Bureau Chief for the Sydney Morning Herald and could choose to cover any stories from anywhere in the world. On this occasion, he was covering a President Nixon story. Our charter was flying from Andrews Air Force Base in Washington D.C. to the “San Clemente White House”. At the outset our flight, Derryn was being offered a glass of champagne by a nervous flight attendant with strong opinions about neckwear.

When I wasn’t busy, we talked. His office, he told me, was in Times Square — only a train ride away from my apartment. When our flight reached California, we had dinner and there were many dinners after.

When I returned from that auspicious flight, I had barely shut the door behind me when the phone started ringing. “Derryn here, Petal. I’d like to show you off to some of my Australian friends tomorrow night. You’ll jump in a taxi — I’ll pay the fare — just tell the driver to drop you at Sardi’s.” The driver, of course, knew exactly where that was. Sardi’s was an institution in the Broadway theatre district, famous for its walls that were lined with hundreds of celebrity caricatures.

I was dazzled by the nightlife of New York City. It was the early 70’s, and I was footloose and fancy-free — though that was about to change.

Just months into dating, I asked Derryn: “What do you think about the idea of us getting married?”

Both of us had been married before. Sensibly, Derryn said, “What if it doesn’t last?”

“Well then,” I said, “we get divorced.”

Soon after, we eloped to Kingston, New York, where we found a tame minister and a couple of witnesses to do the deed.

Did it seem likely that the two of us would end up married? I think we were mutual trophies for each other. I brought good looks, fun, charm, and a love of journalism that started when I was a writer on my high school newspaper. He brought fame, ambition and an accent that told me, before he even mentioned it, that he was from Down Under.

We didn’t stay married. The sensible thing he’d worried about — “what if it doesn’t last?” — happened eventually, the way sensible worries do, and we divorced. But whatever we were to each other didn’t end when the marriage did. Decades on, when I stood in that room full of people who loved him, I realised I was still one of them.

More than fifty years after that flight, when we dropped into the pub ‘wake’ that followed Derryn’s funeral, I listened to more stories. Some of Derryn’s friends I encountered there remembered me and the story of the tie.

Derryn used to say, “All history owes the dead is the truth.” So here is mine: he gave me Australia. and a life I might never have chosen for myself and could not now imagine living without. I became an Australian because of him.

Not bad, for a man in a very bad tie.