TV journalist Denham Hitchcock teases ‘absolute blockbuster’ on new show
With Network 10’s news show about to hit screens, co-anchor Denham Hitchcock discusses the impact his father had on his career, sailing the Pacific Ocean with his family and the story he’s had up his sleeve for months.
Stellar
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Growing up watching his father, former Network 10 news anchor Kevin Hitchcock, covering big stories like the Lindy Chamberlain trial and the 1987 Fiji coup, his childhood bed covered in Eyewitness News stickers, Denham Hitchcock never doubted that he would follow in his footsteps.
“Dad would sometimes get me to write news stories and he would sub them at the dinner table for fun,” the 48-year-old tells Stellar. “One day he got extremely upset because I finished a story with ‘time will tell’. He hates the cliché. I always knew I wanted to be a journalist, even at a very young age.”
The young Hitchcock got his break straight out of high school in 1995, answering phones and filling the biscuit barrel for Today Tonight on the Seven Network. He became a gun reporter, with a stint as a foreign correspondent at the Nine Network, before returning to Seven in 2019 to launch the current affairs show Spotlight.
Reflecting on his 30 years on the road, he says that what stays with him most is the impact he’s had on other people. “To truly try and make a difference and enrich the lives of the people you come across is what I’m most proud of. I’ve managed to do that in a lot of cases, and that gives me the most amount of hope. There’s still beauty amongst the rubble and devastation. You just have to look for it.”
Meeting his Brazilian-born wife, Mari, also seems to have been predetermined. Having grown up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, he’s always felt at home in the ocean, and it was while he was surfing beyond the breakers at a local beach one December morning in 2016 that he paddled over to Mari and was, as he recalls, “captivated. I found she had a similar connection [to the ocean] and there was no looking back – I won the lottery that day I found my wife.”
After marrying (on the beach, naturally) in 2019, the pair took sailing lessons together, quit their jobs, sold their belongings, bought and renovated a yacht called Latitude, and sailed off into the sunset on a six-month voyage through the Pacific Islands.
Hitchcock’s nose for a good story led him to document their adventures on their YouTube channel, Sailing Rio (named after the 40-foot catamaran on which they continued their ocean odyssey as their family grew), which has amassed thousands of followers.
Among their aspirational videos of life on the open seas is their almost two-year surfing and fishing tour of Fiji, accompanied by their daughter, Kaia (Hawaiian for “ocean”), almost 5.
“Sailing across an ocean, it’s the last great wilderness,” Hitchcock says of the experience. “It’s beautiful, it’s terrifying, it’s ethereal, it’s magical. The ocean sometimes will lull you to sleep, and you’ll be sailing along beautifully. And other times it feels like it’s trying to kill you. It’s a dangerous place. But it’s incredible.”
The family returned to dry land at the end of 2024, when Mari was seven months pregnant with their son, Hendrix – though that didn’t stop her manning the yacht during night shifts on the long trip home.
It was partly Hitchcock’s years spent covering disasters and destruction that inspired him to fulfil his lifelong dream to sail the Pacific Ocean.
“I interviewed people most of the time in a terrible stage of their life, horrendous things have happened to them,” he explains. “They’ve been cut down by disease or planes have fallen out of the sky. And everybody says the same thing: ‘I never thought it would happen to me.’ I realised there’s really no good time to leave it behind and go and chase other dreams. So we should just do it and the rest will work itself out.”
The broadcaster says he was also motivated to take the leap by his dad, who was in a diving accident when Hitchcock was 14, that resulted in him being in a wheelchair and had a profound impact on the family.
Hitchcock had his own brush with mortality in 2021 after being hospitalised with a rare condition called pericarditis – inflammation of the heart – following a Covid vaccination, the experience of which he documented on Instagram. This, he admits, also made it easier to step away again in early 2023.
With the family remaining on terra firma since Hendrix was born in December, things recently came full circle after Hitchcock was poached by Network 10 – which also launched his father’s career – to co-anchor 10 NEWS+, a prime-time news show that will replace The Project from Monday.
As free-to-air ratings struggle and current affairs shows like The Project – which aired its last program on Friday – are axed, he says he believes its format of daily news and deeper investigations will cut through and reach wider audiences.
To that end, it will be the first commercial free-to-air news program to also be available as a video podcast via global streaming service Spotify. “That’s the great unknown,” he tells Stellar. “The journos, the network [are] fully behind it. No-one is half-hearted about this show. And the platforms it will be on is also revolutionary in a way.”
Hitchcock will co-anchor the show with his former Seven colleague Amelia Brace, but insists he’ll also be “let out of the gate” on stories – such as the one he’s had up his sleeve for months: “It’s an absolute blockbuster,” he says. “It’s a story 60 Minutes, Four Corners and Spotlight would kill for.”
His father, he adds, is more excited about the show than he is. “[Though] God forbid I get any of my grammar wrong,” he cracks. “’Cause he’s the first one on the phone.”
The new gig has meant getting a “sensible haircut” in place of the golden locks that befitted Hitchcock’s life on the high seas.
It has also meant settling down. Sort of. For now, home for the family is their new 47-foot catamaran, also called Rio, from which he commutes to his new job as they navigate their way back to land life.
But, just like reporting, he says sailing is still in his system. “Our days will never be done. The ocean and the salt spray is in the nostrils and in the blood, so we’ll be sailing and surfing on days off. And somewhere down the track, we’ll get back out to the ocean again.”
10 NEWS+ premieres at 6pm on Monday on Network 10, 10 Play and Spotify.
Read the interview with Denham Hitchcock in today’s Stellar, inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD) and Sunday Mail (SA).
For more from Stellar and the podcast, Something To Talk About, click here.
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