James Valentine knew he was dying but he knew something else with equal clarity: he didn’t want to die angry.

The radio presenter and jazz saxophonist who surrounded himself with music, laughter and good times throughout his life knew that a Dylan Thomas-style “rage against the dying of the light” was not for him.

“I don’t want my last days to be angry,” Valentine, 64, said in his final interview with Australian Story in February.

“Can’t my last days be happy? If these are my last months, I want them full of joy. I want them full of friendship and love and happiness. That’s what I’ve lived for. So, I don’t want that to stop.”

Always a showman, James Valentine makes a grand entrance to his living wake. (Australian Story)

And so, Valentine sashayed into his “living wake” behind a show-tune-playing sax player, raising and dipping his hat like a vaudeville star and cajoling the crowd of family and friends to cheer him on.

James Valentine wanted his living wake to be a joyous occasion. (Australian Story)

He played his saxophone at a gig with son Roy soon after he learnt he had terminal cancer. He sat on the couch with wife, Joanne Corrigan, and daughter, Ruby, and watched movies, simply enjoying their company.

He went back into the ABC Sydney studios to record a final show, reminiscing with his beloved audience of more than 25 years about the laughs and stories they’d shared.

Of course, Valentine said, there were times of overwhelming despair. That day in June last year at Westmead Hospital when an oncologist used the words “stage four, terminal, inoperable, incurable” in one sentence left him and Joanne reeling.

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One last song: James Valentine died on April 22, 2026. (Australian Story: Tom Hancock)

About 18 months earlier, Valentine had been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer and soon faced a monumentally difficult choice between two vastly different treatment options.

Neither guaranteed cancer would not recur, perhaps elsewhere in his body. He chose the less invasive option.

Now, the cancer had recurred as a distant metastasis in his omentum, a “fatty apron” that hangs down from the stomach.

Valentine said that “for a day or two” after his terminal diagnosis, he pondered the medical choice he’d made.

“Then I just went: ‘There is nothing to be gained here,’” he said. “There is no insight that’s going to change anything. And I need to stop doing that.”

James Valentine’s wife Joanne (left), daughter Ruby (centre) and friend Wayne Chick attend his living wake. (Australian Story)

Valentine on stage at his living wake. (Australian Story)

He focused on life, keen to ensure that his children didn’t remember his final months as a dreadful time of despair.

“Yes, I’m dying, but here I am, up again on another day,” Valentine said. “There are friends to be with. There’s family to be with. There’s life to be experienced. There are breaths to be taken. There’s a sky to contemplate. There’s beauty to be seen.

“Don’t start mourning before you have to. There’ll be plenty of time for that.”

Sadly, for all those who loved James Valentine, that time has come.

James Valentine worked as a broadcaster for more than 40 years. (ABC Radio Sydney: Declan Bowring)

Saying ‘silly stuff’ turns into long career

Valentine fell in love with jazz from an early age, first learning the flute before picking up the clarinet and the saxophone.

He emerged as a showman in the 1980s Australian rock scene, playing sax for bands such as Jo Jo Zep and the Falcons and Models, but his true wackiness took flight on Sydney radio.

James Valentine (centre) during the 1980s with the rock band Models. (Supplied: Countdown Magazine)

After touring the US with Models, performing the iconic sax solos on Barbados and Out of Mind, Out of Sight, Valentine felt jaded by the lifestyle and, having met Joanne, wanted a more stable job.

He tried television first, with gigs at the ABC and Channel 10, but was drawn to radio. There was history there: his mother Nina, now in her late 90s, had been a radio announcer in his home town of Ballarat, Victoria.

The moment Valentine walked into a booth for his first radio shift, he felt at home. “My memory is that I just went: ‘Ah, yes, I love this. This is fantastic.’”

He loved the immediacy of radio, the seat-of-your-pants improvisation, and, with his innate sense of rhythm, was adept at understanding the light and shade required to keep audiences engaged.

Valentine’s first media job was on ABC TV’s The Afternoon Show. (ABC Archives)

For the first couple of years after starting on Afternoons at ABC Sydney in 1998, he kept largely to the formula of current affairs-style interviews.

But as his confidence grew, along with his understanding of his listeners, Valentine decided, “You know what? I’m just going to go for the silly stuff that’s in my head.”

Sydney was thrilled to come along for the ride. The audience phoned in to share their stories about stupid things dogs do, or disastrous weddings, or the social faux pas they could never forget.

“There was this great well of creativity that you could draw on,” Valentine said.

“People had these stories. You just had to activate them in the right way.”

James Valentine working in radio in Canberra, late 1990s. (ABC Archives)

One long-running segment, This is What I Live With, invited people to tell their partner’s most annoying or offbeat habit.

It was comedy gold in Valentine’s expert hands, with wild tales about a woman using her hair extensions as tooth floss, or a man’s nightly ritual of sitting on a special chair and waiting for a wild possum to pop down to have its fur combed.

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One of James Valentine’s craziest ideas was one where he said nothing at all. (Australian Story)

All of it made the madcap broadcaster happy and his audience loyal.

“We’ve shared our life together,” Valentine said. “I’ve talked about everything that’s happened to me. They’ve told me everything that’s happened to them.”

So, it was no surprise, says Valentine’s long-time producer and friend, Jen Fleming, when he announced in March 2024 that he wanted to share his cancer diagnosis on air and interview his then-surgeon, Douglas Fenton-Lee, “in his characteristic, quirky, whimsical way”.

Valentine told his listeners about the Thai meal he ate in late 2023 that caused him to choke and retch and how he had difficulty swallowing. How he went for an endoscopy and awoke to learn he had a four-centimetre tumour where the oesophagus meets the stomach.

He told them he’d been having chemotherapy and radiation to shrink the tumour before Dr Fenton-Lee operated, in keeping with standard protocols.

The surgery would be long and risky. It would involve removal of the oesophagus and the stretching of his stomach to his throat.

“I had this impression that for the rest of my life, I’d be eating like a seagull,” quipped Valentine later. “I’d basically just open the beak [and] someone would chuck in a chip.”

But beyond the jokes, there was great trepidation. Recovery would be arduous, with the risk of complications, and Valentine would have to learn to eat again.

Playing the sax might not be possible.

Says his daughter, Ruby: “So many of his main joys in life are food and playing the saxophone and talking. And that surgery had the potential to take all of that away … he was looking at that like: ‘I so don’t want to do that’.”

Valentine decided to go ahead and told his listeners he was taking a short holiday before returning for the surgery a week later.

They’d been in Bali two days when Valentine heard through a friend that there might be an alternative to surgery.

Snapshots of the last family holiday. (Supplied: Joanne Corrigan)

Two doctors, two treatments, an impossible choice

Joanne recalls sitting with Valentine in Bali, the phone on loudspeaker, listening to Dr Michael Bourke tell them he might have an option other than the full oesophagectomy.

The director of gastrointestinal endoscopy at Westmead Hospital thought it was possible Valentine might be a candidate for a less interventionist procedure called endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD), in which cancerous lesions are removed via an endoscopy.

With this procedure, the oesophagus would be retained. But first, Dr Bourke had to assess if Valentine was a candidate for ESD, which is only viable for early cancer, representing about 15 to 20 per cent of all oesophageal cancers.

Surgeon Dr Douglas Fenton-Lee (left) and gastroenterologist Dr Michael Bourke both advised on Valentine’s treatment options. (Australian Story)

Valentine organised for Dr Fenton-Lee to send his medical reports to Dr Bourke, who reviewed the material with his team and carried out his own endoscopic checks.

“It was my view at that time he had an early-stage tumour that was suitable for endoscopic resection, although it had been treated by chemo radiotherapy,” Dr Bourke says. “There was no evidence of spread beyond the oesophagus at that point.”

Dr Fenton-Lee told Valentine he should feel free to explore the possibility “even though at the time I didn’t think that James was suitable for endoscopic resection”.

He didn’t believe Valentine’s was an early cancer, due to the thickness and length of the tumour. There was an enlarged lymph node that was concerning but could not be determined by the reviewing radiologist as cancerous.

Dr Fenton-Lee did not recommend the endoscopic option.

Valentine faced an impossible dilemma. “Two absolute medical experts, two people who are top of their game, telling you two different things,” he said.

Says Joanne: “One was saying it was a tumour that had been there for a long time and that it had grown into the muscle wall and it was at a stage that was necessary to take it all out. The other person was saying: ‘I don’t think it’s been there that long. It’s not that big. I’ve done bigger.’”

Valentine’s family watched as he wrestled with the decision. Like most laypeople, he was flummoxed by the science and medical language.

But what began to crystallise for Valentine was that whatever option he chose, he’d be taking a risk and that the cancer could recur with either procedure.

“I started to see the nature of the risk of the oesophagectomy was a quality of life that was quite probably not going to be very good,” Valentine said.

He decided to opt for Dr Bourke’s procedure first, in the hope that if the cancer returned it could be removed endoscopically, or via surgery if it had travelled further afield.

But, says Dr Fenton-Lee, “that’s not always the case. The tumour can spread somewhere where it’s very difficult to remove”.

Said Valentine: “I started to accept that I’m going to take on a level of risk here, and that I’m changing the nature of the risk. But even if I only get a short period of time and cancer recurs, that feels better. I’ll do that.”

And so, in April 2024, Valentine had the endoscopic resection, which was followed by another when it was found some cancer cells may have been left behind.

The tumour was confirmed as early stage.

“We reviewed the pathology with our full group,” Dr Bourke says. “Fully removed, clear margins and no adverse features, no lymphatic invasion.”

Following surgery, Valentine would have regular three-monthly check-ups, including positron emission tomography (PET) scans, to monitor his oesophagus.

Valentine was thrilled to still have his oesophagus and joie de vivre and so began what Joanne likes to call his “year of living gratefully”.

Following his endoscopic resection, James Valentine had PET scans at 12-week intervals. (Australian Story)

A year of living gratefully

Valentine with (left to right) Roy, Joanne and Ruby. (Supplied: Joanne Corrigan)

Nothing could overcome Ruby and Roy’s deep sadness after learning in June last year that their father’s cancer was back and he was terminal.

But it’s helped them to know Valentine lived that last year with as much gusto as he could muster.

“He was ecstatic just to have his life back and a second chance,” Ruby said.

“It was probably the happiest he’s been, maybe ever. It was almost like because things were taken away for a while, he did just run at everything again and kind of just embraced everything,” Roy says.

James Valentine at home with his wife, Joanne Corrigan, in April 2025. (Australian Story: Tom Hancock)

Valentine continued to host Upbeat on Sunday mornings on ABC Jazz, a light program with broad appeal that he had presented since 2020. He presented the show until November last year.

He took to the stage for a mini-tour called the Upbeat Revue, combining his sax playing with a stand-up routine and filling the seats with fans.

Before launching into a saxophone rendition of When You’re Smiling, he told his Sydney concert audience: “What I’m trying to do when I play this thing, or I’m on the radio, it’s all the same thing: I’m just trying to bring joy.”

Jazz music was one of the great joys in life for James Valentine, pictured as a young man in Melbourne. (Supplied: James Valentine)

Valentine had no regrets about his decisions

Valentine’s brief return to Afternoons on Sydney radio gave him a lot of joy. And for Ruby and the family, it was wonderful to feel the outpouring of love for Valentine.

“What’s been really amazing about sharing this whole process with all of Sydney is you find out about how much he means to so many other people,” Ruby says. “Everything about how he’s gone about this process has brought community together and in just the most beautiful way.

“Not many people have the power to do [that] and so I think it’s very weird, it’s very surreal, it’s horrible in so many ways, but it’s really beautiful as well.”

Producer Jen Fleming and James Valentine on the day they recorded their final radio show. Valentine presented Afternoons for more than 22 years. (ABC Radio Sydney)

On his final day at the station in June last year, Valentine told Australian Story he always knew the cancer could recur, although he admitted to being surprised by the ferocity of its return. Dr Bourke believes it was likely the cells leading to the recurrence had potentially spread before any treatments were offered.

But Valentine had no regrets about the treatment decisions he had made. “I made the choice,” he said.

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Listen to James Valentine’s farewell message to listeners after 30 years on ABC radio. (702 ABC Sydney)

He adopted the same attitude when it came to the way he wanted his life to end. He accessed voluntary assisted dying, which he considered “a very civilised process”.

“Why wouldn’t you do that? It’s a fantastic thing to have available to cut out the suffering at the very end.”

On the Saturday before he died, James Valentine, the performer, the musician, the family man, the radio broadcaster, the much-loved friend to the people of Sydney, was made a member of the Order of Australia.

A few days later, with his adoring family around him at home, he made them laugh one last time, then slipped away.

James Valentine, AM, 1961–2026. (Australian Story: Tom Hancock)