 Hamblin attended North Sydney Boys High School and Geelong Grammar.Interrupted by the Second World War and radar service in the Australian Air Force, Hamblin's studies included Arts (Philosophy and Mathematics), Science (Physics), and an MA in Philosophy (First Class Honours) at the University of Melbourne.He obtained a doctorate in 1957 at the London School of Economics on the topic "Language and the Theory of Information", apparently under Karl Popper, critiquing Claude Shannon's information theory from a semantic perspective.