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A day in the life of Dr Karl Kruszelnicki

Guest post by Helen Nolan November 05

Standing in the foyer of ABC studios in Ultimo waiting for Dr Karl, I recall a conversation I had with Adam Spencer. I asked Spencer, ‘If Karl wasn’t a media savvy doctor, what could you see him doing?’

‘Dancing,’ Spencer says. ‘Karl has a grace and elegance that one rarely encounters in the human form, all the more impressive given his lanky frame.’

On the morning we meet, a very tall man with white hair walks towards me. Wearing green jeans and a brightly patterned shirt, Dr Karl is unmistakable. He is wheeling a case behind him and carrying what looks like a bag of sugar. Within a minute of shaking his hand, I have learnt that he designed and built the case himself. It features an organised interior which allows Karl easy access to the contents by a seatbelt material extractor. He demonstrates how it works and proudly points out the red leather finish. This man seems to be able to turn his hand to anything.

Karl has a friendly, open face. The science guru and media personality speaks quickly and clearly. His words are expressed excitedly and although Karl is both generous with his time, you can’t help feeling that he is always moving things along with slight impatience.

‘Helen Nolan? It’s nice to meet you. I thought we should go and have a coffee first, then you can ask me questions, then I have to go upstairs to the studio and do two radio shows – you can come along with me and drop off whenever you’ve had enough. Okay, what’s the time now…?’

Karl’s words gush out with exuberant gusto. You’ve got to pay attention as he darts between trivial banter, interrogative questions, the day’s schedule, scientific topics and somewhere, he slips in, ‘By the way, you’re my guest, please order whatever you want.’ He then proceeds to point out all of the options with deft efficiency. ‘Now, over here we have the hot food and here are the pastries. Do you like Danish? Or a sandwich. Have whatever you want. Cold drinks over there. How about a coffee? How do you like it? Skim? Ah, you take the unleaded!’ At the same time he is sweet talking the waitress and engaging with the barista.

Karl leads me to a private table where we can talk and I can record. He knows the drill. I have a list of questions and an angle, but it becomes clear that Dr Karl will take the lead. I make a conscious decision to try and harness some of his energy and steer him down paths I want to go.

Firstly, I thank him for his time and he responds with enthusiasm. ‘That’s okay, it’s my duty.’ This is the third time I have heard him say that so I start by asking him if he enjoys the interview process because ‘duty’ implies obligation and not necessarily fun.

‘Sometimes you have to say no to people, but I won’t say no to people like you because you’re the next generation of people who’ll be doing all the good things, so it’s my duty to make myself available to you.’

Karl makes you feel at ease and treats you as though he’s known you all your life. I push my tape recorder towards him on the table; he barely glances at it. I tell him I want to reveal a more private side of Karl to the reader and he’s happy with that. However, it doesn’t turn out to be that easy, for although Karl is very open, he has a knack of steering the conversation away from himself.

Before he discovered ‘hippidom’ (a period of time when he rebelled against his parents and embraced Kombi vans), he was a shy boy, and facts and knowledge were a good way to make some noise without having the attention on you. He read a lot of science fiction as a kid and even though he tells me he doesn’t have a good memory, he says his family would sit him on a chair in the middle of the room and fire questions at him and he could answer them.

I ask him if there’s anything he can’t do and he says ‘cooking and sewing’ which leads to a nice segue where he extols the virtues of his family – a subject he talks about throughout the interview. He is feeling guilty that he wasn’t present when his son, Kam, bought a motorbike and makes two phone calls to him during our interview. I find myself reassuring him that he is a good father; after all, he won Father of the Year in 2003. ‘Yes, but I should have been there for Kam. I feel terrible about that. It turns out there’s something wrong with the bike.’

Karl also calls his wife during our interview and I listen in, indulging myself with a peek into Karl’s private world. At first, his wife does not answer his call and he jokes, ‘She’s not talking to me…she’s leaving me!’.

I laugh and say, ‘Maybe I should turn off the recorder.’

Karl shakes his head. He leaves her a loving message and we continue our interview.

Soon, it is time to head upstairs to the ABC studios. Karl cleans up the table so the wait staff don’t have to and we wiz over to the elevators. Karl has a way of including you in everything he does, even catching an elevator. ‘Right, Helen, you push the button and we’re off.’ I feel so useful. I’m even carrying his sandwiches.

Up we go and into ‘The Tardis’ a tiny studio with two mikes set up. Pointing to a set of headphones, Karl tells me to ‘put the cans on’. During our time in The Tardis, Karl calls and speaks to listeners of Queensland ABC, NSW country ABC and London’s BBC, where he ends the interview with, ‘Thank you – Mother country scum signing off’.

Karl is ebullient and has a knack of appearing spontaneous, even though it becomes clear to me that he is very prepared and well-read. He re-hashes the same anecdotes to a new audience throughout the day. (E.g. In ye olde Britain, your DNA was kept on file for life for heinous crimes such as handling salmon in suspicious circumstances or picking wildflowers). He is never boring and cleverly educates while entertaining his audience at the same time, his loyal listeners ever ready to accommodate him and go where he goes.

It is magic to watch, for he is not just a scientist or environmental advocate, but an actor; a public speaker with acute awareness of his role, of expectation. His past experience as writer and presenter of Quantum, of columnist for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, as TV weatherman and taxi driver, as well as his natural ability have served him well in the driver’s seat of talkback radio and science television. He was even on an episode of Neighbours.

Karl has degrees in physics, mathematics, biomedical engineering (where he designed and built a machine to pick up cells off the human retina), medicine and surgery, but for all his smarts, he is the first one to put up his hand and admit he doesn’t know something. I ask him about ‘Mind Mapping’ and am quite taken aback when he boomerangs the question back at me. ‘What’s Mind Mapping? Is it some sort of new age thing?’ I explain to him that it is writing down a central idea and thinking up new and related ideas which radiate out from the centre. He listens intently and admits that listeners often try and stump him. Not that he minds, he happily goes away and does his homework. ‘That’s part of the gig. I’m just a conduit for knowledge, a generalist, not an expert.’

When he’s starting research on a new story, Karl says it’s a matter of reading through a huge amount of literature. ‘You have to read the boring stuff to get to the good stuff so you can tell people and they can stand around the water cooler and discuss it.’

It must take a lot of time. ‘I just troll through it. When there’s a new story, I have to build up a database of knowledge, which takes about twelve hours. Read, summarise, sit, type, edit. Eventually, we get close to the truth.’

It is these truths and his relentless pursuit of them that have earned Dr Karl an Ig Nobel Prize (Parody of Nobel Prize) in 2002 for his research on belly button fluff. He is the author of thirty books. His latest, Curious and Curiouser (Pan Macmillan) is full of scientific conversation pieces such as the supposed phenomenon spontaneous human combustion. His passion for environmental concerns and social justice have lead him to stand as a candidate for Climate Change for the Australian Senate with Patrice Newell, who describes Karl as ‘just lovely, a lovely man’, and spokesperson for the RTA Microsleep campaign.

All this and he is currently the school of Physics Julius Sumner Miller Fellow at Sydney University where he spreads the good word about science and its benefits. He’s also been known to clean the toilets! Yup, he’s just a regular guy. A regular guy who has worked as a physicist, tutor, film-maker, car mechanic, labourer, and medical doctor at the children’s hospital in Sydney.

What does his family think of Dr Karl? Do they ever tell him to shut up? He laughs. ‘I’m the obsessive guy who just wants to load the dishwasher properly. I’m a normal Dad.’ Does he ever ‘switch-off’? ‘Ah, yes, when I sleep. The whole purpose of being alive is so you can go to sleep.’ Really? ‘Yes, sleep is better than sex.’

The day has flown, but there’s one more stop before it’s over. Karl is keen for me to come shopping for fruit and vegetables at Paddy’s market and rings his wife, Dr Mary – the ‘clever one’ who makes all of Karl’s quirky shirts – to compile a list of groceries. It’s a short walk to Paddy’s markets and on the way Karl gives me a run-down of how it works.

‘You have to shout and call everybody darling,’ he instructs me. Indeed, it is quite a manic atmosphere in the markets and Karl fits right in (although he towers over everyone else like a loping giraffe amongst a group of macaque monkeys). Stall holders and regulars know him, not necessarily as Dr Karl, but as a fellow shopper enjoying the theatre of the markets. I find myself filling boxes with vegetables, sampling hot nuts and using a calculator to add up Karl’s bill. ‘Don’t say the figure first,’ he yells at me from across the pineapples. Suddenly, he is beside me, guiding me through the bartering process.

And that sums up Dr Karl nicely. He gets involved, gets you involved, throws you in and then helps you swim. All the while, you’re learning and having fun. I feel special to be included in this personal part of Dr Karl’s day and secretly hope to be invited to dinner.

As for the bag of sugar that Karl arrived with. ‘Ahh, it’s not sugar, you see, it’s my lunch.’ Recycling every step of the way. Back at the ABC studios we say goodbye and Karl sails away, custom-made bag in tow.

Helen ‘Helhen’ Nolan is a work in progress. She has a diploma in book editing and publishing from Macleay College and a diploma in writing from UTS. She spends her working life soaking up the vibe at Macmillan Publishing in Sydney and her spare time writing.*

*Lies. Her spare time is spent tweezering hairs and tickling her ears.

 

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