Dr Karl Kruszelnicki has a visceral response when I tell him I’ve just finished reading his 400-page memoir.
“All of it?” he gasps. “Oh my god, I’m sorry.”
Kruszelnicki has written, by his count, no fewer than 48 books. The others have all been upbeat explorations of how stuff works, with punny titles including 50 Shades of Grey Matter (about our brains) and Game of Knowns: Science Is Coming (the year was 2014 and Game of Thrones mania was a widespread illness). He knows scientific topics inside out, thanks to his time as a physicist and then a medical doctor. And he’s comfortable breaking down complex matters and explaining them simply, a skill honed across his decades-long tenure as a presenter on Triple J.
But Kruszelnicki’s latest publication is the story of his life – and writing that, he says, made him feel very awkward.
“The publisher wanted it, I didn’t,” he says. “They snuck a clause into the contract saying I owed them … a memoir. I managed to fight them for three years.”
We were meant to be talking about his new book while taking a stroll along the coast but I woke up this morning with blocked ears and no voice. I contacted Kruszelnicki asking to reschedule but he had another idea – why not just come to his house instead, where I can ask questions at whisper-level with a mug of ginger tea in hand?
It’s an unusually generous offer from an interview subject and I arrive a few hours later at Kruszelnicki’s home in the Sydney suburb of Maroubra, face mask on and curiosity piqued. And so we walk through his rambling two-storey house as colourful as his personality. There’s a rainbow painted up the stairs (“Isn’t it amazing that you can just paint a rainbow and it enriches your life?”) and paintings hung on just about every available inch of wall space (“Without art, what’s the point?”). There are two pirate flags flapping in the wind outside. On one shelf there’s a small meteorite in an upcycled salsa jar. “That’s my meteorite,” he says but, before I can ask him more about it, we’re whisked on to the next thing.
Kruszelnicki moves a mile a minute, speaking enthusiastically about the topics that excite him – prompted or not. A question about recreational drugs somehow ends up with him talking about calcium atoms in the human body. One about the process of his writing his memoir swerves to his thoughts on nuclear war. When I ask whether he thinks Sydney has become better or worse during his 50-odd years here it sparks a seven-minute digression into developers, how cold Australian houses are in winter, and criticism of a particularly well-known property group whose shoddy practices he says I should investigate and expose.
His sunny, no-nonsense take on the machinations of science and the human body are never far from our conversation. At one point he tells me it sounds as though I have an upper respiratory infection – better than a lower respiratory infection, the latter of which is potentially deadly.
“That’s good,” I respond. “I’m not dying –,”
“No, you are,” Kruszelnicki interrupts earnestly. “We’re all dying. Just not right now, today.”
Before eventually convincing his family to relocate here in the early 2000s, Kruszelnicki had wanted to move to Maroubra for years – it is, he says, “the best part of Sydney”. He’d discovered the area during his years as a cab driver and then again while working as children’s doctor at the nearby Prince Henry hospital. Those are two of the varied jobs he writes about in A Periodic Tale: My Sciencey Memoir, which begins with Kruszelnicki arriving in Australia in the 1950s, the young child of two Holocaust survivors.
As his book tells it, Kruszelnicki has had one hell of a life. On top of his time as a cabby and a doctor, his CV includes a stint in the laboratory of a steelworks, an unsuccessful turn as a film-maker, two years spent building an eye disease-detecting machine for Fred Hollows and a gig as a tertiary tutor in Papua New Guinea (his worst job of the lot because “the boss thought I was fucking his wife when I wasn’t”). He earned his first degree in physics, came back a decade later for a master’s in engineering, before returning again to study medicine.
Along the way he lived rent-free for eight years in squats in Glebe during his time as a self-described hippy who smoked weed daily and preferred not to wear shoes. He was once stalked by a shark while swimming at Little Bay. He narrowly avoided being arrested by Bjelke-Petersen era Queensland police by jumping from a moving train. He had another close call with death when, while driving the taxi, a group of men dragged him from the vehicle, beat him up and left him on the side of a road.
“Having been beaten unconscious really changes your life,” he reflects now, as we take a seat in the study. “So if people insult me and say, ‘You smell like a bum.’ I go, oh, all right. But until you beat me unconscious again, I’m not really worried. Words, they just go past.”
Despite all the action crammed into the memoir, Kruszelnicki says there are other chapters of his life that didn’t make the cut.
“I left out minor things like my seven trips to Antarctica and several decades being a test driver for four-wheel drives in the Australian outback,” he says. “And there was stuff I had to leave out because it was too bad and so [the publisher] said leave it out.”
Like what, I ask?
“Oh, they were pretty bad. So that’s why forgiveness is such an important thing, because we all make stupid mistakes. Next question.”
Eventually Kruszelnicki began making media appearances as a science communicator, finding himself in yet another new career. But despite the high profile he has built he insists there’s nothing special about him.
“I’m not particularly smart,” he says. “My IQ is in [the category] that two-thirds of the population is, between 85 and 115, but I am very well educated because once upon a time the Australian government thought that education was a worthwhile investment in the future.”
The secret to his success, he says, is just “being able to explain things in plain English. And 16 years of free university education – I could not have done it without that.”
Today Kruszelnicki is in his mid-70s (I ask his exact age and he responds only that he’s “older than lettuce, younger than a mountain”). Over the years some things have changed while others stayed the same. He no longer smokes cannabis, though he says it’s “pretty clear” it should be legalised. He doesn’t identify as a hippy any more but still believes in progressive causes including raising the minimum age for incarceration (“Putting 10-year-old kids in jail like they do in Queensland, that’s just very wrong”).
In his later years he has found more wholesome hobbies than those of his youth. On my way out he shows me the back yard where he plays with his grandkids and the shed where he spends a lot of time tinkering with tools, or just sitting down to scour the Aldi catalogue for deals. On the wall is a street sign from a nearby main road. “It fell off, I didn’t knock it off,” he says. “But as soon as I saw it, I took it.”
Having lived it all, Kruszelnicki’s advice to others navigating their own journey is to stay curious, optimistic and generous – and not to rush things.
“There’s many ways there, so don’t worry about taking a meandering path,” he says. “Every job I’ve had makes me feel good, and when it stops making me feel good, I walk away.”
I ask Kruszelnicki if there’s any job he hasn’t had yet had but wants to try. He replies without missing a beat: “Astronaut.”
I get the feeling he might make it happen yet.
A Periodic Tale: My Sciencey Memoir by Dr Karl Kruszelnicki is out now through HarperCollins
