"Stupid o'clock" is how Nate Byrne describes it — the time between 2:30 and 3:30am (depending on what weather-related disasters are unfolding that day) when he drags himself out of bed and heads into work to present the weather on News Breakfast.
Despite the unnatural middle-of-the-night wakeups, Byrne bounces around the ABC studio with remarkable energy and enthusiasm for all things weather and science.
"This job is everything to me. I love it. I really love it," he says.
"I get to help people, even if it's just a couple of people in the middle of Australia where there's a warning that nobody else would care about, I tell them, I talk about it.
"There are so many examples of people being killed or hurt by weather and avoiding that is so important. I feel like I'm trying to keep people safe and whether I'm helping one person or a million people I think I get to do something really important every single day."
Before joining News Breakfast in 2017, Byrne served 12 years in the navy, initially as a maritime wartime officer, driving ships.
With a bachelor of science in biophysics under his belt he qualified as a meteorologist and oceanographer (trained at the Bureau of Meteorology) and became a maritime geospatial officer, responsible for providing critical forecasts for ships at sea.
Relaxed and engaging on screen, he'd never actually worked in TV before landing the News Breakfast weather presenting gig. But a year travelling around Australia hosting live shows about science for kids as part of a master's in science communication through the Australian National University and Questacon – the National Science and Technology Centre — proved to be a great training ground.
Since starting at the ABC, Byrne has become a popular and respected presenter, providing vital information during times of weather-related disasters and producing interesting and entertaining science stories from the field.
He's refreshingly down-to-earth and very comfortable being himself. He's open about being gay and last year shared his experience of anxiety that led to him having panic attacks on air.
As it gears up to cover a range of events as part of the global LGBTQI+ festival WorldPride, being staged for the first time in Sydney, the ABC has announced that Byrne will co-host the TV broadcast of the 45th Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, alongside ABCQueer's Mon Schafter and Behind The News journalist Jack Evans.
"It's an incredible honour, particularly because it's WorldPride, and it's going to be huge," Byrne says.
"The ABC was the first to bring Mardi Gras to television screens in 1994 and now its back on the national broadcaster for the second year in a row. The ABC is for everybody, and we want to celebrate the whole diversity of the rainbow.
"I think it's really important that we in the LGBTQI+ community show the world that we exist. If you're not seen, it's much easier for you to be discriminated against. We need to have pride in who we are in order to make sure that our voices are heard.
"I think it's easy to get complacent, especially now that we've got marriage equality, but some recent examples from overseas, particularly in the US, show us that even all of the progress that's been made can really quickly be taken away. There are intolerances even within our own community, so we need to fight it from all angles."
Byrne was particularly stung by such intolerance after appearing on the first ABC Mardi Gras float in 2020 and receiving a nasty direct message on Instagram. While concealing the person's name, Byrne made the post public, calling out the "unprovoked spray of hatred".
He received huge support on social media and from the ABC. On air, colleague Michael Rowland slammed the "disgusting and disgraceful homophobic comments" and declared his support for Byrne and others who'd marched.
"Normally, I ignore this sort of stuff, I've got a pretty thick skin and you've got to work hard to upset me," Byrne says.
"But in that case, it wasn't a public bit of abuse. If somebody tweets about me and anyone can see it, that's okay. You are putting your awful opinion out there and it can be judged by the public who read it or, as is so often the case, there is no reaction just silence, which is, I think, sometimes the best thing.
"Don't engage, let them scream into the ether and have absolutely no-one bite back so they may as well be talking to no one at all. But in that case, that person had direct messaged me — written to me in a way that only I could see. It was directed to hurt, and it was vicious.
"It was the first time I'd been in the Mardi Gras parade and it hit me in the guts not because what they said upset me but because I thought of other people who aren't as well supported and defended as me and how that could have landed on someone else. And I thought that that is happening quietly, silently, behind closed doors, in email inboxes and on phone calls all around us all the time and it shouldn't.
"I wanted to let people know that even I was getting that. There have been more of them but that tipped me over the edge, and I thought no, I've got to do something. I can turn this into some good. And it did. I've had a lot of people I've met or who have written to me who thanked me for talking about it. And whenever it does come up again it lets me remind everybody that we're not done with this yet.
"Hopefully, there will be more good come from it because somewhere there's a little kid who hears those exact same words said to them and maybe just seeing that I hear the exact same messages that they hear, but I'm doing okay, I'm out and loud and proud, hopefully that can give them some hope."
Coming out in the navy
Nate Byrne was once that kid.
Now 38, he describes his story of 'coming out' as an adult as "dull, but in a good way" because he had a supportive workplace, family and friends. But, growing up in Perth, a "nerdy" child with bad eyesight (he wore glasses from the age of six) who loved magic tricks, science, Sea Scouts and sailing, he recalls being taunted for being different.
"I was very much bullied as a kid," he recalls.
"I think that the other kids didn't necessarily know or sense that I was gay, some people probably guessed, but back then "gay" or "poof" was just the standard insult for boys. I felt it a lot more strongly, obviously, and it was a problem.
"I think I always knew I was gay in some way, not that I always had words to put to it. I had plenty of girlfriends all the way up into uni and it was while I was at university that I really started to embrace that side of myself."
He joined the navy in 2004 at the age of 20 and while he initially felt a need to hide his sexuality, Byrne found it ultimately to be a supportive and welcoming workplace.
"In the early days, when I was in training in particular, there were some workplaces where it would be a bit of a lads' room and they'd snicker and says stuff like 'back to the walls, boys' that sort of thing but it was never targeted at me with any malicious intent, which was good.
"Later, I saw 'out' people around all the time and the navy brought in de facto recognition for same-sex couples which was long before we had marriage equality or anything resembling it in the real world. So that showed me there was support in Defence for same-sex relationships.
"Around that time, I came back from serving operationally in the Middle East, after working on an American base at a time when the US Defence policy was still very much 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' and that made me think about how lucky I was to be in a military where that wasn't the case.
"I hadn't been very 'out' at that stage — my friends knew but my bosses didn't — but I felt very comfortable and secure at work. We had an event where partners were invited and I just brought my boyfriend along and that was it. Done. Everyone was like, 'Oh, Nate's got a boyfriend' and then moved on. So, pretty unremarkable. If anything, I got in trouble from my buddies for not telling them sooner."
A grandfather's gift that gave him a second chance
What do you want to be when you grow up? Children are always being ask this question by adults and as a young child Nate Byrne rather prophetically declared he wanted to be a weatherman, but as he got older it faded as realistic prospect.
"Apparently, I was about five when I told mum I wanted to be a weatherman but that was because I knew that grown-ups needed to have a job and the weatherman seemed to have a job for about five minutes a day and I thought: 'Brilliant! More time to play!'
"Turns out it's a lot more than five minutes' work! But that desire became for me like the ultimate dream job that would actually never happen, one that was out of reach."
He desperately wanted to fly, but a sceptical brain soon dismissed hopes of magic powers, and bad eyesight quickly dashed any dreams of being a pilot.
Byrne enjoyed the water activities and camaraderie of the Sea Scouts and there was a strong family connection to the navy. His parents had immigrated from the UK and grandfather ("Pappy"), Reg Hounsome, served in the Royal Navy.
Nate Byrne later joined the Navy Cadets at Training Ship Marmion, which he loved, and was determined to pursue a naval career once he finished secondary school. (His younger sister, JD, also joined the navy and was recently commissioned as a training systems officer.)
Byrne's application was rejected the first time and he was left devastated.
"The navy turned me down because I had bad eyesight and even though everyone had told me to have a plan B just in case you don't get in, I didn't. I was so sad. That was the only plan I had for my life and I couldn't see another way forward," he says.
"I looked into getting laser surgery done and it was scary and a bit of a battle because I was so young, and the doctor wanted my eyes to stabilise a bit more and then I found out how much it cost and it was expensive.
"My grandfather had died around that time and left me a small inheritance and the cost of the surgery was exactly the same as my inheritance. I don't believe in fate, but it just seemed like that was the right thing to do.
"Pappy had this enormous love for the military, and I think when they knocked me back his disappointment would have been even bigger than mine. So, I thought that was just perfect use of that money. I got my eyes lasered and started with the navy through an undergraduate program."
Over the next 12 years, Byrne enjoyed an interesting and rewarding career, at sea and on land. He's proud of his service and recalls fondly the strong sense of belonging it gave him – "in the navy the ship becomes like a huge extended family".
As a meteorologist, he was involved in the search for Malaysian Airlines flight 370, which disappeared in 2014.
"When MH370 went missing, I was forecasting for the search and recovery vessels and on that first day I had no idea it was going to be a feature of our lives for months and months," he says.
"I think I was forecasting for about half a dozen vessels initially and the information on where the plane might have gone down was updating and changing so regularly they had to keep shifting the ships and I'd have to keep redoing their forecasts.
"We did that for a very long time. It was really, really sad but I did feel like I was doing something really important. That was actually a feature of my navy career. I was so lucky. Every year, every ship I was on, everything I did, I got to help somehow.
"In the Middle East I was involved in counter-terrorism operations and helping stop drug running, we went and found World War Two mines in the Solomons, Vanuatu and New Caledonia, we searched for a container that had fallen off a ship near Moreton Island that it was feared was leaking horrible chemicals into the ocean, we did fisheries patrols up north to stop illegal fishing. All the time I got to do these jobs that I felt were having a positive effect on the world and it was really gratifying."
As a naval meteorologist, Byrne learned about the critical importance of forecasting – ships at sea needed to know if it was safe to put a boat in the water or launch a helicopter. He feels the same sense of responsibility presenting the weather on News Breakfast.
And while it's a popular sport to bag the weather bureau when the forecast turns out to be wrong, Nate Byrne would like us all to appreciate, even with all the whiz-bang technology available, just how difficult predicting the weather is.
"I think its incredible we can predict the weather at all," he says.
"The atmosphere is massive, 10 kilometres high and it extends right around the Earth. If you imagine dropping one drop of ink in a bathtub of water and trying to figure out where that ink drop is going to go and how that's going to diffuse through the water, it's really, really difficult. That's a massive ask – next to impossible.
"Now do that for the entire atmosphere. It's a huge problem to solve and I think it's amazing that we get to solve it and as soon as we're done — it's kind of like Wordle — you get a new one tomorrow. I'm so lucky, because the weather blows my mind every day."
The 2023 Mardi Gras will be broadcast exclusively on ABC TV, iview and triple j on February 25 from 7.30pm.
