ABC science broadcaster Robyn Williams has always wanted to excite listeners with tales of discovery about the natural world. He has less interest in presenting a shopping list of facts and research papers which could quickly bore listeners of Radio National’s The Science Show.
“Networks and relationships are the essence of great science, and great other stuff as well,” Williams tells Guardian Australia on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the program. “It’s about trying to get listeners to realise that there is not only something that changes their world for the better, but that it can be an exciting journey of discovery, and sometimes a funny one.”
His approach may be the key to his remarkable longevity in the role of presenter of The Science Show: the longest running program on the ABC with the same host.
On Saturday 30 August 1975, Radio National broadcast the first episode of The Science Show, live from the 13th Pacific Science Congress in Vancouver.
On Saturday, the program celebrates 50 years with a birthday broadcast at midday.
Williams – the founding presenter of the program – was 31 when it started. He is now 81.
For 25 of those years he has worked with producer David Fisher.
The program has always been ahead of the game, whether it is reporting on global warming or featuring groundbreaking investigations into asbestos and medical malpractice. In a 1987 episode of The Science Show, Norman Swan, who went on to host The Health Report, exposed scientific research fraud by obstetrician Dr William McBride.
The late Matt Peacock AM uncovered the corruption and spin of the asbestos industry over three decades, Williams said at a celebratory event held at the ABC on Wednesday attended by eminent scientists including Fiona Stanley and Tim Flannery.
On the first episode, author and academic Lord Ritchie-Calder warned about the climate effects of releasing gases from fossil fuels into the atmosphere after Williams asked him: “Do you expect the limitation to this ever-expanding use of fossil fuels as an energy source to be due to either running out of them or to this second question of climate effect?”
Photograph: Bec Lorrimer/The Guardian
The science editor at Radio National, Jonathan Webb, told the crowd in Studio 22 for the 50th birthday, he did wonder if the time was right to be celebrating “a person who is comparatively old, comparatively white and comparatively male”.
“I feel I can make these observations because I am also male and white, and my knees are giving out,” Webb said. “However, the more that I thought and I spoke to Robyn himself, of course, I realised that this is a celebration of so, so much more than one man.
“It’s a celebration of an institution, because that’s what The Science Show is. And at this moment in 2025, institutions around the world are suffering from neglect and often from outright attack.”
ABC chair Kim Williams remembers sending Robyn Williams a huge bunch of flowers for the program’s 20th.
“It has engaged hundreds of thousands of listeners weekly, fostering science literacy literally nationwide, sparking public debate and awareness,” the chair told the crowd.
“It has celebrated with national events and awards and established a template for radio-based science journalism in Australia.
after newsletter promotion
“The Science Show has inspired a generation of science journalists, podcasters and educators, demonstrating the power of storytelling in demystifying complex research.
“Importantly it has improved public trust in science by always providing balanced, evidence-based reporting.”
Williams says he is essentially doing the same thing he did 5o years ago, despite the seismic changes to the media landscape.
“I am still going to campuses and houses, and I’m knocking on the door and I’m carrying a microphone,” he says. “It used to be a Nagra recorder which weighed five kilos.”
He has famously refused to carry a mobile phone and communicates via email and landline. (He has been known to carry a block of wood which he calls his “mobile phone”.)
Up until the Covid pandemic, he wrote his weekly script on a typewriter. Webb says Williams would appear on Friday mornings before dawn and bang away on the typewriter because he liked the rhythm of sitting down and typing. He loathes social media and told the crowd as much at the event, even though the science unit has embraced social media as a way of getting its content out.
However, the quality of those hour-long scripts is flawless.
“If there’s one thing that stands out, it’s Robyn’s radio craft,” Webb says. “His peers love Robyn’s scripting, he is the master of efficient scripting that turns on a dime from one topic to another, and he really often has a cheeky aside.”
The cheeky side was no doubt nurtured by the five years he spent in television in the UK where he was an extra on The Goodies, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Doctor Who. After a science degree he decided to put the acting and the science together and try journalism, getting a job at the ABC in 1971.
When we met Williams in an ABC recording studio to take photographs, he declared he was wearing a suit jacket he bought from David Jones in 1973, while apologising for his muddy trousers and shoes, which were soiled at his property on the south coast of New South Wales.
But some things do change. Colleagues used to rib him about his habit of wearing sandals to the office, but he appears to have given that habit up.