I've covered a lot of ground geographically and emotionally and for years I lost my connection with my family. But the best comfort you can have whether you are on the phone or sitting there in the living room with them is with your parents and to me family has always meant protection. When you smile you get a smile back unconditionally.

I don't really remember a time younger than 5 years old that I didn't have skates on because all I can remember is every day tying up my skates and a big smile on my face excited to go on the ice.

So my style has hopefully changed over the years and it is more relaxed and I do tend to smile and have more than one expression these days hopefully - which I didn't at the beginning.

I was walking around legally blind. Now I have 20-20 vision. I can't believe I spent so many years blurry but I think that coincides with how I was feeling. Now I notice if people are watching me but I also smile right back if someone waves which helps.

I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.

Science for hundreds of years has spanned the differences between cultures and between countries.

In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2 000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods.

Today's recording techniques would have been regarded as science fiction forty years ago.

But the imposition of morality onto science - where it does not belong - has become rampant in recent years.

Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely complete isolation from other humans for 10 000 years.

Thousands of years ago humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times despite the efforts of modern science.

I very much enjoyed my career in science. I didn't leave science because I was disillusioned but felt I'd done my bit for it after about twenty-five years.

The world has changed - through technology through wine-making techniques the quality of wine is greater than it's ever been. Whereas ten fifteen years ago it was very easy to find lots of bad wine it's kind of hard now. The technology the science - it's like are you kidding? We're in the golden years of wine!

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

This much we know: Journalism is not a precise science. It's on its best day is a crude art. We make mistakes I make mistakes. With more than 50 years as a journalist I have at least had the opportunity to blow more stories make more mistakes than maybe anybody in television.

The science linking the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather to the climate crisis has matured tremendously in the last couple of years.

Millions of people were inspired by the Apollo Program. I was five years old when I watched Apollo 11 unfold on television and without any doubt it was a big contributor to my passions for science engineering and exploration.

If you start any large theory such as quantum mechanics plate tectonics evolution it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

We are born at a given moment in a given place and like vintage years of wine we have the qualities of the year and of the season of which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything more.

The last few years have been my happiest. I'm happy in the years that most people are blue and sad and waiting to die. I don't feel that a bit. Smiling has a lot to do with it. You can just lift your spirits by smiling a little bit.

'Eyes Wide Open' took shape from two real life events straight from my own past. One was the sad suicide of my young nephew a troubled kid who was found at the bottom of a landmark cliff in central California. The second was a chance encounter forty years ago with none other than ahem Charles Manson!

Well I did Marlene 15 years ago and that's in the style. It's somehow similar and not similar because Marlene was much more aggressive funny and sad.

It would be sad if my best work had been 20 years ago and now I only had memories.