About
Richard de Grijs is a keynote speaker for hire in Sydney, NSW.
Richard de Grijs takes big subjects and makes them land with a room. His keynotes cover maritime exploration and survival at sea, scientific discovery, navigation, astronomy, leadership under uncertainty, and the human stories buried inside global history. Featured talks include Captain Cook and Health at Sea, To the Edge of the Universe in 26 Steps, The Sound of Silence, and The Race to Antarctica. Clarity, warmth and humour are what audiences tend to remember. He works with conferences, museums, festivals, corporate events and cultural organisations, and formats range from a single 45 to 60 minute keynote with questions, through to a lecture series or an after-dinner talk. Standard AV suits him: projector, HDMI, and a microphone in bigger rooms. Current NSW Working with Children Check.
Watch
The show
Deep expertise, told as a story. Richard works across navigation and astronomy, what it took to survive a voyage at sea, how scientific discoveries actually happened, how people lead when nobody knows the answer, and the quiet human episodes sitting underneath the big historical ones. He makes all of it land with people who've never studied any of it. Clarity, warmth and humour are what audiences tend to comment on afterwards. He's drawing on international experience across science, history, leadership and public engagement, so a talk gets shaped for the room in front of him rather than delivered off the shelf. Conferences, festivals, museums, cultural organisations and special events all sit comfortably.
On the day
Standard AV is enough. A projector or a large display screen, an HDMI connection for the slides, and audio so multimedia content can play. Larger venues want a lectern and a microphone as well. He's presented to everything from small groups to big international conferences, so if your venue has a quirk, raise it early and it gets worked around.
Performance options
A single keynote runs 45 to 60 minutes plus questions and is shaped to the audience. There's also a featured lecture series, several linked talks on themes like maritime exploration, the Age of Sail, scientific discovery, astronomy and cosmology, or Australian colonial history, which suits festivals, touring programs and longer events. After-dinner talks are a different shape again, story-driven and built for clubs, associations and dinner audiences. And presentations can be written from scratch for a specific theme or a commemorative occasion.
Insurance and paperwork
Working with Children Check
