by Bob Irwin
Eight short minutes after we arrived at the hospital, Lyn gave birth to our little boy. I couldn’t believe it. Out came the nurse with this little bundle: Stephen Robert Irwin. It was clear that he couldn’t wait to come into this world; his enthusiasm to be on this planet was evident from day one.
‘Congratulations, Mr Irwin! Here is your beautiful son,’ the nurse said as she handed him over to me, all wrapped up tight in a light blue baby blanket. I was always frightened to hold babies because I was scared of breaking them, but I eagerly took him into my awkward arms. Beautiful? Talk about an ugly bugger, I thought to myself, but I made all the appropriate noises for the nurse’s benefit. All I could think to myself was that anybody who says newborn babies are cute has got to be kidding. He looked more alien than human.
But I was stoked to be a father to a son, and felt like punching the air. We hadn’t known we were having a boy, and I immediately started dreaming about all the things I would teach him, the way my dad had taught me. I instantly knew that we were going to have a great adventure.
Thankfully as the days went by, he changed from blue and wrinkly to a pretty damn good-looking blond-haired baby. And he was a tornado, wired to the eyeballs, right from the start. He came in a hurry and he never stopped from then on. He was into everything that it was possible for him to be into. From the age of two onwards, whenever he went missing you’d just look up the nearest tree and there he’d be. I never tried to stop him, it would’ve been useless. You had to let him go merrily on his own way. That kid just couldn’t keep still.
By this stage, I’d learnt a bit about quoting for different jobs and I’d helped Dad to expand his business for many years. But eventually he had to retire due to poor health, the beginning of debilitating emphysema. So I decided to go out on my own.
Lyn and I moved to Essendon, one of the inner-city suburbs of Melbourne, where I knew I could get ample work. I took out a mortgage to purchase a modest family home on a comfortable street in suburbia. It was nothing special, but it was a start: somewhere to live and run a business from. I made a promise to Lyn that I would pay off the home in just five years. With this goal came a lot of work, and before long the business picked up and we were run off our feet.
Eventually we were so in demand for work that Lyn took on the bookkeeping as well as being a full-time mother. She would do all of the quoting, running around to different government departments. We made a great team, and it would have been impossible without her: bookwork and me never got along.
I was lucky to be in an industry where the harder I worked, the more hours I clocked up and the more money I made. We were becoming financially stable. But I hated living in the city. The steel and concrete jungle was a world apart from the quiet and calming effect of the bush where I felt such a deep-rooted connection. I was never home, working day and night, so I didn’t spend time with the kids and I missed a lot of that little kid stuff. By the time I’d get home they’d usually be in bed. You don’t always realise the cost at the time, of course. Your mind says, You’ve got a family to support, it’s your responsibility, so you work like buggery. That became our life from the day we arrived in the city.
But every now and then, Lyn and I would escape from the city for the day and take off down south to do a bit of trout fishing on the Goulburn River. We had a permit that allowed us to catch six trout per day and would rarely come home empty-handed. We had quickly learnt that the best bait for trout were frogs we’d collect from the banks of the river. In my opinion trout made for terrible eating, but these trips got us out into an isolated part of the world. I always enjoyed watching the scenery evolve from concrete and bitumen to reviving greenery as we waved goodbye to the city.
Out there everything was alive. Tall river red gums lined the banks of the creek, home to cockatoos, galahs and parrots, which flitted in and out of hollows in their broken branches. Occasionally we’d catch a golden perch or freshwater crayfish. Most of the time we’d put them back, but there was always that anticipation of what we might find next. No two visits to these parts were ever the same because the wild is such an unpredictable place.
One day I was walking the length of the creek on my own, searching under fallen logs for frogs. As I overturned the first log I expected to see a bunch of frogs, but instead found a startled banded brown-coloured snake. I identified it as a mainland tiger snake, one of Victoria’s best-known snakes, often with distinctive tiger-like bands along the length of its body. His ragged stripes varied in colour from pale yellow to black along his solid, muscular body. I wasn’t all that shocked to find him, just annoyed that the little bugger had eaten all of my frogs. I went to the next log only to find another tiger snake and no frogs. By the time I got to the fifth log with the same frustrating sight, I was getting so grumpy that the snakes had taken all my bait that I just sat there looking at this snake until I finally thought, Oh well, I’ll take you home instead.
I was far from experienced at handling venomous snakes, so I observed him for quite some time before planning my move. I knew enough to be aware that it wasn’t an intelligent thing to be doing. Mainland tiger snakes are high on the list of Australia’s top ten most venomous snakes, and they can inflict fatal bites. If I made a wrong move, I’d likely pay for my inexperience with my life. With just one strike, within minutes, I’d have trouble breathing, and paralysis would take hold soon afterwards. And I guess I didn’t have much in the way of common sense because I weighed all of that up and I still proceeded with trying to catch him.
As I approached him, he gave me a warning, raising his head in a threatening pre-strike stance. I hadn’t seen a snake do that before and I was fascinated to find that he flattened out the entire length of his body in his aggressive posture. Duly warned, I gave him a wider berth and continued to observe him. I realised he had no intention whatsoever of harming me if I could just show him that I wasn’t a threat.
In my attempts to interpret his defensive behaviour, I was reminded of the advice of my self-defence instructor at a time when I’d been finishing my plumbing apprenticeship. I’d become tired of being knocked around by boys twice my size and I wanted to learn how to stand up for myself a bit more. The class taught all forms of self-defence, with the teacher making it clear that these skills weren’t to be used unless you absolutely had to. The ideal situation, of course, was to just walk away from a bully. ‘But if the worst comes to the worst, Robert,’ my teacher told me, ‘don’t wait. If you know something is going to happen, then you need to become the aggressor.’ Applying that same understanding to the snake, it was clear to me that as I had cornered him it was in fact me who had become the bully. I knew he didn’t perceive me as food, I was far too big for that, and if I was bitten it wouldn’t be out of malice but self-defence.
After quite a while of warily watching each other, the snake chose not to become the aggressor but instead to walk away. Well, in his case, slither. Carefully watching how he manoeuvred, I grabbed him by the tail and cautiously lowered him into the pillowcase I had been carrying to collect frogs. I tied a very tight knot to close the opening and stood frozen for a moment, my adrenaline soaring. I can’t believe it. I did it. I was excited to realise that I’d read the snake well enough to capture the animal with minimal stress to him. As I returned to the car, I’m sure I triple-checked that knot before letting him ride with me on the floor of the cabin.
We weren’t equipped for a new family member of this nature, but I hunted around the house and found an old glass aquarium and set him up on the kitchen bench. I was really rapt with my catch. Now that I had caught my first wild snake, I wanted to immediately go out and do it all over again.
Lyn wasn’t too happy with our new housemate. ‘Either that snake goes or I go,’ she told me. ‘Well, off you go!’ I replied. But before long her fascination matched mine. She helped me breed mice to feed to him, cleaned out his enclosure and read any literature available on how to care for him, of which there wasn’t much in those days. Eve
r since that day I had a certain fascination with tiger snakes. I used to wander along the rock fences around Wirroughby and catch them just to look at them, then put them back, honing my catching technique.
It wasn’t long before our snake collection had expanded so much so that I had to build an extension to the house—we called it the Snake Room—to accommodate them all, from venomous varieties to the non-venomous like tree snakes and pythons. From the outside our home looked just like every other residence on Primrose Street, but inside it was beginning to tell another story. Keeping reptiles in Melbourne was always a challenge during the wintry cold. The thought was always there, in the back of my mind, that it’d be much easier to care for them in a warmer climate further north. But it wasn’t just the snakes that had trouble with the temperature. Even though I’d grown up in Victoria, I simply hated living in a cold climate. At times I considered myself coldblooded too.
Lyn was naturally very maternal, and I suppose that’s what made her such a good wildlife carer as well as a mother. After taking an interest in the reptiles, Lyn started to get involved with all kinds of Australian wildlife. She began caring for orphaned and injured animals from time to time: native birds, possums and snakes from the local area that had been hit by cars or attacked by dogs. She absolutely loved it and had such a wonderful affinity with the animals. As time went on, our small family home seemed more like a zoo.
But our human family was not yet complete: four years after Steve was born, we completed our litter with the arrival of our youngest daughter, Mandy, at Moonee Ponds Hospital in Melbourne in 1966. We’d had a lot of trouble having her and were thrilled to finally welcome her into the world. Steve was in awe of his little sister and newly appointed playmate, and over the years they became as thick as thieves. She was nicknamed Grub, as she shadowed her older brother through creeks and mud. And although he was sometimes tough on her, he generally liked to look after her and get her involved in his boyish games. Mandy was into everything that Steve was into, always seeking the approval of her intrepid older brother, whereas Joy grew to be more studious and into the intellectual side of life.
To me, having girls was a totally different experience to having a son. I loved them equally, of course, but I learnt very quickly that you have to treat your daughters differently to a son. I taught my son to be strong and resilient. With Steve, we had to teach him to toughen up if he fell over or pushed the boundaries a little bit too far, which he frequently did because he was just unstoppable. Given his tremendous energy, we had to teach him to be pretty tough to survive.
Steve tormented the girls endlessly; he’d annoy the hell out of them with pranks and drive them up the wall. At times he went too far, and I’d have to step in and put a stop to it. The only place that was suitable to give him time-out was the toilet. It was the only place he couldn’t escape out of the window. But as he grew older he became fiercely protective of his sisters, and everybody in his family.
At the time, the kids were city kids because that’s all they’d ever really known. But Steve was lucky, because our home backed onto Moonee Ponds Creek, a tributary of Melbourne’s mighty Yarra River. He’d be out there exploring for hours on end and come back with his gumboots full of water, soaking wet, but thrilled with little lizards that he’d caught, excited to show me and always seeking my approval. Nine times out of ten, though, he wouldn’t come home on his own at all—I’d have to go out searching for him at dusk. So his attempts to try to impress me often backfired because I’d have to go out and find him.
I realised that from very early on he enjoyed the same kind of things that I did as a kid and so I started to take him with me out into the bush. Even at his young age, I could see he had that same curiosity about the natural world that I had as a young boy. He was a great observer of animal behaviour and driven by a natural curiosity. But he was just never where he was supposed to be: Steve came with a guarantee from birth that if he could go missing, he would.
When he was just four years old, I took him out to Sunbury, on the western periphery of Melbourne. I was headed there on a mission to catch eastern brown snakes. Its hilly boulder-lined paddocks with very little undergrowth supported a large population of these particular snakes. I was catching them for subcontractors to Eric Worrell, founder of the Australian Reptile Park in Gosford, who would then milk them for their venom and send it to the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories—an Australian government department researching antidotes to Australia’s venomous inhabitants.
The brown snake antivenom had only been around for ten years or so then. It had been introduced in the mid 1950s, and it took a lot of venom milked from a lot of brown snakes to develop it, and then to keep the antivenom on hand around the country. And it was sorely needed: brown snakes were responsible for more fatal snakebites in Australia than any other snake, and the antivenom would go on to save many lives.
Catching snakes was a hobby; I wasn’t paid for it, it was just something I liked doing. I started getting to know people in the industry and made a lot of friends from whom I learnt a lot about reptiles.
I would always bring Steve with me if it was practical. We both got a lot of satisfaction out of these trips—it wasn’t a one-sided thing. It was a good exercise for me as a young dad. I taught him bush skills, and he relished learning all about the environment and how it all worked in the wild. He was a good learner because he was just so naturally inquisitive, a little sponge soaking it all up, asking more questions than I had the answers for.
But similar as we were in that respect, we were also totally different in others. I was measured and relaxed, and would always take my time. Steve was the polar opposite of that, completely hyperactive. I would go so far as to say that he was a monster child at times. Steve was not your ordinary toddler.
This made field trips a nightmare on occasion. I’d be trying to creep up on snakes out sunning themselves, and before I’d get close enough to catch them they’d take off down a hole in the ground because he’d have scared them away. So I was trying to concentrate on the job at hand, while also looking after a child who couldn’t stand still for more than two minutes. On this day he was in sight just over a slight rise, not far away. But then I must have lost concentration for about a millisecond, because he suddenly vanished.
Then I heard him shout out, ‘Dad, I got one, I got one!’
I knew straightaway that this wasn’t going to be good. I raced in the direction of his exhilarated voice. ‘Where are you?’ I shouted, struggling to catch my breath.
‘I’ve got a big brown snake!’
I thought I had been running as fast as I could but those words doubled my speed. As I clambered over granite boulders, I finally saw him on the side of a hill. My heart was in my mouth as I caught sight of him. He didn’t have one snake. He had two. Two of the biggest eastern brown snakes I had ever seen, one in each hand. He had no catching bag, wearing only sandals, the skin on his feet fully exposed. It was another lesson in parenting that I knew I needed to be more attentive to in the future—in particular, workplace health and safety.
Brown snakes are the second most venomous snake in the world. But worse than that, they’re also some of the most nervous. Most snakes seem to tolerate human interaction without a great deal of agitation, but common brown snakes get displeased very quickly indeed. And here was my four-year-old son, only knee-high to a grasshopper, holding two of them by the tail. They were longer than the kid was tall, with their heads still on the ground, hissing in anger as he held them up. They could quite easily have swiped him. Either of these snakes could have killed him with just one drop of their lethal venom.
As I reached him, I gave him a backhand and he immediately dropped them. ‘You bloody idiot!’ I shouted. I had hit him with such force that he rolled down the hill backwards. He didn’t cry, and I’d hit him hard enough to make any kid cry. Afterwards I felt really bad about hitting him so hard. In the intensity of that moment I felt I had no other option. I had to act instan
tly to remove him from the immediate and very real danger. If booting him halfway across the paddock meant he wasn’t going to get bitten, then I was okay with that. I was just so angry with him. And I was even more angry with myself, that I’d let him get that far from me because I had been focusing only on the job at hand.
He eventually got up and dusted himself off. I went down to him and explained that my reaction was due to the risks he’d taken. His knees were skinned and bleeding but I knew his pride was hurt more than anything else. Then I walked over and caught the snakes correctly, showing him the safest way to do it, all the while reiterating how it was not something that a boy his age should be doing. As I did, I reasoned with him. I told him how dangerous it was. That we were a long way from the truck, and from medical help. That because he was only a little fella, if either of those snakes had bitten him it would have killed him. He’d have been as dead as a doornail, it was as plain as that. And that would have been a bad day to be his father.
I learnt a valuable lesson there and then about how the dangerous field I was working in could be perceived by someone his age. My risky hobby was commonplace to him because he knew no different. I guess to most children, your parents are your action heroes: you just want to imitate them and follow in their footsteps. Well, this is how Dad does it, so I can do it too. But after that day, I realised I had to try to teach him care, and that even superheroes can make mistakes. It’s hazardous enough for an adult to deal with a brown snake, let alone a kid who has no idea what he’s doing, just fuelled by gusto and enthusiasm and an inability to perceive the risk.
In the car on the way home, after my heart rate had returned to normal, I turned to him and said, ‘Steve, this is one of those things that your mother doesn’t need to know.’ And he never told her. It was definitely on a need-to-know basis and this was one of those situations where Lyn didn’t need to know, if he was ever to be allowed out with me again.