by Bob Irwin
After that experience, I realised I needed to teach him how to handle himself with snakes, and he was keen to learn. We started back at the basics, handling a non-venomous variety. For Steve’s sixth birthday, I bought him his first snake: a tropical amethystine python thereafter known as Fred the python, or Big Fred. I had wandered into our local pet store and there he was, an exquisite specimen unique to the rainforest areas of Far North Queensland.
Amethystine pythons are the largest non-venomous snake in Australia, and this particular fella was twelve feet long, far too big for that kid to handle on his own at first. But Steve was awestruck. He had to care for Fred on his own, learning what he needed to stay alive, what he ate and how warm his enclosure needed to be. He loved every minute of it and got him out every chance he had, when finally he grew big enough to handle Fred alone.
Which brings us up to the day I nearly died on the job site, buried in that hole like a wombat in a burrow, and the catalyst it became for our family to pursue a new direction. Certainly after that day it was vivid in my mind what I really wanted to do. Wildlife was on my mind constantly.
Dad taught me to work hard, but also to enjoy the work you do. I had become a plumber because I admired him and I wanted to work alongside him. But when he retired, so did my enthusiasm for the job. I realised it wasn’t the job that had been motivating me but the quality time I got to spend with my dad. After all those years, there came a time when there was no more challenge, no more goals to achieve.
And in those last few years of plumbing, I had moved into rock blasting because there was more money to be made there. It enabled me to pay off the house a lot quicker. But the weather made doing that kind of work in Victoria simply awful. I’d come home covered in mud and soaking wet from sewage and rain, boots full of sloppy mud, and absolutely freezing. Some days, I’d come home three or four times and change. And as happened that fateful day, the trenches I was digging would quite often cave in and then I’d have to dig them out a second time, and I’d be silently cursing with every single shovel-full of wet, thick mud.
I’d had a few other minor accidents in the lead-up to the cave-in, and I came to the conclusion that if I kept going the way I was going, it could well be a short life. When you’re regularly using compressors, drilling rock, blasting with explosives and using a lot of heavy machinery, it can be all too easy to become complacent. Even just fatigue would easily lead to accidents, and there was no such thing as workplace health and safety back in those days. Then, one day, one of my good friends made a fatal mistake while blasting rock, detonating the explosives too early, and he didn’t survive. That shook me up. It once again brought home to me just how unnecessarily risky that kind of work was, particularly given we were more or less financially stable by then.
So our decision to leave Melbourne and follow our dream was a culmination of many things that had built up over time. It just takes one thing to start you off thinking, and then there’s some other little incident which sets you off again, and it escalates from there, until one day you are forced to make a decision. Financially, we would have been better off staying in Melbourne—that was the safe option. But at the end of the day we had to weigh up what was more important: money or our happiness.
Our early discussions about starting a reptile park had been a bit pie-in-the-sky, just a farfetched dream. But as we returned again and again to this idea, and started to research it a little, it grew increasingly plausible. We knew we’d have to build the reptile facility in Queensland, because it was far too cold in Melbourne. And we knew it would have to be on a traffic thoroughfare to put us on the map.
Lyn had such a wonderful philosophy. Her advice was always the same, with our kids and for life generally: ‘If there’s something you can’t do, you just don’t want it badly enough.’ Her ethos had a really positive influence on me and it was perfectly true. If you wanted something badly enough, you pulled out all the stops to do it. The most important thing is to ignore all the naysayers around you. If you can do that, and believe in yourself, then you’ll succeed. It doesn’t really matter how impossible it seems. You’ve got to believe that you’re going to achieve what you set out to do. If you believe in yourself, there’s no reason why you can’t do it.
Everyone we spoke to in Melbourne laughed at our idea when I first told them, and I can’t blame them: we Irwins weren’t renowned for doing anything out of the ordinary. Our every move up until this point had followed a disciplined plan. We heard it all: ‘You’ll be back,’ ‘You won’t make a go of it,’ or ‘It won’t work.’
But I was determined it would. Our new business venture would not only support the family financially, but also be an exercise in togetherness. In starting a reptile park, we really wanted to achieve something lasting.
In November 1972, on a field trip to catch snakes for snake contractors in south-east Queensland, we found the perfect three-and-a-half-acre property for sale beside the main highway in a town called Beerwah. So we bought it, and that was that. We had made the first leap towards our dream of running a reptile park. We were ready to thaw ourselves, and our menagerie of reptiles, in the tropical sunshine state. I didn’t sell the business, I just shut it down. For the first time in my adult life, I felt a fire ignite in my belly.
Big Fred’s going to love it here! I thought to myself. He’s going to be the star of the show.
2
Beerwah Reptile Park
It was one year of hard yakka before the whole family moved up to Beerwah. In those years I drove between Beerwah and Melbourne, building the foundations of the facility. I clocked up that many kilometres along that highway it would’ve been equivalent to driving the entire distance around Australia. I sold the family home in Essendon, as well as our beautiful brick-veneer beach holiday home down at Port Lonsdale that I’d built with the help of my handy brother-in-law, Graeme. Finally, I sold our prized Dodge Phoenix, which I had bought for Lyn. What a machine it was, an immaculate vehicle that felt like driving your lounge room around town. I regretted the sale of that car most of all. That hurt a lot but we traded it in for a brand-new Toyota Landcruiser, a more practical vehicle for the roads that lay ahead of us. The sacrifices were coming hard and fast as we faced the realities of following our dream. But we were prepared to tackle them headfirst.
My apprehension about whether we’d actually be able to pull this off was building in the background. But I suppressed it, reasoning that while I knew nothing at all about the zoological industry, we did have experience in running a successful family business. We also had a fervent determination to make a go of it.
I firstly built a large shed on the new property, hammering in every nail and screwing together every last sheet of corrugated iron by myself. We planned to live in it until we could afford to build a family home, so I made it homely. It had all the creature comforts, and our creatures could be housed comfortably in it too. The businessman in me knew we had to open the front gates first and start to earn an income before we could afford anything better for ourselves. We were going backwards in order to go forwards.
It was the end of 1972 when we made the final move to Queensland. We took the kids out of school and they had to bid farewell to the only friends they’d ever known. I’m not sure whether the kids were excited at all, or just depressed. Our eldest daughter, Joy, stayed behind in Melbourne with Lyn’s parents, Nanna and Pa, to finish her final years of schooling before joining us in Queensland. That wasn’t an easy decision, especially for Lyn, but at that stage of Joy’s life we felt it was the most practical thing to do.
We loaded up our new cream and green Landcruiser and tandem trailer with all our worldly possessions. We all fitted tightly into the car—Lyn, Mandy, Steve and me, and Trinni, our large white fluffy Samoyed dog—wherever there was available space. Our collection of snakes was simply put in bags scattered at our feet, tightly knotted at the end to stop them from escaping on our two-thousand-kilometre journey north. We didn’t label the bags,
so we had to take care not to mistake them for clothing.
We blew four tyres on the trailer in the first hundred kilometres because it was so unbelievably overloaded. Like a tortoise carrying its shell, we were carrying our entire life on the back of that rig. Slowly and steadily, we made our way to our new property. And when we finally arrived, it was a shock for the rest of the family to look at the bare bush block and realise the work that lay ahead. It was a blank canvas, but at least it was our very own blank canvas.
I decided that when I left Victoria I wouldn’t go back to playing professional badminton. Time was too precious, with every moment we had being spent on preparing the park for opening. When I’d been playing badminton, training for state titles had been a constant challenge, and I probably made it more time-consuming than it needed to be because I was an aggressive player and I didn’t like to lose. I couldn’t afford now to keep up that kind of regime. I used to train six nights per week, and it was always difficult to find the time. I’d return home from a long day of physical work, eat dinner, run around the suburbs for an hour and then collapse in bed. It took me away from home and the family that I barely saw as it was. Much as I loved it, I had new priorities now. When we moved to Beerwah, the Queensland selectors came to ask me if I’d represent the state of Queensland. I must have thought about it for about a second before I turned them down. Our sole purpose in moving to Queensland was to spend more time together as a family, and badminton was one of the distractions I was walking away from to make that happen. After eleven solid years, I gave it up, just like that. I didn’t miss it and I never thought about it again. I had more important things to focus my energies on, like building an entire park from scratch and making ends meet. We were placing all our eggs into one big basket.
After the family joined me in Queensland, we worked together as a team to finish off the reptile park and open as soon as possible. The first thing we had to do was build an eight-foot-high security fence around the entire three and a half acres. Lyn worked industriously out there with me every day, mixing concrete in the cement mixer while I concreted in the posts. We eventually had another lady helping us too. It was an unusual sight to see in those days, two women mixing concrete, as in that era women didn’t typically work such physical jobs, but those women worked harder than any bloke I’d worked with on a job site.
Occasionally a truck would deliver spare concrete left over from other jobs, which I used to build all the paths in the park, barrowing, boxing and screeding them out by hand in the tropical Queensland heat.
When the kids came home from school, they got involved too. It was a great feeling to finally have that intimacy as a family for the first time. The family couldn’t have worked together in the same way when I was plumbing. And it was a gratifying feeling to know that ultimately we could all feel a real sense of ownership of this project.
After six short bone-aching months, working through all the hours of the day and night, we finally opened the park on 11 April 1973. Our first unassuming black-and-white advertisement in the local newspaper read:
Stop! You can’t go past without calling in to see one of Australia’s largest collections of native reptiles at Beerwah Reptile Park. Hop in! All venomous species, as well as death adders, pythons, tree snakes, goannas, lizards, in a safe, natural habitat.
We had no grand opening. We unassumingly opened the front gates of our humble facility one day and allowed people in to take a look at our family’s personal collection of reptiles. To begin with that’s all it was: a basic assembly of a few snake and lizard pits. We’d built a ticket office by the front gate. There was a large mural of a common brown snake near the front entrance that I handpainted with the help of a projector, and a small chalkboard advertising cold drinks on the thoroughfare. I’d toiled away in the shed at night, cutting information signs out of pieces of metal and painting them, along with all of the backdrops for the snake displays. Gate entry was just forty cents for adults and twenty cents for children.
And we were happier than pigs in mud. We couldn’t have been prouder to have come this far. It was testament to the whole family, and everyone could take a slice of the credit; we’d seen what could be achieved by working as a team. It was slow to start off with, but people were certainly curious. It was a promising beginning.
As the months passed, the park seemed to grow bigger every day, and with that the workload grew too. At the end of the day when the park was closed to tourists, the real work day began: all the animals’ enclosures had to be cleaned and the animals put away, fed and watered. The jobs just seemed endless, and it was a big undertaking for our small family, but we all pitched in and got it done rain, hail or shine. Compared to plumbing, this was a dream, and I found myself enjoying working out in the tropical Queensland heat. I’d be pouring with sweat as I worked, wearing next to nothing, but for the first time since I could remember I’d come home with dry socks. It didn’t feel like work and we seldom got tired of it. Instead we flourished in our new life among the animals. Despite the fact that we didn’t even have a proper roof over our heads, it started to feel more like home than anywhere else we had ever lived.
***
I vividly recall my first visit to a zoo as a young lad in Victoria. While the prospect of seeing spectacular animals was very exciting, in actuality I spent the next couple of days crying about the conditions some of those animals were housed in. To see large animals like big cats, bears and monkeys confined to tiny concrete and steel enclosures was very confronting indeed. The animals were so bored they were almost psychotic. But it was the sight of the chimpanzees that moved me the most. They had no stimulation, no exercise, nothing to help pass the time. They sat looking blankly at the ground, depressed. It was an image that stayed with me for a long time.
Zoos to me seemed nothing but freak shows for people to ogle at. I couldn’t get over the fact that animals were being used for our entertainment with no regard for their wellbeing, forced to live in enclosures that didn’t reflect their life in the wild at all. At that time, zoos didn’t serve any educational purpose; it was just a matter of making money by sticking animals in a cage and keeping them alive as long as possible.
And yet animals are actually far more entertaining to see in the wild, in their native surrounds, doing the things they instinctively do. To me, it doesn’t get much better than seeing an animal in its own habitat. The intention behind those old zoos may not have been cruelty—in those days there simply wasn’t the knowledge for zookeepers to understand the basic necessities those animals required. Research was in its infancy.
Thankfully, by the time our family emerged onto the wildlife scene, that way of thinking was beginning to shift towards upgrading zoos and linking the animals more closely to their existence in the wild. But it remained a difficult time to find out how to care for certain species. Keeping animals was largely a matter of trial and error. Everything we did was considered scientific research because most of the time our methods hadn’t been documented before. Research wasn’t widely available.
One day at the reptile park I received a phone call from a farmer who had shot and injured a wedge-tailed eagle. In those days farmers considered wedge-tailed eagles vermin that preyed on their livestock. Bounties were paid in Queensland for dead eagles up until they became a protected species in 1974. Over the preceding fifty years or so, it’s estimated that over one million of these magnificent birds were culled under this system.
I couldn’t believe his gall, asking me to drive up to collect the bird from his farm on the hinterland after he’d nearly shot one of the bird’s wings clean off. The bird then underwent an operation to save his life. Afterwards you only had to look at the forlorn animal to realise that he’d lost his regal bearing. This once majestic, proud bird had lost not only his ability to soar across the skies but also his independence to survive in the wild. Wedge-tailed eagles are an incredibly active aerial species, soaring for hours on end without effort, known to fly to heights
of eighteen hundred metres, with amazingly large home ranges. He’d gone from being a powerful bird of prey—the largest of the Australian raptors—to a despondent caged creature.
I was determined to do all I could to restore his confidence. I built him his very own aviary, knowing that he would be in care with us for a long time. Following his operation, I had to massage his legs daily for many weeks until he could eventually stand on his feet. To start with, he just wanted to eat me, but in the end I had earned his trust enough that he’d come and sit proudly on my arm, digging in his dagger-like claws and allowing me to stroke him.
I’d marvel at the veneration he demanded, as he nobly puffed out his chest and looked down at me over his beak. He had an impressive crew-cut hairstyle, and the feathers adorning his legs made him appear as though he was wearing an oversized pair of pants. He was an absolutely magnificent bird.
I was becoming so distressed by what people were doing to creatures like him. The more injured wildlife we took in, the angrier I came to feel with the human species in general. With this in mind, I decided to make a sign for his enclosure. With a paintbrush one evening out in the shed, I described his terrible plight.
This is what happens to our precious native wildlife when people don’t care for them. This wedge-tailed eagle, once able to fly long distances, catch his own food, and choose his own mate, has been shot and will be in care for the remainder of his life. He has lost his sovereignty at the hands of humans. Please take better care of our wildlife. It’s your responsibility.
Our mission in designing the reptile park had been to educate people about the importance of the wildlife that shares our environment. Because in the 1970s, when we opened the park, the commonly held belief was that the only good snake was a dead one. They were something you’d hit with a stick.