by Bob Irwin
It was a difficult era in which to get people interested in our conservation message. Even the term ‘conservation’ was such a foreign concept to people, especially when coupled with the word ‘snake’ or ‘crocodile’ or anything else with fangs or big teeth. It was almost impossible to change the opinion of that particular generation, where that kind of fear was so deeply engrained.
So we knew we had to work on the kids, to get them involved—to help them to slowly come to appreciate the little bearded dragon or blue-tongue lizard they might find in their backyard. We knew that if we could give people the opportunity to have a positive encounter with something they didn’t quite understand, they would have a heightened appreciation for it. We wanted to show people that every creature in the wild was significant and had rightfully earned its place. We were determined to raise the public’s consciousness about animals.
As I trawled for more information on keeping birds of prey, I contacted the Queensland government’s Parks and Wildlife Services hoping for their expertise. However, instead of receiving information, I was surprised to find myself slapped on the wrist for displaying the eagle. ‘Displaying or exhibiting any injured wildlife is against the law,’ a department official told me sternly, upon paying a visit to the park.
Threatened with the confiscation of the eagle, I argued till I was blue in the face to keep him. Eventually they backed down, as long as he was no longer displayed to the public. What’s the benefit of an educational facility about wildlife if we can’t showcase the plight of animals in the wild? I thought to myself. In my opinion, they sure had things the wrong way around. The department was quite happy to read me the riot act but were not so forthcoming in thanking me for the time and expense I’d put into caring for him. Needless to say, I never got the information I’d hoped for.
So the problem remained: how to find the best-practice, up-to-date information on how to care for native animals—or any information at all. I was green starting out. I didn’t know much about wildlife other than reptiles and I had to quickly learn how to care for our mounting collection of animals. Before I took on a new species, I would read every piece of literature I could get my hands on, cramming in as much information as I could during every waking minute.
I also started to get in touch with people in the field who were ahead of their time when it came to displaying wildlife. We’d share our findings and observations, and learn from each other. We weren’t only learning the right way to do things, but we were also focused on learning from the wrong way. If somebody had made a mistake due to ignorance, then you’d learn from that. It was just as important to find out what not to do.
Lyn and I wanted to run the park as an educational facility, with the ability to care for injured animals and release them back into the wild when they had recovered. Still searching for information on wedge-tailed eagles, I decided to get in touch with David Fleay, an Australian naturalist widely known for his work in rehabilitating native wildlife who kept birds of prey and was a world authority on wedgetailed eagles. David had his own park, Fleay’s Fauna Reserve, on the Gold Coast, just a couple of hours away.
David and I immediately hit it off. Talking to David was like talking to a human encyclopaedia. He was painfully shy so there wasn’t much small talk, but information on wildlife just flowed out of him. He never wrote anything down, it was all stored in his head. I made it my mission to extract it all.
I enjoyed visiting him regularly, learning as much as I could from him. He always made me feel welcome. He’d make me a cup of tea and we’d go and sit somewhere quietly in the tranquil surrounds of his nature reserve where we wouldn’t be interrupted, and he’d give me all the time in the world to answer my questions. Talking to David was better than anything I’d read in a book. I thought he was better than sliced bread.
I regarded him as an elder statesman; he’d been involved in wildlife for so many years and was a true pioneer. Like David, I never wrote down any of the information he bequeathed to me. I guess he and I were a bit alike in that once something in the wild captured our attention we’d never forget it.
One day, while I was admiring his incredibly large bird-of-prey enclosure, David gave me some advice that resonated deeply with me. ‘You don’t need a university degree or letters after your name in order to be successful in displaying and caring for wildlife. What you need is observation, nothing else. Because that’s the only way you’re going to learn when it comes to the animals. You’ve got to think like one.’ While it may seem obvious, this ethos was frequently overlooked when it came to working with animals, and I couldn’t have agreed with it more wholeheartedly.
I remember once I came across an enormous huntsman spider on the trunk of a rough-barked eucalyptus tree in our park. Huntsmen are harmless garden-variety spiders, common in these parts of Queensland, but they’re spectacular: their leg span can grow as wide as the palm of your hand. The large spider, a female, had hold of a male huntsman. They must have just mated—I had missed that bit. Instead, I sat there and watched her consume her mate totally. She ate the whole spider, every last bit, and then washed her face with her front legs as if using a napkin. I was enthralled, thinking to myself, How good is this?
Another time, one evening, I was quietly watching a wallaby hanging around on our front lawn. He was loitering by a beam of light trained onto the grass, which was attracting a swarm of insects. Suddenly, with his tiny little hands and some of the best reflexes I had ever seen, he grabbed this rather large moth and ate it, bit by bit, munching on it like it was a stick of carrot. Before seeing that, I’d never have believed that wallabies caught moths. In fact, I’d have questioned the sanity of anyone who told me they did—to me, it was unheard of.
These are just some of those little things that you see from time to time and never forget. You could read it in a book, but ten minutes later you’d have forgotten what you’d read. But when you’re in the field and experience it for yourself it’s totally different. Observation with your own eyes can be really quite profound.
David was one of the pioneers of the now widespread philosophy that we need to design zoos from the perspective of the animals themselves. His was a lone voice constantly insisting that we make an animal’s captive life constructive: not just as an educational tool for people, but for the sake of the animal, keeping its life full of vital purpose. David worked with animals not to provide people with entertainment, but to make them beacons for the survival of the species themselves.
After meeting David I adopted many of his principles in our park. I saw how we could do things better. His work was the higher realisation of a mission that had first ignited in me as a young boy when I saw those miserable chimpanzees. I wanted to make sure that our animals would be not only comfortable but also happy enough to breed so we could eventually reintroduce them into the wild if and when they reached a critical stage out there.
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It was about this time, in 1973, that I met a terrific bloke who would become my best friend and a big part of our new life up in Beerwah. Peter Haskins was a biologist who’d just emigrated from England with his family, with the aim of setting up a biological supply company. He and his family were driving north from Brisbane when they passed our park and decided to come in for a look-see to get a first glimpse of what were to them exotic Australian animals. What were normal run-of-the-mill things to our family, had captured Peter’s attention. He said:
We saw a man at the entrance squatting next to a bucket filled with water. He was wearing a white-towel hat and no shirt, with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. There was a venomous black snake in his hand. He told me he was the owner of the park. Fascinated, I asked him what he was doing. He said, gesturing to the snake in his hand, ‘If you don’t get its skin off, it’ll just die. Snakes need to shed their skin to grow and this guy’s having trouble.’ I stood there enthralled, not wanting to leave, watching him alternate between soaking the animal’s skin and peeling it off
meticulously. I considered it a very kind thing to be doing for a snake. That was typical of Bob, you see, the animals always came first.
We struck up a conversation, and immediately realised we were on the same page when it came to our curiousity for animals; this was the kind of thing that made us both tick. And that was it: Peter and his family settled on the Sunshine Coast and we formed a friendship that has now lasted over forty years.
In England, Peter had only seen these kinds of animals illustrated in textbooks, but soon he and I were off on our adventures into far-flung corners of Queensland. We shared a mutual thirst for intrepid adventures, heading out into some of the remotest parts of Queensland to catch things, often for weeks on end without contact with the outside world. Lyn was very good about us going. She realised that without reptiles, there’d be no reptile park.
This new friendship couldn’t have come at a better time, because I had started to feel the strain of the financial burden we had taken on. We had rapidly depleted our savings by building and running the facility, and I was beginning to think it might have been a flawed idea. Have you made the right decision? Are you going to survive? Is it all going to work out? These questions kept resurfacing the tighter things became. The park could well have folded at any time back then and I would have had to go back to plumbing, which was a sickening thought. We were only just finding our groove as a family and the kids were beginning to thrive in our new life.
Over smoko one day at the park, Peter mentioned that back in England he had grown strawberries as a side business for a while for extra cash and that it had been relatively profitable. I thought about it and then adopted the idea, and we started to grow fruit and vegetables in our down time on our vacant land, to help things along financially. It actually worked out all right. In the evenings, when the park was closed, Peter and I tended to a strawberry patch across from the front ticket office. We sold the fruit to markets in Brisbane and shared in the earnings. Every evening, I’d be packing fruit in the shed to get it to market by sun up. As I worked out the business side of the markets, I started to grow cucumbers and capsicums too, until we had another idea that was far more appealing: professional fishing.
I invested in a twenty-foot fibreglass fishing boat suitable for conditions offshore. We’d head out to the Barwon Banks, a great fishing location twenty kilometres off the Sunshine Coast where a massive reef system supports large pelagic species. We’d take a big esky and fill it with some of the most incredible deep-sea fish imaginable: kingfish, snapper, red emperor, and so on. The first couple of times we went out we both got incredibly seasick, but thankfully we found our sea legs over time.
We were always so enthusiastic to get out there, and one night this eagerness got us into a quandary. We were twenty kilometres out to sea when we decided to head home, only to discover that the engine wouldn’t start. In our haste to get out on the water, I hadn’t packed a spare battery, nor did I have any extra fuel; I simply hadn’t been thinking properly. Fortunately, we did have a radio and we could just make out the faint light of another vessel in the distance. We radioed them and after an hour or so they finally came to our rescue. They hadn’t come any earlier because the fishing was so good that they didn’t want to leave their prosperous mark for a couple of clowns who hadn’t charged their battery properly. But thanks to these people and their jumper leads, we were able to start our engine and we got home safely in the end.
With a large number of fish out on the reef came a large number of tiger sharks. Hungry tiger sharks were always a hindrance when we were out fishing. Most of the really big fish we hooked were taken by them. Our equipment wasn’t up to a battle with a shark: you’d put in quite a bit of muscle reeling in what had to be a really big fish and then you’d see the grey fin surface and realise a shark had stolen it. Those sharks were never far from our thoughts when we jumped over the side of the boat for a swim to cool down in the hottest part of the day, and for this reason we never swam at the same time: one of us would always stay on board to be the spotter. I’d look first, and call out, ‘No sharks,’ and then Peter would jump over the side, swim beneath the boat, and climb back in. Then it would be my turn. You’d almost walk on water to get back on the boat. It was great to cool off, but we never lingered in the water and we always kept our wits about us.
We’d come home at night, put the fish in the iceboxes, and first thing in the morning Peter would take them up to the fish auction at Mooloolaba. Our catch would be weighed—it’d usually be well over one hundred kilograms—and then the bidding would start. At the end of the day we’d usually pocket five hundred dollars, which was a good sum of money in those days. After petrol and bait expenses, we’d split it straight down the middle. We went out as often as the weather would allow. It evolved into a hobby that we thoroughly enjoyed. It sure beat packing boxes of fruit and vegetables.
Lyn and I kept our financial struggles hidden from the children, but Lyn used to cry a lot when times were so tough. We had gone from earning a decent living in the plumbing business to struggling to make ends meet, living in a shed, then later in a caravan, with three kids. We also had the added responsibility of caring for so many animals without being able to make an income from our new venture until we had more visitors. But thanks to these after-hours endeavours, we were finally able to build a family home in the park. That made life a lot easier for everyone.
I built the house myself in a private area of the park which we called The Compound. It had a big fence running around the perimeter for privacy. It was a very comfortable double-brick house. And almost as soon as we moved in, we wasted no time in filling in every available space with all kinds of critters.
While Lyn really enjoyed getting involved with the reptiles on display, her forte was the rehabilitation of orphaned and injured wildlife. With this in mind, when I built the house I tiled the entire kitchen and dining area and made a little gate so that all the little animals we were nursing could be confined to that area. But the sugar gliders didn’t get the memo: they’d flit anywhere they liked around the house. If you couldn’t find them straightaway, then sure as anything they’d be making a nest in a tissue box in the bathroom.
Our lounge room was a hive of activity. There was rarely a time when Lyn wasn’t caring for orphaned kangaroos, gliders, tawny frogmouths and possums of some variety or another. It wasn’t uncommon to walk into the house to see twelve pouches set up on the backs of chairs, koalas hanging off curtains with gum-tree branches entwined in the curtain rods, or Lyn wandering around wearing a beanie with a possum sitting on top. Possums like being up high—so much so that one minute you’d be walking through the house, minding your own business, and the next a juvenile brushtail possum would be clambering up your bare back, digging into your skin with its razor-sharp claws.
Lyn’s training as a nurse came into its own during this time; she just loved nursing little things. She started inventing her own milk formulas using powdered milk and yoghurt, because tins of powdered food concentrate weren’t even thought of back then. She was always tweaking mixtures and trying out new things and became really successful with it, eventually passing on her knowledge to many carers in the local area.
But caring for little animals was a full-time job that required around-the-clock attention. She juggled regular bottle feeds with running the front ticket office, taking the kids off to school and doing the daily rounds of the park. She was a powerhouse, and rarely got a full night’s sleep.
As the park became known in the local area, people began bringing all kinds of animals to us. We’d take them into our care and look after them until they were fit for release back into the wild, or we’d give them a full-time home with us if their injury was permanent. If the kids showed an interest in a particular animal and wanted to raise it themselves, Lyn and I always encouraged them. Mandy, in particular, was right into that, especially with the furry little critters. One of the first animals she raised was a flying fox named Wolfie. Lyn and I were
always adamant that the kids had full responsibility for any animal they took on. ‘That animal is your concern. You have to learn everything you can about how to care for him,’ I said to Mandy as she was handed Wolfie.
And she cared for him very well indeed. He slept in her bedroom by night and went to the park by day. She used to hang him on a coathanger up at the park entrance, but as soon as he heard her voice he would fly over to her. It was a good education for Mandy. She learnt everything an animal needs in order to survive, including the most valuable lesson of all: to send them back to the wild when it was time for them to go home, knowing you’d given them the best opportunity at a second chance.
With so many new animals around the house, there was never a dull moment. In the very early days, a particular trio—Egg Head the emu, Curley Bird the bush-stone curlew and Brolly the brolga—became just like an extension of the family. It was exactly like having another three kids around, because they sure acted like children. We had to parent those animals almost as much as our own kids.
Egg Head was a typical emu: he wasn’t all that intelligent. A carer had raised him from a small chick, but when he got too big we were asked to take him on. Egg Head lived with us in The Compound. One day I was painting one side of the house in mission-brown paint, a very popular colour at the time. I was kneeling down on the concrete, concentrating. I wasn’t taking too much notice of Egg Head; he used to quietly wander around behind people, just part of the furniture. But the next minute he’d dunked his whole head into the bucket of paint, like a sausage roll into a bowl of tomato sauce.
‘You stupid bird brain!’ I shouted, but it was too late: he lifted his head out of the paint tin and sprayed wet paint absolutely everywhere. There was mission-brown paint strewn from one end of The Compound to the other, all over the windows, the bricks and the concrete, not to mention Egg Head and me. I had to hang onto him to wash all the paint from his beak, eyes and nose before it dried; it was a race against time.