The Last Crocodile Hunter

by Bob Irwin

  And I was leaning towards thinking that the reptile park needed a change. After my twenty years as proprietor we needed young fresh ideas to keep up the momentum. It was all too easy for someone of my vintage to become set in my ways. Steve was ready, full as ever of foresight and enthusiasm. So that was the end of our years of crocodile catching, time with Steve that I’ll always cherish, that reinforced our bond. But it was just the beginning of something quite profound for Steve Irwin and crocodiles.

  5

  Australia Zoo

  By the early 1990s, I’d resolved to hand the reptile park over to Steve. It wasn’t a hard decision, to be honest. It was a natural next step. I’d always wanted the park to remain a family-run business and I knew that I’d hand it over to him somewhere down the track. At twenty-nine years of age, he couldn’t have been keener for the opportunity, and to my mind, he couldn’t have been more ready for it either.

  ‘Once you get settled and comfortable in what you’re doing, I’ll just get out of the way,’ I said to him. I initially gave him fifty per cent ownership of the park. It wasn’t a legal arrangement, there was no paperwork or documents signed, it was just a gentleman’s agreement with a nod and a handshake; a verbal agreement about how we were going to go about a handover and what our responsibilities would be as I started to step to the side. He would pay Lyn and me a wage from the park and he would manage it as he saw fit. There were no finances exchanged, we just handed over the running of the whole thing.

  He loved that place; it had become more than just his home. He’d proven beyond any doubt that he had the drive and ambition to take it on. He was so singularly focused on the park that nothing else mattered. He saw his future there, seeking out new ways to use it as a platform for his conservation message about crocodiles.

  He built almost every new enclosure and carried out all of the construction work himself, with his bare hands, no contractors or machinery. I’m sure at times his staff questioned whether there would be an easier way to do things, but he always had a need to physically exert himself. His philosophy always was, ‘We didn’t have any of that when I was younger, so why would we start now?’ Like me, he really enjoyed hands-on hard yakka.

  He’d often be up and about in the park at four o’clock in the morning, planning for his next project, getting in as much work as he could in the peace and quiet before the gates opened and it became harder to get around the park. He applied the same gusto to absolutely everything he put his mind to, whether it was ramming in a fence post or concreting in a new pathway.

  I was really confident that it was in good hands and that it would continue to grow with Steve at the helm. I wanted him to take over the park and run with it while I was still able to be around to provide assistance on the sidelines. It was always my intention to do that rather than Steve wait until I was permanently out of the picture.

  Lyn and I really felt like taking a break away from the tourism industry altogether. Although we were really proud of the park, after twenty-six years I had reached the stage where I wanted to go and hide. I didn’t want to be dealing with hordes of people anymore. I was quite content to just fade away into the background and let him run the show.

  By this time, Steve had married Terri, an American tourist with a background in wildlife management whom he’d met during one of his crocodile demos. At one stage, the thought had crossed our minds that he might not ever settle down. We weren’t confident that there was anybody out there who would be able to keep up with him. So when he finally did, we could see that he had found the perfect partner to launch it all off with.

  To me, it seemed like a good time for Lyn and I to also make a lifestyle change. As a parent it makes you really happy when your child finds someone they share common interests with, with whom they can take on the world and start building something of their own. I didn’t foresee just how far it might go then, but I certainly could imagine that they’d take what I’d started to even bigger and better places.

  I didn’t want to retire as such, because it was impossible for me to do nothing. They say that idle hands are the devil’s workshop and in my case you can pretty much guarantee that tenfold. So Lyn and I moved to a new property four hours’ drive away, where we could still be of assistance to the park. As we moved out of our beloved family home in The Compound, it was a chance to reflect on how it had all turned out, and we realised we had achieved more than we had ever dreamed possible.

  And to have achieved such great togetherness as a family, well, it doesn’t get much better than that. While Steve was looking after the animal side of things with the park, Mandy and Joy were managing the catering side of it, running the food kiosks as their own business alongside him. They grew too and Joy’s husband, Frank, and Steve’s mate Wes were eventually employed in the park to manage the day-to-day aspects of a bustling tourism facility.

  Lyn and I purchased a property at Rosedale on Baffle Creek on the outskirts of Bundaberg, Queensland’s sugar town, a four-and-a-half-hour drive from Beerwah. It was a stunning property, sixty-eight acres of rainforest with a crystal-clear stream, Island Creek, running through it. We had a new timber home built with verandahs wrapping around three sides of it, the perfect spot from which to enjoy the rufus bettongs, whiptail wallabies and myriad other wildlife that meandered across our front lawn every day.

  It was a dream place to retire to after so many years of hard work, anchored to a park we could rarely leave. We were looking forward to our new chapter in a quieter place, taking a break from caring for wildlife and sharing our home with the public. We’d get back to the things we never had time for when running the park: bushwalking, fishing, and just being more connected with nature itself. For the first time in our lives, we finally had time to ourselves, just Lyn and me.

  But our new calm was shortlived. After just two weeks in our new home, with boxes still to be unpacked, the Baffle and Island creeks flooded to record levels. Both creeks broke their banks and joined in a raging torrent right in the middle of our property. The floodwater rose frighteningly fast. Trying to predict how close to the house the water might come, I put a marker on a tree, and then watched in horror as water rapidly swamped it. Island Creek rose from its usual depth of just one foot to an alarming forty-six feet of water in no time at all. Our new purpose-built dream home, containing all our worldly possessions, including precious family photographs, was completely inundated right before our eyes. We couldn’t do anything but watch from higher ground as an expanse of brown water engulfed our house.

  When the water had started to lap over the verandah, I had decided to close all of the windows and doors to try to prevent the water coming into the house. But I hadn’t foreseen that the water would rise as high as the eaves. I was then concerned that when the water levels dropped, there would be so much water inside the house that the pressure would smash the windows out and do even more damage. I decided I needed to try to open them myself. So at the peak of the flood, I launched my boat and motored up to my neighbour, whose property was on higher ground, to ask for his help. He immediately came back with me.

  ‘You stay and hold the boat while I dive in!’ I said to him, and I carefully lowered myself over the side of the boat into the water.

  While he hung onto the gutter of the house to hold the boat in place, I dived down to the double doors onto the verandah and prised them open. Then I swam through the house, opening every window, resurfacing constantly to breathe. The water inside the house was up to the ceiling and it was pitch black in there. I had to feel my way around the inside of the house underwater, among household debris. Swimming around your lounge room is such a surreal feeling.

  As the water receded, we went around in the boat collecting floating lounge chairs, television sets and all sorts of things and tethering them to trees with long ropes so they weren’t carried away down the creek. We salvaged anything we could find but the destruction was complete. Everything we owned had been destroyed. The brand-new carpet throughou
t the house was water-damaged; we cut it into pieces to get it out, and then hosed it down, strung up on long clotheslines tied between trees, trying to save whatever we could. We rewired the house from scratch. It was many weeks before we were able to live there again.

  After that I decided we’d have to move the house to higher ground, aware it could happen again the next time Baffle Creek flooded. So I cleared an area of bush closer to the road, and called a friend with heavy machinery that could do the job. We jacked the house up as high as we could and dug two tracks all the way under the house so the low loader could back underneath. Then I got a sawmill to cut some really long beams to lay across the truck that we could lower the house onto.

  To get to this point I had to pull all of the verandahs off the house, as well as the roof. I measured and drew diagrams outlining where every single piece of timber went, and every stump and roofing sheet, down to every nail. These big sheets of paper became the instructions to reassemble the house in its new location. The whole process was a nightmare and a test of my very short fuse. We did the entire job ourselves.

  Thankfully the property never flooded again but the flood and move cost us a fortune, and it wasn’t what you’d call a nice housewarming. Lyn was understandably very upset; it was a pretty traumatic event. The hardest part was that every time it rained after that, we’d wake up and think back to that terrifying day. When we said we wanted to keep busy up there, we had no intention of doing anything quite like that. I suppose you’ve got to be careful what you wish for.

  ***

  ‘The kids might have sold their video to America. They could make a million dollars! Can you believe that?’ Lyn said, jumping up and down with excitement. She had just spoken to Steve, whose documentary had been sold to an American television network called Animal Planet.

  In the late 1980s, Steve had met a television producer called John Stainton through the reptile park. Steve had given John a few of his home videos to review, depicting him catching crocodiles up at Cattle Creek. Those videos showed Steve exactly as he was, no airs or graces, just pure enthusiasm and energy that bounced out of the television and around your lounge room. In the bush Steve came alive; that was where he was able to just be himself. John saw Steve’s appeal straightaway. Those tapes were the most intrepid home movies he had ever seen; he was glued to the television all night long. So John suggested to Steve that the two of them get together to film a pilot documentary. Steve and Terri jumped straight on board, spending their honeymoon filming with John, catching snakes and crocs in the wilds of Australia.

  Four years later that very documentary—The Crocodile Hunter—was a success on Animal Planet, with around seven million people tuning in worldwide. Nobody had put that sort of basic, down-to-earth crocodile-catching on film before, for the average guy in the street to see. And I think that was its charm.

  I had nothing but admiration for John and his expertise and the way he operated with Steve. It was great to watch the two of them work in front of and behind the camera. Steve was a natural in front of the lens because he was really determined to get his message out to people. And from day one of shooting, John’s advice to Steve was to remain exactly that way: ‘Just feel like natural, Steve, be yourself,’ he said.

  John had wanted Steve to remain exactly as he was in those raw home movies from Cattle Creek. What came across in those videos was effortlessly humorous, action-packed and a true representation of his passion for wildlife. Even after they’d shot what they wanted, Steve would be off doing something unpredictable or chasing another reptile up a tree. I think John understood that simply letting him go and be his natural inquisitive self was the way to go—and just always keep the camera rolling. It was kind of like releasing an animal out into the wild.

  I kept out of the way of the cameras as much as possible because I’m not a people person, and Steve used to protect me a fair bit when the media attention grew over the years. Occasionally I’d go out on location with him, helping behind the scenes in catching a fierce snake they wanted to film or helping to set the crocodile traps. It was a good excuse to get back to some of my favourite places and be out there again with Steve.

  I’m sure I pissed John off at times with my non-compliance: I’d never shave when I was supposed to and I wouldn’t do up the buttons on my shirts. I hated wearing shirts as it was.

  But with the increasing popularity of Steve’s documentaries came questions about his authenticity. Not everyone, it seemed, was convinced that his high-spirits on screen were genuine. The public, and even friends, didn’t hold back from putting in their two bobs’ worth. ‘That son of yours is crazy!’ they said. ‘He’s not fair dinkum. He’s putting it on,’ or, ‘Nobody can have that much energy, surely.’

  Well, we knew better than anyone that unfortunately he did have that much energy. The cameras were now capturing exactly what he’d been like since he was a hyperactive blond-haired boy who’d caused his mum and dad such headaches and near heart attacks. Steve’s full-on excitable nature was mistaken by some for overacting, but actually nobody was more genuinely passionate about the state of our planet and the creatures on it than he was.

  With his wildlife documentaries, he managed to get the viewer right in the middle of the action. He wanted his audience to be right there with him, just as he did with all those visitors to the park. He was all about getting people to have a personal experience with wildlife, rather than a casual look.

  He wanted to undo the disconnection between humankind and animals; he wanted to bring the two together. He had the idea that if you could impart to someone the feeling of a close encounter with an animal, you could also impart the love and respect that came from that close encounter. If he could relay the sensation of that black snake’s tongue flicking out or let us hear the crunch of a saltwater crocodile’s powerful jaws snapping shut—if he could make his viewer feel it, hear it, see it—then there was a greater chance of engaging people with animals. Because if you can’t get people interested, then you’ve got no hope of conserving that animal. He wanted his encounter to feel like your encounter.

  And John enabled Steve to get that across to people. The two of them made an unlikely duo—a raw crocodile hunter and a refined television producer—but somehow it just worked and they made a great team that endured a very long time. It was thanks to John that Steve got to be where he was; he took Steve out into the world and right into people’s lounge rooms.

  Steve never wanted anyone to try the kinds of things he was doing at home. People saw him work with dangerous snakes and jump on monstrous crocs, handle snakes that swung back to bite him in defence, lie down and let a deadly fierce snake lick his face. But people probably didn’t understand that Steve had had a thirty-year apprenticeship, as well as a natural born gift for reading animals.

  A lot of money was generated by The Crocodile Hunter in the years that followed. It was a fortune in anyone’s terms, something we certainly wouldn’t have been able to achieve with the reptile park. With it the park was able to grow. It very quickly became a world-class attraction and one of the most well-known zoos in the world. Steve renamed it Australia Zoo in the late 1990s, because he wanted it to mature. He had moved to stocking more exotic animals alongside native ones and a name change made perfect sense. I didn’t agree initially, but once again Steve was spot-on.

  The zoo went absolutely mental. People were swarming through the gates to see Steve working with the animal he had made famous alongside him, the saltwater crocodile. Things got so busy they had to buy more land for a carpark to accommodate the hordes of people turning up from all over the world to visit the very home of the Crocodile Hunter.

  But what was most amazing of all for me to see was that it didn’t change him a bit, except he became a hell of a lot busier. His filming took him all over the world doing what he loved—getting close to wildlife. He was able to get out to some other countries and wild regions of the world, which wouldn’t have been possible otherwise, and he w
as able to see with his own eyes what was happening globally for the conservation of wildlife.

  Television enabled him to get the conservation message out to the largest possible audience—at one stage he had a viewership of five hundred million people. We could never have even dreamed of that when we started our family reptile park in Beerwah.

  And all this meant Steve could put his money where his mouth was. If he wanted to buy conservation land then he could, and he did. He wasn’t just able to display an animal in the park, he could also look at securing habitat for that species in the wild. He was able to take our humble local wildlife park and our message of conservation to unbelievable heights through his wildlife documentaries.

  From where I stood, it was sometimes hard to believe it had all happened—I could never really digest it, to be honest. It was always quite surreal to see Steve Irwin’s name anywhere or his face on a billboard, because behind the scenes we were just doing the same old things: getting our hands dirty, driving the backhoe, catching crocodiles and disappearing for weeks out in the bush with just our swags. To me, he was just the same Steve as he always was, still the same old turkey, only now he was also a household name.

  ***

  Even in our retirement at Baffle Creek we still got involved with wildlife whenever we could. Steve and I ventured up to a property called Escott Station, near Burketown on the Gulf of Carpentaria, to rescue a rogue saltwater crocodile called Nobby with a jaw blown away by a high-powered rifle. And Steve finally caught himself a pair of elusive canopy goannas. They had first been described as a species in the mid 1980s, when some were shot out of the rainforest canopy. In 1992, after years of climbing trees in the rainforests of the Cape York Peninsula in Far North Queensland, Steve finally got his hands on a pair as Lyn, Terri and I stood on the ground, excitedly directing him on which branches to swing from to catch up with his target. He brought them back to the zoo and began a successful breeding program of this rare species, eventually releasing the original pair back in the same spot, where they could continue to thrive in the wild.