by Bob Irwin
Our friendship developed in this way. Then, precisely a year after we’d met, we were sitting together on his verandah, chatting, when he suddenly said something that nearly caused tea to come gushing out of my nostrils.
‘Let’s get married,’ he said.
I was frozen in a state of shock. We hadn’t talked about a relationship, or about anything like that. We were just good friends, so I was a little lost for words.
I carefully declined his offer, although I still felt that really wounded him. I wasn’t looking for a relationship. I had a fifteen-year-old daughter at home, Bonny, whom I had virtually raised on my own. I owned a beautiful little house on a peaceful five acres at Cabarlah on the outskirts of Toowomba. I knew that marrying him would mean moving to Ironbark Station and taking Bonny out of the school she loved. I also knew that he was still grieving and that it was all too soon for him.
‘I just need to know that there is going to be someone around,’ he said. I reassured him that I would be and so we continued to see each other until Bonny finished high school. Bonny and I would visit on weekends and he would come down to Cabarlah once a week for dinner and to help out with the animals whenever he could. He didn’t bring flowers for me, he brought big bunches of leaves for the koalas I was caring for. That’s the way to a wildlife carer’s heart. Cutting leaves for koalas in care is the most time-consuming job of all, taking hours out of any given day.
Then one weekend, while I was at Ironbark Station, the phone rang. It was Steve. ‘I’ve called because I want to thank you for what you’ve done for my dad,’ he said with emotion. He poured out his heart to me about the overwhelming love he felt for his dad. I was floored when the call ended. It was such a precious phone call for an adult son to have made.
He had concluded by saying he wanted to give me a car, a Landcruiser wagon, and a fuel card, to help me out. At the time I was caring for a lot of koalas and clocking up over one thousand kilometres a week to pick leaves for them, as well as making the return drive to visit Bob on weekends. On those visits I would prepare all of Bob’s meals, clean the house and do the washing—the type of chores that he hated to do. Steve’s phone call was a really touching moment for me, because it would have been a difficult time for the family as it was. They had lost someone incredibly important to them, the matriarch of their entire family.
Romance didn’t blossom between Bob and me like it does with twenty-year-olds. There weren’t any fireworks. It just crept up on us, slowly but surely. I grew to really enjoy his love of nature. I hadn’t had that in my family. I had been caring for wildlife for almost twenty-five years alone, and to find a partner who cared about the same things—and in such a big way—was truly amazing. I knew no one else like him; I could ask him about any animal out in the wild and he could tell me what it was, what it ate and how it lived. Our relationship really did flourish from a shared passion for wildlife.
Bonny graduated from high school and went off to study veterinary science at university. It had long been her dream career. When she was young, I’d often wake her up by placing an echidna or a baby koala on her pillow, saying, ‘You know, you’re probably the only child in the whole world waking up like this today.’ Meeting Bob had only furthered her passion for wildlife and he had become quite a role model.
It felt like we had reached the right time in our lives to take him up on his offer and so I thought it was about time I said so. ‘If you are still interested in getting married and asked me again, I wouldn’t say no a second time,’ I said.
‘Okay, let’s do it,’ he said, and he seemed pretty chuffed. But there was no engagement ring or any kind of dreamy proposal. Bob doesn’t have a romantic bone in his body; those things just don’t come naturally to him. Many a Friday afternoon, Steve and his family would arrive with a bunch of flowers and Steve would give them to Bob to give to me. We organised a wedding at Australia Zoo because I knew that was the only place where he felt relaxed and happy—which gave me confidence he’d turn up!
Bob doesn’t like public places, he just likes to be somewhere comfortable, so on the afternoon of our wedding, Steve closed Kangaroo Heaven—the huge free-range kangaroo paddock—to the public and we were married right in the middle of it. Joy, now running the zoo’s new Feeding Frenzy Foodcourt above Steve’s purpose-built Crocoseum, did all of the catering. Bob wore a white polo shirt that he’d owned for thirty years. He hadn’t let me buy him a new shirt for the occasion. There was no tie or suit jacket but, I guess I shouldn’t complain—at least it wasn’t khaki!
A few months before we were married, Bob and I had started a conversation with Steve and Terri about the ownership of Australia Zoo. ‘We’d like to have the paperwork done up to legally hand the zoo over to you two,’ I said to both of them. I didn’t want people to think I was marrying Bob for his family’s money, because by this stage the Irwins were famously successful. Bob still technically owned the original eight and a half acres after giving it to his son to manage all those years before.
Bob agreed that it was as good a time as any to sign it over. He had always wanted to do it while he was still around. Lyn had been the one who had managed the bookwork, and when she had gone, Bob hadn’t kept up with that side of things. I knew it was a conversation that I’d have to initiate on his behalf. Steve and Terri had the documents legally drawn up, and he signed it all over, the whole lot.
8
Reawakening
‘You’d better do something about that woman,’ Steve said as we worked out in a paddock at Ironbark Station one day. We were spending a lot of time together because neither of us was coping all that well.
‘I might just do that,’ I replied.
It was reassuring to know that I had his approval. Steve thought Judy was pretty good to me from the get-go, and I couldn’t have agreed more. I knew that just feeling as comfortable with her as I did was a good start, because that didn’t come easily to someone like me who is a bit of a hermit. One of her greatest strengths is her compassion—it doesn’t matter whether it’s for an animal or a person, she just loves to care. She looked after me like one of her kangaroos: I needed to be rehabilitated and returned to the wild and she had a real knack for that. I warned her that I wasn’t the easiest person to get along with, and I don’t know if she didn’t hear me, or if she wasn’t listening, but I’m thankful she persevered with me. When we first met, I was just a lonely guy with a bird-eating spider and not much optimism. If it hadn’t been for Judy, I wouldn’t have made it through that very difficult time—it’s as simple as that.
I was looking for answers everywhere and couldn’t find them anywhere. On other people’s recommendations I spoke to lots of people, from a counsellor to a nun, but nothing was helping. I was told I needed to accept what had happened and get on with my life. Well, that wasn’t working for me either: rather than accepting, I was obsessing, and rather than moving on, my life felt like it was on hold. My brain was on a short-circuit of loss and devastation.
Judy was the first person I spoke with whose words resonated with me. I had been so angry, wanting to blame someone for what had happened, looking for a scapegoat. Judy’s spiritual take on loss helped me more than I had imagined possible. I might still be walking around like a zombie if I hadn’t been fortunate enough to meet her. That’s one of the things I’ve been incredibly thankful for: to have had a teacher like Judy.
Everything in nature has energy, whether it’s a plant, an animal, a river or the big blue ocean itself. What spirituality meant to me was stripping life back to its core and seeing that everything is interconnected in an intricately woven web. Everything we do has an impact on the world around us. Push and pull. Everybody has their own idea of spirituality, whether that’s religion of some kind or simply tuning in to your own gut feelings. For me, spirituality was about returning to where I’d always found comfort in my life before: reconnecting with the environment. I had been so busy for so long, and worked so hard, that I had lost the kind of connect
ion to nature I’d had when I was a little boy. Judy reawakened in me that way of thinking. I believe a love of nature is innate but that it gets lost over time. My personal opinion is that anybody who cares for animals has some basic understanding of spirituality, whether they realise that or not. All wildlife carers, without exception, are communicating with their animals and connecting with them on some level: interpreting what they need and how they behave, or just tuning in to the animal.
Judy’s perspective helped me understand loss and grief from another point of view. But I don’t think you ever find peace, I think you find understanding—there’s a big difference. Throughout it all, the pain never left—nothing could stop it from resurfacing from time to time—but it became easier to manage. And then, slowly, after a lot of time had passed, there was joy in my life again. I woke up and it was as if the sun had come out from behind the clouds and I could see a future again. And that was all down to having someone by my side to share a future with, full of our mutual passion for wildlife. Judy and I really loved having animals around us, none more so than a baby wombat called Burrow.
***
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, northern hairy-nosed wombats were on the brink of extinction. With only around two hundred left in the wild, it became one of Steve’s priorities to display them in the zoo, with the intention of raising awareness about their plight and developing a breeding program to assist in their recovery. Steve approached National Parks and Wildlife Services to get a permit to do this, but they were concerned that the species didn’t relocate well and so before they granted him permission they first wanted him to prove that he had staff experienced enough to raise wombats. If he could raise the more abundant common wombat successfully from a joey, then they would consider a project with the northerns down the track. So Steve asked Judy, who jumped at the chance to raise a wombat joey.
We didn’t live in the home range of any wombat species, and Judy’s wildlife rearing, although extensive, hadn’t extended to wombats, so she and a friend consulted with another wildlife carer and then took a trip down south, visiting specialised wombat carers to undertake a training course in their care.
When we first brought her home, Burrow was just the size of a tennis ball, and the same shape too: she was about as wide as she was long. For a wombat, she was reasonably well behaved, but she didn’t like to go anywhere without us. She would be forever trying to jump up on our laps when we were sitting on the couch, as scratches in the leather showed. Every morning she would wander into the bedroom and work her way up on to the bed between us. She became expert at this, shimmying up between the bedside table and the bed. Outside on the property, she would follow us around like a puppy dog. Before long she had really burrowed her way deep into our hearts.
After a year Burrow went off to live in her new purpose-built enclosure on display at Australia Zoo, and a rapt Steve quickly notified the department, who next wanted to know if Steve’s staff could raise the southern hairy-nosed wombat, a species from South Australia. So Judy and some wildlife friends travelled down to bring five babies home, on permits issued by the department. Suddenly it was all about the wombats; they had fast become Judy’s favourite animal to raise. And Ironbark Station became a nice place to be—Burrow the wombat underfoot and lots of work to do.
Ironbark Station grew over the years. Adjoining properties were purchased and a program to track koalas after their release from care was established in collaboration with the University of Queensland. With these successes, Steve eventually purchased a second property, called Mourachan, out at St George in southwest Queensland. In the end, Steve had purchased around 84,000 acres out there to protect and restore as wildlife habitat. As more land became available, Steve and Terri bought it and dedicated it to critical wildlife habitat. The station, in the area known as the Brigalow Belt, encompassed semi-arid ecosystems and had been a vital habitat for many species before widespread clearing for sheep and cattle farming had driven them to become locally extinct. Others had disappeared from the area altogether, such as the greater bilby, northern hairy-nosed wombat and the bridled nailtail wallaby.
These properties—with the model of habitat acquisition, reforestation and maintenance for the benefit of wildlife and their wild places—were beginning to set a benchmark for wildlife conservation on private property. These properties really had become Steve’s and my focus: whenever Steve had any spare time we were out slashing grass, digging dams, working out in the paddocks or confronting trespassing kangaroo shooters and escorting them off the property.
With the success of Steve’s television career, the zoo was now essentially focused on a more commercial platform. While their educational message was thriving as a result of that, I was starting to see that the vitally important work was taking place behind the scenes, in securing habitat for animals in the wild. I started to become aware of the value of managing land for wildlife on private property and what the individual person could do to manage land for wildlife. There was no point learning about an animal in captivity if we couldn’t ensure their populations had a chance in their natural environment. Individuals out there could protect critical habitats in a similar way the government has zoned off national parks.
And it was essential work. Australia’s mammalian extinction rate had fast become the worst in the world by far. No other country could even compare to the damage we’d managed to inflict in the very short time since European occupation. It’s not something we purposely set out to do, but in clearing land for farming, housing and other industries, wildlife habitats were destroyed, which led directly to the extinction of animals. A lot of land-clearing may well be inevitable to support our country’s population, but we have to weigh up how we’re going to manage it so that progress doesn’t devastate our environment. If we continue to stuff it up, it only puts our own species under threat as well. We’ve simply got to do things better.
Pretty much every Friday afternoon, when they weren’t overseas filming, Steve and the family would come out to Ironbark for a family barbecue. Steve would cook for everyone on a forty-four-gallon drum we had out the front of the house, and they would stay for the rest of the weekend, unwinding. Steve was always noticeably tired when he arrived, looking like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. Trying to have a conversation with him when he was like that was as good as talking to a tree. His mind would be somewhere else, full of other things.
He had ever-increasing responsibilities at that time and the stress often accumulated. Everybody wanted a piece of him. He wasn’t able to just do the things that he enjoyed, that enabled him to relax. Mind you, it was self-inflicted, because the media work he was doing was a way to finance his environmental work.
But by Saturday morning, after a few hours of physically exerting himself cutting leaf for the koalas or helping me to clear lantana, he would be a totally different bloke. The dark cloud above his head would lift, and you could have a conversation with him, get him to laugh, and get inside that head of his again. As his schedule became busier, it took him longer and longer to unwind. He needed to be in the bush to quiet his mind and centre himself, away from people. The bush was his meditation, his medicine, and had been since he was a little boy.
In 2003, Steve and Terri had their second child, Robert. I was pretty chuffed for Steve, knowing how special our own father–son relationship was to me. He now had his own little mates in Bindi and Robert to keep him grounded. He was excited to be able to pass on to them everything he knew about the bush. I knew that special times lay ahead for him as a father. I also thought a bit of payback might lie ahead, if Robert was born with Steve’s genes of hyperactivity.
‘We named him after you, Dad,’ he told me. I thought that was pretty good indeed. I was secretly punching the air.
9
The master’s apprentices
‘I’ve got the best back-up in the world.’
—STEVE IRWIN
Despite all of our work with cro
codiles over the years, there was still very little known about them scientifically. How did they move about their environment? Did they return to the area they were relocated from? How many dominant males really live in one river system? Crocodiles are the unseen predator, after all. They use exceptional camouflage skills and live in a murky underwater environment. They are possibly the hardest animal in the entire world to research. You can’t see them, you can’t follow them, and you certainly can’t swim with them. The time had come when if we didn’t get these crocodiles into people’s hearts and prove on paper their utmost importance to the environment then they were going to become extinct. It would only take the next bad media headline about a crocodile to bring up the discussion once again about legalising a controlled crocodile-hunting industry. And yet there was still no complete population survey of crocodiles in the wild. We simply needed more data and more scientific research in order to be influential in the management of crocodiles in our country.
By the early 2000s, Steve had his heart set on joining forces with scientists and universities to drive cutting-edge crocodile research projects. The more we knew about crocodiles, the better equipped we would be to understand, appreciate and protect them. He knew that the information produced from this kind of ground-breaking research was going to help in the long-term conservation of crocodiles around the world. He wanted to be at the forefront of bringing to light information on the species to contribute to and influence best-practice guidelines for their management in Queensland that could be widely utilised by government departments and wildlife facilities internationally.