The Last Crocodile Hunter

by Bob Irwin

  Bob suddenly got up and took off towards the bush on foot, with me following close behind. I was in a state of panic. He was deep in shock now and the reality would soon start to set in. Losing Steve would be enough to push him over the edge. He’d just come back from the brink after losing Lyn, and my concern was that he was about to spiral back down into that deep, dark hole. This could be enough for him to decide that he didn’t want to go on. So I followed him as he alternated between sitting and wandering through the gully. Sometimes I was with him, sometimes he gestured that he wanted to be alone. So I just always stayed where I could see him. I didn’t want him to be alone and disappear off into the bush somewhere. I was unable to say anything to him while he was stricken with pain. I couldn’t even comprehend what he would have been experiencing. It was an awful feeling to watch the person you love suffering like that and not be able to do a single thing to console them or help them in any way. I didn’t know what to do. It was awful.

  That afternoon, as family members started to arrive at Ironbark Station, I noticed Bob disappear from the house, heading towards the sawmill shed. A little while later, I excused myself and followed him down there too. He spoke the first words he’d managed to utter for many hours. ‘I want to be alone. I just need to be alone.’ He sobbed painfully.

  I sat there with him anyway. I didn’t speak. He sat in silence for a very long time, going from bouts of pained tears to just staring. Eventually he spoke again. ‘I have to go into the zoo and ask the media to leave Terri alone.’ He felt this really strongly. We hadn’t been watching the news or listening to the radio, so we didn’t know the extent of the media circus then, but Bob just had a gut feeling that he had to go there and help. So the next morning, after a sleepless night, we drove to the zoo. Bob wanted to travel alone, so I followed closely in my car.

  Bob Irwin

  They say that when you have everything, you have everything to lose. And that is perfectly true.

  It is incomprehensible to wake up without a care in the world and go about your day, as carefree as normal, and then get a life-altering phone call like that. All of a sudden you are looking out into a very different world. One without the person who has stood by you, been engrained in every single aspect of your life. It’s impossible to digest that kind of information. Unbearable. The hardest thing for anyone in this world to have to suffer is losing your child. It’s not how it’s supposed to be at all. To lose someone you raised and watched grow every day. Someone you taught to walk. Taught to catch crocodiles. Taught to love.

  Steve was my everything. My friend. My strength. My mirror image. He was the calming influence in my life. The joy. The key to all of my adventures. For forty-four years we had spent so much time together, and now I wasn’t ever going to see him again.

  Again, I thought: why him? Why not me? Why someone with so much life ahead of them, rather than someone who’s had their time? I would gladly have swapped places with him, without giving it another thought. It just seemed so very wrong for him to go. He was just starting out as a father, the best years you could ever have. He thrived on it; he loved his kids. That was the most unbearable part of all.

  When I lost Steve, a big part of me went with him forever. I certainly thought again about not continuing. I had already been through the agony of losing Lyn after forty-six years, and then to lose Steve, well, the pain was almost intolerable. I would never be the same again.

  At the zoo, the media had already established themselves, setting up tents and satellite dishes, there twenty-four hours a day. News of Steve’s death prompted widespread shock, and thousands of people had also visited the zoo to pay tribute, leaving flowers, candles, stuffed animals and messages of support. The zoo was like a nest of ants. We hadn’t really prepared ourselves for what that was going to be like. There were people absolutely everywhere. The police had to close roads, even the main highway, to manage the traffic. We entered through a back way to avoid it all.

  John Stainton had taken on talking to the media and arranging a press conference to respond to the media frenzy. It was held in the original carpark at the old entry, when it had just been Beerwah Reptile Park. Looking at the swarm of people lining the front of the zoo that day, it was surreal to think that this had led from us first opening those front gates as an excited young family all those years ago. What I would have given to go back. We knew that the media weren’t going to leave us alone until someone from the family spoke, so I decided to do it.

  The media demand was partly fuelled by the people watching right around the world who had loved Steve. It was clear a lot of people were mourning his loss. It was a strange feeling, to think that a portion of the pain that I was feeling, and our family was feeling, was being felt worldwide. It was very different from losing Lyn—that had been very private, very personal. This time, we had to share our heartbreak with the world.

  Unfortunately, that didn’t help. To be honest, the fact that so many people were grieving for my son only made me feel a bigger sense of loss, because he touched so many people, got the message out there like no one else could, and that void would never be filled. He was irreplaceable. I suppose there was some naivety on my part about the outpouring of love. My time together with Steve was pretty much always in the field, at the zoo or in the bush. I never really got involved with Steve’s media career or travelled with him to red carpet events. So to me, he was just Steve my son, the boy in the bush where we were so remote, and so far from people, that I never really saw it any other way. It really startled me to see how much the world was watching. There were certainly two sides to Steve and I was definitely the part of his life that was very normal and grounded. I guess the attention that he received meant that up to that point we had succeeded in raising him to be a dinky-di Aussie who was respected for the work he did and the way he interacted with people. There’s a fair bit of pleasure that you get out of that as a parent.

  There are a couple of levels of how people feel about one another. You might be good mates, you might be friends, you might be in love with someone like your husband or your wife. And then there’s another level, and that’s the level that Steve and I were on. As time went on that grew even stronger. We weren’t just father and son, and that was difficult for people to understand.

  I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to get through that press conference. I just did the best I could. I didn’t take off my sunglasses; they concealed the tears that were constantly streaming, and created a psychological barrier between myself and the media. The journalists were strangers, ruthlessly and publicly probing me with the kind of personal questions that you wouldn’t ask even those closest to you. I had no planned speech; I never did. I just opened up my mouth and whatever came out, did. The entire croc team came out during that press conference to back me up. We weren’t catching crocodiles this day, but their strength was needed just as much.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the first media interview that I’ve ever given,’ I said. ‘And it’s not something I enjoy, but I owe it to Steve. And I also owe it to Terri and the children. First of all, I’d like to ask the media to please give Terri and the children a break. I realise you’ve got a job to do, but it’s extremely hard for Terri and the children right now. Terri is holding up very well, considering. She’s extremely concerned for her children, Bindi and Robert, obviously. And so I ask the media to give them a bit of a break, for the children’s sake.’

  But then the questions kept firing, one after another.

  ‘What was Steve really like?’

  ‘He was an ordinary guy. He was just like any other guy in the street. He just had this ability to get through to people. We weren’t like father and son. We never were. We were good mates. I’ll remember Steve as my best mate ever. He’d come up to the property and we’d wander off and we’d have a barbecue, maybe just wander off into the scrub and we’d light a fire. I’d have a couple of smokes, because I’m a criminal and I smoke, and we might sit around the fire
talking for hours on end, about nothing really at all. And it was just so enjoyable. I’m a lucky guy that I’ve had the opportunity to have a son like Steve.’

  It was a surreal feeling to be talking about him in past tense. He was so real to me still. I couldn’t grasp that he would only be alive in my memories from now on. I didn’t want to accept that. I couldn’t.

  ‘What is one of the things you hope he is remembered for?’ The microphones and recorders were all pointed towards me, the flash of the cameras blinding.

  I didn’t have to think for a second to answer that one. ‘Honesty. I told him as Australia Zoo grew, as the filming scene with Johnny grew, whatever you do, wherever you are, you will be honest. And he was.’

  Another question fired. ‘Did he have a deadly passion? Many people say that he was pushing the envelope too far?’

  I suppose that was warranted but it really made me wonder how people with this kind of job sleep at night. In their own lives, when they reached the very bottom of the barrel, would they appreciate me knocking on their door and demanding answers to such personal questions, sleeping on their front lawn until they supplied them?

  I answered the best way I could. ‘Over the years Steve and I had a lot of adventures together. And there have been many occasions when anything could have gone wrong. Steve knew the risks involved in the type of work he was doing, and he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. There’s never been anybody else that I know of with Steve’s personality, strength and conviction. And his message was conservation. He was such a strong influence that people all over the world believed in him.’

  Steve and I had discussed the risks. That either one of us could have a fatal accident from the kind of work we were doing. It was the nature of the beast. We knew through and through that our line of work was a deadly passion. Over the years we’d had some pretty fortunate escapes and survived almost certain death. Steve, in particular, had always pushed himself hard. But he did it because he had things he wanted to achieve.

  We knew that at any time one of us could make a mistake that couldn’t be corrected. Steve would have accepted that. He died doing the things that he loved in life. He wouldn’t have wanted to have been in a car accident, or been hit by a bus or to suffer some kind of terrible illness.

  Another question. ‘What’s the plan for the zoo now? Will it continue on without him?’

  Well, we hadn’t talked about it. We knew, of course, that going forward with the zoo without him would feel like moving forward without a map. But it was his home; he’d grown up there since he was a young boy. To let it go—to let his message die with him—well, that would have been such a terrible waste.

  ‘I retired from the zoo many years ago. I still do conservation work on the property, and I’m going to help Terri wherever I can to carry on his conservation work.’

  It had felt like an ambush, but the press conference was finally over. And just in time, because I was on the verge of collapsing into a blubbering heap. I had only just made it through and now I needed to go and hide somewhere far away from people.

  John did an amazing job corralling the media that day and in the weeks that followed. I don’t know where he found the capacity in the face of his own despair. John had been with Steve when he left us, and he wasn’t handling Steve’s loss any better than us. Over the years they’d become very good friends. On our behalf, he held it all together. I really respected him for that, and to me he felt just like family.

  We continued to drive to the zoo every day. I didn’t sleep there, I preferred to drive the hours home. The media didn’t tire for a long time. Steve remained headline news on CNN in the United States for over a week and the media did whatever they could to get to us. Eventually I had to put heavy machinery across the tracks leading up to the house on Ironbark Station to prevent people driving in. But even that didn’t stop them: a couple of determined journalists climbed over the gates and walked in, right up our one-kilometre driveway. I couldn’t believe their nerve.

  The show must go on

  THE CROC TEAM

  FRANK MIKULA, AKA LEFTY

  Autopilot is the only way you can describe when your physical body is driving the ship while your mind is drifting far away. That’s how all of us approached the next day at work. We knew Steve would be kicking us up the backside if we just sat back and let it all come undone, so we had the collective ambition to make everything appear as close to normal as we could conceivably make it. So we busied ourselves in making sure that the crocs at the zoo were happy and healthy, and got in and occupied our minds with diligent physical work. With busy hands, you could easily disguise the shock that had set in, sending jolts of unfamiliar pain through your body every time you had a moment to stop and collect your thoughts. The best idea was not to let your mind wander, to help it pass with action. Too many questions would enter your mind that you didn’t have the answers for at this early point in time. ‘Is this the end?’ ‘What happens now to all of that hard work?’ ‘Will it continue on?’ The decision made by all of the croc team was that the zoo operations for now would carry on unchanged. Like nothing had happened. We’d feed the animals. We’d do the shows. We’d just pull together as a team and get it done.

  But in the back of my mind I was stewing on a time of the day that was hurtling towards us at breakneck pace, an unstoppable, unavoidable event that we wished we could have put on hold while we came to terms with the reality of the past twenty-four hours. Eleven o’clock was a thick black cloud hovering above my head overshadowing every thought. Two times a day, at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., we dropped everything to deliver the world-famous Crocoseum shows. Rain, hail or shine, we did it seven days a week, every single day of the year, driven by Steve’s intent to show visitors from all over the world exactly why crocs rule. The pinnacle attraction that put Australia Zoo on the map, Steve’s famous live croc feeding demo in his purpose-built, five-thousand-seat Crocoseum. But this day was to be immeasurably different. Today would be the very first show since Steve had left us. It was in the back of my mind the entire day, consuming every thought. ‘What’s going to happen around the show today?’ It would be the first of many milestones in moving Australia Zoo forward without our fearless leader, and that was a pill that nobody was willing to swallow. The Crocoseum was the home of the Crocodile Hunter. It was his dream, his platform in getting his conservation message out to the world, and a labour of his blood, sweat and tears. To think that he’d never walk in there again was just unimaginable. He was a phenomenal force that burned brightly in our eyes. What would we do moving forward without the star of our show now that the flame had extinguished?

  And I couldn’t help but selfishly consider what we would do as Steve Irwin’s crocodile team without our apex leader. He was our big wise croc, right at the top of his game. Like an old, territorial, busted-up crocodile in the river that kept the wilds of the world around him in order, how would this ecosystem which he had wonderfully handcrafted continue on without him? How would we forge ahead with research and education when he was the most recognised conservationist out there? To our team, he was our leader, big brother, best mate and, without a doubt, our personal hero. He was the reason we were here, following this path that he’d led us down, unearthing our personal passions. To be given the gift of having your eyes opened to that innate soul purpose is something you simply can’t thank someone for enough. Some people go through their entire lives trying to find it.

  I was the last of the boys to arrive at the back of the Crocoseum after the free-flight bird show had just finished. The bird and snake shows were the warm-up, building up the crowd for the highlight of anyone’s zoo visit, seeing the Crocodile Hunter. Why he was called the Crocodile Hunter, I’ll never know, because his life’s mission was saving their lives. Funny how I’d never really considered this before. That name was everywhere I looked in my workplace.

  The typical atmosphere behind the scenes was light-hearted as we waited for our cue to perform. In fig
hting off a few nerves about presenting in front of so many people we’d find comfort in chatting, kicking each other in the back of the legs and playing a few practical jokes before the start of the show. It had become customary to challenge each other to get away with throwing in a few hidden lines from our favourite movie, Anchorman, a hilarious task to keep our mind on something else and the other boys in fits of laughter backstage.

  Being crocodile keepers first and performers second, public speaking was definitely not our forte. We were there to educate people about the animals; none of us had an ambition to do what Steve could do so naturally in the spotlight. We were quite happy to be his back-up supporting his endeavours behind the camera lens. While Steve was certainly in the foreground, we were working away in the background. In doing so, our faces were plastered right around the world on his renowned documentaries, though we never grew to be comfortable with a camera in our faces. Combatting a few nerves about public speaking was always something we battled with, and Steve took delight in throwing us in the deep end. Give me a croc to feed any day. Today, looking around at my sombre team, my mind suddenly wandered to a happier time.

  It was only months before that Bindi had started performing in her all-singing, all-dancing children’s series Bindi and the Crocmen. Steve, immensely proud of his young daughter, got devotedly involved in the shows, singing, dancing, and encouraging her from the sidelines. He was the proudest dad around. One day as he was about to introduce Bindi to take the floor during a show, Steve commanded for the music to play from the Crocoseum sound department and for his croc team to dance. We were all horrified, fumbling our way through some of the worst impromptu dance routines imaginable. A horde of ungraceful men with pairs of two left feet looking well out of our comfort zones. But a week later the joke was on him. Little did Steve know that we had tirelessly practised a choreographed routine, and we bemused Steve front and centre in the Crocoseum as we broke out into still some of the worst dance moves, finishing up with hurling our smallest member, Crocs Dan, into the air and catching him, as they did with Bindi in her shows. It was one of the most priceless pranks that we had played and Steve watched on in stitches of laughter from the top of the stadium seating.