by Terri Irwin
As Steve glided along the edge of the overhanging leaves, every now and then a golden orb spiderweb would clutch at my hair, the thick, yellow, sticky webbing covering my head, the boat, and the torch. Steve was oblivious to anything but the crocodiles.
Some of them allowed us to get close. Steve could gauge a croc’s total size based on the length of its head. My heart kept pounding, and I tried to do everything right. He showed me how to hold the spotlight right under my chin, so that I could look directly over the beam and pick up the eye-shine of the crocs. I was tired, yet adrenaline surged through my veins.
“Look, look, look,” Steve whispered excitedly, “there’s another one.” There was something strange about this one, only a single red eye reflected. Perhaps the other one had been shot out, Steve suggested.
“He’s big,” he whispered. “Maybe fifteen feet.”
We edged closer. The engine coughed and suddenly ground to a stop. Steve leaned over the back of the dinghy, reaching in up to his shoulder in the water, to clear the weeds from around the propeller.
The single red eye blinked out. The big croc had submerged. Submerged where? I thought. Steve finally cleared the weeds and yanked the ignition cord, but the engine refused to turn over.
I am in the middle of nowhere. It’s nighttime. I am surrounded by crocodiles. The boat motor won’t start. Steve will be snatched and eaten by One-Eye right off the back of the boat. Then I’ll be alone.
But after some gentle persuasion (some of it verbal, and not so gentle), the engine finally started. The heat hadn’t really broken when we got back to camp. It was still well over ninety degrees. The insects that had been attracted to my spotlight were stuck and struggling in the sweat running down my back.
“How about a quick tub?” Steve said. That was Australian for bath. Somehow, the words “bath” and “crocodile” refused to go together in my mind.
But into the Burdekin we went, in our shorts, barefoot, picking our way through the stones, sticks, and burrs until we got to the smooth rocks of the river. Steve jumped in. I was more cautious. As I edged toward deeper water, he blocked my path and moved himself around in front of me.
“What are you doing?”
He laughed. “I caught the last big male crocodile around here last year, but I can’t be too sure another one hasn’t moved in.”
“So,” I said, “you want to make sure to keep yourself between me and the rest of the river.”
“Right-o, mate,” he replied.
I thought, Is this guy for real? Most guys think they’re doing a girl a favor by opening a door, and here Steve was, putting himself between me and a croc.
I avoided getting eaten on the Burdekin. I managed again to escape being flattened by a road train on the return trip to the zoo. My monthlong stay in Australia was nearing its end. The ache hadn’t hit me yet, but I could feel it coming.
On our return from the bush, we went straight back to work at the zoo. A huge tree behind the Irwin family home had been hit by lightning some years previously, and a tangle of dead limbs was in danger of crashing down on the house. Steve thought it would be best to take the dead tree down.
I tried to lend a hand. Steve’s mother could not watch as he scrambled up the tree. He had no harness, just his hat and a chainsaw. The tree was sixty feet tall. Steve looked like a little dot way up in the air, swinging through the tree limbs with an orangutan’s ease, working the chainsaw.
Then it was my turn. After he pruned off all the limbs, the last task was to fell the massive trunk. Steve climbed down, secured a rope two-thirds of the way up the tree, and tied the other end to the bull bar of his Ute.
My job was to drive the Ute. “You’re going to have to pull it down in just the right direction,” he said, chopping the air with his palm. He studied the angle of the tree and where it might fall.
Steve cut the base of the tree. As the chainsaw snarled, Steve yelled, “Now!” I put the truck in reverse, slipped the clutch, and went backward at a forty-five-degree angle as hard as I could. With a groan and a tremendous crash, the tree hit the ground.
We celebrated, whooping and hollering. Steve cut the downed timber into lengths and I stacked it. The whole project took us all day. By late in the afternoon, my back ached from stacking tree limbs and logs. As the long shadows crossed the yard, Steve said four words very uncharacteristic of him: “Let’s take a break.”
I wondered what was up. We sat under a big fig tree in the yard with a cool drink. We were both covered in little flecks of wood, leaves, and bark. Steve’s hair was unkempt, a couple of his shirt buttons were missing, and his shorts were torn. I thought he was the best-looking man I had ever seen in my life.
“I am not even going to walk for the next three days,” I said, laughing.
Steve turned to me. He was quiet for a moment. “So, do you want to get married?”
Casual, matter-of-fact. I nearly dropped the glass I was holding. I had twigs in my hair and dirt caked on the side of my face. I’d taken off my hat, and I could feel my hair sticking to the sides of my head.
My first thought was what a mess I must look. My second, third, and fourth thoughts were lists of every excuse in the world why I couldn’t marry Steve Irwin.
I could not possibly leave my job, my house, my wildlife work, my family, my friends, my pets—everything I had worked so hard for back in Oregon.
He never looked concerned. He simply held my gaze.
As all these things flashed through my mind, a little voice from somewhere above me spoke.
“Yes, I’d love to.”
With those four words my life changed forever.
Chapter Five
The Crocodile Hunter
“What’ll it be?” Steve asked me, just days after our wedding. “Do we go on the honeymoon we’ve got planned, or do you want to go catch crocs?”
My head was still spinning from the ceremony, the celebration, and the fact that I could now use the two words “my husband” and have them mean something real. The four months between February 2, 1992—the day Steve asked me to marry him—and our wedding day on June 4 had been a blur.
Steve’s mother threw us an engagement party for Queensland friends and family, and I encountered a very common theme: “We never thought Steve would get married.” Everyone said it—relatives, old friends, and schoolmates. I’d smile and nod, but my inner response was, Well, we’ve got that in common. And something else: Wait until I get home and tell everybody I am moving to Australia.
I knew what I’d have to explain. Being with Steve, running the zoo, and helping the crocs was exactly the right thing to do. I knew with all my heart and soul that this was the path I was meant to travel. My American friends—the best, closest ones—understood this perfectly. I trusted Steve with my life and loved him desperately.
One of the first challenges was how to bring as many Australian friends and family as possible over to the United States for the wedding. None of us had a lot of money. Eleven people wound up making the trip from Australia, and we held the ceremony in the big Methodist church my grandmother attended.
It was more than a wedding, it was saying good-bye to everyone I’d ever known. I invited everybody, even people who may not have been intimate friends. I even invited my dentist. The whole network of wildlife rehabilitators came too—four hundred people in all.
The ceremony began at eight p.m., with coffee and cake afterward. I wore the same dress that my older sister Bonnie had worn at her wedding twenty-seven years earlier, and my sister Tricia wore at her wedding six years after that. The wedding cake had white frosting, but it was decorated with real flowers instead of icing ones.
Steve had picked out a simple ring for me, a quarter carat, exactly what I wanted. He didn’t have a wedding ring. We were just going to borrow one for the service, but we couldn’t find anybody with fingers that were big enough. It turned out that my dad’s wedding ring fitted him, and that’s the one we used. Steve’s mother, Lyn, gave me
a silk horseshoe to put around my wrist, a symbol of good luck.
On our wedding day, June 4, 1992, it had been eight months since Steve and I first met. As the minister started reading the vows, I could see that Steve was nervous. His tuxedo looked like it was strangling him. For a man who was used to working in the tropics, he sure looked hot. The church was air-conditioned, but sweat drops formed on the ends of his fingers. Poor Steve, I thought. He’d never been up in front of such a big crowd before.
“The scariest situation I’ve ever been in,” Steve would say later of the ceremony. This from a man who wrangled crocodiles!
When the minister invited the groom to kiss the bride, I could feel all Steve’s energy, passion, and love. I realized without a doubt we were doing the right thing.
Then, just as we were to leave on a whirlwind honeymoon in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, a call came from Australia. Steve’s friend John Stainton had word that a big croc had been frequenting areas too close to civilization, and someone had been taking potshots at him.
“It’s a big one, Stevo, maybe fourteen or fifteen feet,” John said over the phone. “I hate to catch you right at this moment, but they’re going to kill him unless he gets relocated.”
John was one of Australia’s award-winning documentary filmmakers. He and Steve had met in the late 1980s, when Steve would help John shoot commercials that required a zoo animal like a lizard or a turtle. But their friendship did not really take off until 1990, when an Australian beer company hired John to film a tricky shot involving a crocodile.
He called Steve. “They want a bloke to toss a coldie to another bloke, but a croc comes out of the water and snatches at it. The guy grabs the beer right in front of the croc’s jaws. You think that’s doable?”
“Sure, mate, no problem at all,” Steve said with his usual confidence. “Only one thing, it has to be my hand in front of the croc.”
John agreed. He journeyed up to the zoo to film the commercial. It was the first time he had seen Steve on his own turf, and he was impressed. He was even more impressed when the croc shoot went off flawlessly.
Monty, the saltwater crocodile, lay partially submerged in his pool. An actor fetched a coldie from the esky and tossed it toward Steve. As Steve’s hand went above Monty’s head, the crocodile lunged upward in a food response. On film it looked like the croc was about to snatch the can—which Steve caught right in front of his jaws. John was extremely impressed. As he left the zoo after completing the commercial shoot, Steve gave him a collection of VHS tapes.
Steve had shot the videotapes himself. The raw footage came from Steve simply propping his camera in a tree, or jamming it into the mud, and filming himself single-handedly catching crocs.
John watched the tapes when he got home to Brisbane. He told me later that what he saw was unbelievable. “It was three hours of captivating film and I watched it straight through, twice,” John recalled to me. “It was Steve. The camera loved him.”
He rang up his contacts in television and explained that he had a hot property. The programmers couldn’t use Steve’s original VHS footage, but one of them had a better idea. He gave John the green light to shoot his own documentary of Steve.
That led to John Stainton’s call to Oregon on the eve of our honeymoon.
“I know it’s not the best timing, mate,” John said, “but we could take a crew and film a documentary of you rescuing this crocodile.”
Steve turned to me. Honeymoon or crocodile? For him, it wasn’t much of a quandary. But what about me?
“Let’s go,” I replied.
Two weeks after we said, “I do,” Steve and I were on a river system called Cattle Creek, near Ingham, seven hundred miles up the Australian coast from Brisbane. John Stainton was along with a sound man and a camera man. Steve’s best mate, Wes, was there too.
The big saltie in Cattle Creek was in great danger. When we arrived, we immediately discovered cartridge casings and other evidence that people had been shooting at him from the shores of the river. Steve worked up and down the river system in the dinghy, finding the areas the crocodile had been frequenting, mentally marking the slides, and searching for the right spot to set the trap.
It seemed like only a few days ago I was in Oregon. What was I doing? I was out rescuing crocodiles with my new husband, and a film crew was documenting our every move. Newlywed, croc hunter, filmmaker: three brand-new job descriptions, hitting me all at once.
And cook. At the end of an exhausting first day, the six of us—Steve, myself, Wes, John, and his two-person crew—gathered wearily around the fire. I looked up and realized that five pairs of eyes were looking at me. Wait a minute. Oh, I get it: I’m the only woman here. I am supposed to be cooking dinner.
The camp “kitchen” consisted of a collection of odd, alien-looking utensils such as a jaffle iron and a camp oven. I had no idea how to use any of them. Steve came to the rescue. He made toasted sandwiches in the jaffle iron and cooked up a stew in the camp oven. We realized it was going to work best if I was the assistant and he was the chef.
Mosquitoes came off the river in clouds. Every once in a while goannas sauntered right through camp. As I chopped vegetables that first night, a big lacey showed up.
“Grab it,” Steve said to me. I dropped what I was doing and picked up the lizard. John and his crew went into action. I told the camera everything I knew about lace monitors.
“Lace monitors are excellent tree climbers,” I said. “They can grow up to seven feet long, but this guy looks to be between four and five feet.” I spoke about the lizard’s predatory nature and diet. Meanwhile, the star of the show flicked his forked tongue in and out. After we got some footage, I put the huge lizard down, and Steve leaned his head into the camera frame to have a last word.
“And they’ve also got teeth like a tiger shark, mate,” he said with relish. “They can tear you to ribbons!”
“Thanks a lot,” I said, laughing, after John stopped filming. “You should have told me that before I picked the bloody thing up!”
It was a brave new world that I found myself in. At night I would hear the sounds of the fruit bats as they came into the trees. Also in the mix were the strange, far-off grunts of the koalas as they sang out their mating calls. Herds of wild pigs passed right behind the tent. Venturing outside in the middle of the night with my dunny roll to go use a bush was a daunting experience.
Steve was a natural in front of the camera. John had to give him only one important piece of advice.
“Stevo,” John instructed, “there are three people in this documentary. There’s you, Terri, and the camera. Treat the camera just like another person.”
Steve’s energy and enthusiasm took over. He completely relaxed, and he managed to just be himself—which was true of his entire career.
This wasn’t just a film trip, it was also our honeymoon. Steve would sometimes escape the camera crew and take us up a tributary to be alone. We watched the fireflies come out. I’d never seen fireflies in Oregon. The magical little insects glowed everywhere, in the bushes and in the air. The darker it got, the brighter their blue lights burned on and off.
I had arrived in a fairyland.
Mostly, though, we worked. The tides were so huge that going out at high tide meant an easy boat ride down the river. After a full day of setting traps, checking traps, and looking for crocs, we headed back to camp late in the afternoon, at low tide. Suddenly we couldn’t all ride in the boat.
Steve and I were the first ones out. As we maneuvered John Stainton and the ever-valuable camera up the river in the boat, we walked carefully along the rocky bottom. We often encountered sinkholes and had to hang on to the side of the boat, hoping there wasn’t a crocodile lying in wait down below. When we got back to camp, John had to get out of the boat and struggle through knee-deep mangrove mud. Not exactly his cup of tea, but to his credit, he never complained.
To successfully trap crocs, meat was needed for bait. This was where Sui came in
to her own, rounding up pigs. Feral pigs are not native to Australia but were introduced when Europeans first arrived. They root up native vegetation and raid freshwater crocodile nests, feeding on everything from plants to turtles.
Steve caught the feral pigs and kept them in makeshift corrals until he needed them. Over the years, he and Sui had become the ultimate pig-catching team. It was an amazing process to watch. Since there was no way to store large increments of fresh meat, we were off to some local cane fields at first light to catch pigs.
The cane fields were dangerous. Taipans, the third most venomous snake on earth, followed rats into the cane. As we crashed through, intent on catching pigs, it was impossible to scan the ground for snakes, so we did our best to move quickly.
At first we moved stealthily through the bush. Steve signaled to me by pointing to his nose that he could smell pigs. Sniffing the air, I caught a heavy, musky odor. We soon saw tracks and heard the rustling of bushes up ahead. Sui became absolutely frantic. She danced in place and almost jumped out of her skin. This was what she was all about.
Steve whispered, “Up front, Sui.” She exploded forward, disappearing in the thick cane. Steve was right behind her. Suddenly I heard crashing sounds all around me. I realized the pigs had doubled back. Steve was yelling something, but I couldn’t hear him.
A large boar burst through the bush right in front of me. Sui and Steve came up quickly behind. The big boar decided that it was time to turn and fight. Sui started yapping at the pig, dancing right in front of its nose. The boar’s tusks stuck out at odd angles. It slashed at Sui, who moved like a boxer in the ring, weaving in and out, deftly maneuvering the pig so that it couldn’t run and wouldn’t be able to connect with those killer tusks.