by Terri Irwin
When the babies graduated up to the subadult pond, they lived among an overcrowded, tangled mass of three-, four-, and five-foot crocodiles. In these stagnant, putrid ponds, Steve and I saw injuries suffered from fighting over food and space: severed limbs, parts of jaws torn off, and great chunks bitten out of their tails.
I felt as though I had entered a nightmare. The prevalence of birth defects horrified me: knots and stumpy burls where a tail was supposed to be, flippers instead of feet, crossed scissor-jaws. After half a dozen miserable years, the farm crocs would cop a bullet to their skulls when they grew large enough.
In another corner of the farm, the carcasses were processed. Their skins were sent out to adorn people for clothing, and their flesh was sold bush meat-style.
I’d seen Steve in countless situations that required great physical and emotional strength. He suffered the rigors of the bush without complaint. But seeing him in that croc farm that day made me realize he needed every ounce of his strength to witness the animals he loved so much treated in such a sadistic, inhumane manner. He had a lump in his throat that he just couldn’t swallow.
How crocodile farming could be allowed in a country that was fighting to stop whaling and the bear bile trade was beyond me. I could not understand how anyone could proudly wear reptile-skin boots considering the torturous conditions under which the skins were obtained.
I left the farm that day shaken and confused.
“Why did you bring me there?” I asked. I knew the answer without Steve saying anything. He was doing me a favor. It’s much easier to talk about something that you’ve actually seen and experienced.
“It’s the farming that is evil,” Steve said. “Not the people involved. Not all of them are wicked monsters, you know. Those blokes, I know them. They beat the crocodiles because they’re afraid of them, or because that’s what they were told to do.”
Steve told me that a lot of crocodile behavior research, scientific studies, and filming was done at croc farms.
“It’s an easy place to access crocodiles in great numbers,” he said.
“But there’s no way on earth you could ever observe any form of natural behavior there,” I said.
Steve nodded grimly. While we were at the farm, we had witnessed females who were defending their nests being beaten back into submission, something that would never happen in the wild. The farm had some of the biggest crocs I’d ever seen. They were beautiful animals, living in squalor.
Croc farmers were fiercely protective of their livelihood and ignored efforts to control or regulate them or provide alternatives, such as ecotourism. A few of them arrogantly described themselves in public as “crocodile conservationists.” I found this disgustingly deceptive. Killing crocs for money is not conservation.
As we started our long drive back to the zoo, we stopped at what could be called a general store. There was a pub attached to the establishment, and the store itself sold a wide variety of goods, groceries, cooking utensils, swags, clothing, shoes, even toys. As we picked up supplies in the shop, we passed the open doorway to the pub. A few of the patrons recognized Steve from television. We could hear them talking about him. The comments weren’t exactly positive.
Steve didn’t look happy. “Let’s just get out of here,” I whispered.
“Right-o,” he said.
One of the pub patrons was louder than the others. “I’m a crocodile hunter too,” he bragged. “Only I’m the real crocodile hunter. The real one, you hear me, mate?”
The braggart made his living at the stuffy trade, he informed his audience. A stuffy is a baby crocodile mounted by a taxidermist to be sold as a souvenir. To preserve their skins, hunters killed stuffys in much the same way that the bear poachers in Oregon stabbed their prey.
“We drive screwdrivers right through their eyes,” Mister Stuffy boasted, eyeing Steve through the doorway of the pub. “Right through the bloody eye sockets!”
He was feeling his beer. We gathered up our purchases and headed out to the Ute. Okay, I said to myself, we’re going to make it. Just two or three more steps…
Steve turned around and headed back toward the pub.
I’d never seen him like that before. My husband changed into somebody I didn’t know. His eyes glared, his face flushed, and his lower lip trembled. I followed him to the threshold of the pub.
“Why don’t you blokes come outside and tell me all about stuffys in the car park here?” he said. I couldn’t see very well in the darkness of the pub interior, but I knew there were six or eight drinkers with Mister Stuffy.
I thought, What is going to happen here? There didn’t seem any possible good outcomes. The pub drinkers stood up and filed out to face Steve. A half dozen against one. Steve chose the biggest one, who Mister Stuffy seemed to be hiding behind.
“Bring it on, mate,” Steve said. “Or are you only tough enough to take on baby crocs, you son of a bitch?”
Then Steve seemed to grow. I can’t explain it. His fury made him tower over a guy who actually had a few inches of height on him and outweighed him with a whole beer gut’s worth of weight. I couldn’t imagine how he appeared to the pub drinkers, but he was scaring me.
They backed down. All six of them. Not one wanted to muck with Steve, who was clearly out of his mind with anger. All the world’s croc farms, all the cruelty and ignorance that made animals suffer the world over, came to a head in the car park of the pub that evening.
Steve got into the truck. We drove off, and he didn’t say anything for a long time.
“I don’t understand,” I finally said in the darkness of the front seat, as the bush landscape rolled by us. “What were they talking about? Were they killing crocs in the wild? Or were they croc farmers?”
I heard a small exhalation from Steve’s side of the truck. I couldn’t see his face in the gloom. I realized he was crying. I was astounded. This was the man I had just seen turn into a furious monster. Five minutes earlier I’d been convinced I was about to see him take on a half-dozen blokes bare-fisted. Now he wept in the darkness.
All at once, he sat up straight. With his jaw set, he wiped the tears from his face and composed himself. “I’ve known bastards like that all my life,” he said. “Some people don’t just do evil. Some people are evil.”
He had told me before, but that night in the truck it hit home: Steve lived for wildlife and he would die for wildlife. He came by his convictions sincerely, from the bottom of his heart.
He was more than just my husband that night. He was my hero.
The word of the Crocodile Hunter spread, and we discovered that people overseas were starting to notice Steve as well. Peter Jennings, the respected anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight, happened to see one of our documentaries. Every week Jennings featured a different individual as his “Person of the Week.” Jennings chose to honor Steve, featuring him in a long segment and naming him the person of the week.
I understood more than Steve what an honor this was, because as an American, I was more familiar with Peter Jennings. I knew firsthand the significance of this recognition. Steve was appreciative, but humble about it all. I felt the Jennings segment was a point of pride, simply because all of Steve’s hard work was finally getting some recognition.
It took awhile, but that first glimmer of visibility eventually led to increased interest in our documentaries in America. The Discovery Channel, which was the gold standard of documentary cable television in the States, came calling.
Steve’s and my partnership had evolved to the point where I was taking on more and more of the business side of the enterprise, both at the zoo and with our film work. My experience running a business at Westates Flagman proved invaluable. Steve didn’t want to be cooped up with a calculator and balance sheets, but I actually enjoyed it. It was just another way that we completed each other.
I recall the first meeting I ever had with the programming executives at the Discovery Channel. I arrived at their offices in Bethesda, Maryland,
the sleek, modern headquarters of what was becoming one of the fastest-growing cable channels of the mid-1990s.
I was intimidated by the building, the big city, and the men in suits. I’m a real blue-jeans-and-T-shirt girl at heart. I had nothing to wear. I worried how I would handle myself in this oh-so-sophisticated environment. Finally I dug out one of my old power suits from the eighties, with padded shoulders and flared lapels.
My suit and I entered a room full of producers, attorneys, and several others—I wasn’t even sure what they all did or why they were there. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I kicked myself for not preparing a whole presentation. So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I talked about wildlife, our love for it, and our commitment to its conservation.
“I’m excited to have the opportunity to work with Discovery,” I concluded. “Steve and I have always loved the channel. You do such quality shows. We want to be part of your family.”
Hmm, we’ll see about that. That was the response in the room as I read it. Then the lights went down, and we all stared at an enormous TV monitor to watch a Crocodile Hunter documentary. There I was, and there Steve was. I so much wanted everyone in the room to love him.
Well, our documentary ended, the lights came back up, and it was clear that the programmers at the Discovery Channel were a bit hesitant about Steve.
One of the executive producers was a woman named Maureen. “Terri, you see, there’s a specific format for documentary filming,” she said carefully. “The main focus is not on the host, but rather on the show’s subject.”
“The subject, yes,” one of the other execs murmured.
Maureen was right. Up until that time, wildlife documentaries were made up of 80 percent wildlife, 20 percent host. What I had just shown her was a documentary where Steve was in almost every single shot.
“If you just put one of our shows on,” I pleaded, “I know it will rate really well.” I could hear myself. I knew I was echoing what countless filmmakers had said in that same room countless times before. The Discovery programmers had encountered filmmakers as naive as me a million times before. I didn’t care. I knew I was right.
“It will work,” I said.
Maureen gave me a patient smile. Everyone else in the room nodded thoughtfully. They all rose to their feet at once.
So, I figured, no go.
Then something interesting happened. Discovery had a subsidiary channel, just starting out, called Animal Planet—it wasn’t too big or established, with a mere 250,000 subscribers. It had launched in 1996 and was still just a blip on the cultural radar. Nobody was quite sure whether it would last.
But Animal Planet had a different reaction to our show. The executives were eager to try something totally new.
“We want to air your documentaries, all of them, in the same form as you aired them in Australia,” Animal Planet’s executive vice president and general manager, Clark Bunting, told us, genuinely excited.
Sold. Just getting our shows on television in America was a big deal. But it was just the beginning.
Chapter Eleven
Bindi Sue
Dateline is a major prime-time news show in America, reaching millions of viewers on the NBC network. So it should have been very good news when the show’s producers informed us that they wanted to do a segment on Steve, and they wanted to film it in Queensland.
“We want to experience him firsthand in the bush,” the producer told me cheerfully over the phone.
Do you really, mate? I wanted to say. I had been with Steve in the bush. It was the most fantastic experience, but I wasn’t sure he understood how remote the bush really was. I simply responded with all the right words about how excited we were to have Dateline come film.
The producers wanted two totally different environments in which to film. We chose the deserts of Queensland with the most venomous snake on earth, and the Cape York mangroves—crocodile territory. Great! responded Dateline. Perfect!
Only…the host was a woman, who had to look presentable, so she needed a generator for her blow-dryer. And a Winnebago, because it wasn’t really fair to ask her to throw a swag on the ground among the scorpions and spiders. This film shoot would mean a bit of additional expense. We weren’t just grabbing Sui and the Ute and setting out. But the exposure we would get on Dateline would be good for wildlife conservation, our zoo, and tourism.
I telephoned a representative of the Queensland Tourism and Travel Commission in Los Angeles. “I wonder if you could help us out,” I asked. “This Dateline segment will showcase Queensland to people in America.” Could Queensland Tourism possibly subsidize the cost of a generator and a Winnebago?
Silence at the end of the line. “What you are showing off of Queensland,” a voice carefully explained, “is not how we want tourists to see our fair country.” The most venomous snake on earth? Giant crocodiles? No, thanks.
“But people are fascinated by dangerous animals,” I began to argue. I was wasting my time. There was no convincing him.
We scraped up the money ourselves, and off we went with the Dateline crew into the bush.
I saw our familiar stomping ground in Windorah through the eyes of our American visitors, who were as astounded as I had been at Steve’s ability to bring the desert to life. We searched and searched for fierce snakes, but to no avail. Then Steve’s sixth sense kicked in. At five thirty one morning, after days of fruitless searching, he said, “Hurry up, let’s get going.”
Our Dateline host was keen. This was what she’d traveled halfway around the world to see. “Where are we heading?” she asked.
“We’ve got to get out on the black soil plains,” Steve said. “We are going to see a fierce snake at seven thirty.”
The host looked a bit surprised. Even I teased him. “Oh, yeah, seven thirty, Stevo, we are going to see a fierce snake at exactly seven thirty, right.”
But off we trundled to the black soil plains, camera crew, host, Winnebago, Ute—the whole convoy. Steve scanned the landscape. I monitored the temperature (and the clock). Seven thirty came and went.
“So, we’re going to see a fierce snake at seven thirty?” I said. “Let’s see, oh, yes, it is seven thirty, and where might the fierce snake be?”
After a little bit of teasing, Steve gave a good-natured grin, but then a look of determination passed over his face. No lie: Precisely at 7:32, he spotted a fierce snake. We ended up filming not one but two that morning.
The rest of the NBC crew looked upon Steve with new respect. This guy says we’re going to see a snake at seven thirty and he’s off by two minutes? They were checking their watches and shaking their heads.
Always give Steve the benefit of the doubt in the bush. I had learned that lesson before, the last time we had tailed fierce snakes on the black soil plains. But his ability to sense wildlife continued to strike me as uncanny.
We pulled up stakes and headed north to croc country. Lakefield National Park is one of my favorite places in Australia. Steve considered it the most beautiful place on the face of the earth. He gave the NBC people everything they wanted and more. Not only did we spot numerous saltwater crocodiles, but Steve found one that had submerged under an overhanging tree limb. We were able to crawl out on the limb and film straight down over a magnificent twelve-foot croc.
But it was left to me to head off what could have been a potential catastrophe at the end of filming. The Dateline host and a female producer were with a couple of the NBC crew members beside a stretch of water. Steve, myself, and some of the team from Australia Zoo faced them across the creek.
“See how NBC Dateline is over there on the other side?” Steve said. “Let’s show them our NBC ‘Datelines,’ what do you reckon?”
All the guys laughed. They turned around, faced their backsides toward our American friends, and were about to drop their daks. I leaped forward like a soldier throwing herself over a grenade.
“Noooooo!” I exclaimed. “The women from New York just won’t g
et it.”
The boys grumpily kept their pants on. Steve threw me an oh-you’re-no-fun look. I may have been a wet blanket, but a cross-cultural disaster had been successfully averted.
Our life together was filled with contrasts. One week we were croc hunting with Dateline in Cape York. Only a short time after that, Steve and I found ourselves out of our element entirely, at the CableACE Award banquet in Los Angeles.
Steve was up for an award as host of the documentary Ten Deadliest Snakes in the World. He lost out to the legendary Walter Cronkite. Any time you lose to Walter Cronkite, you can’t complain too much. After the awards ceremony, we got roped into an after-party that was not our cup of tea.
Everyone wore tuxedos. Steve wore khaki. Everyone drank, smoked, and made small talk, none of which Steve did at all. We got separated, and I saw him across the room looking quite claustrophobic. I sidled over.
“Why don’t we just go back up to our room?” I whispered into his ear. This proved to be a terrific idea. It fit in nicely with our plans for starting a family, and it was quite possibly the best seven minutes of my life!
After our stay in Los Angeles, Steve flew directly back to the zoo, while I went home by way of one my favorite places in the world, Fiji. We were very interested in working there with crested iguanas, a species under threat. I did some filming for the local TV station and checked out a population of the brilliantly patterned lizards on the Fijian island of Yadua Taba.
When I got back to Queensland, I discovered that I was, in fact, expecting. Steve and I were over the moon. I couldn’t believe how thrilled he was. Then, mid-celebration, he suddenly pulled up short. He eyed me sideways.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “You were just in Fiji for two weeks.”
“Remember the CableACE Awards? Where you got bored in that room full of tuxedos?”