Steve & Me

by Terri Irwin

  But after John called out, “Got it,” and we turned back to Bindi, we were amazed at what we saw. Bindi was leaning against the base of Ayers Rock. She had placed both her palms against the smooth stone, gently put her cheek up to the rock, and stood there, mesmerized.

  “She’s listening,” Steve whispered. It was an eerie moment. The whole crew stopped and stared. Then Bindi suddenly seemed to come out of her trance. She plopped down and started stuffing the red sand of Uluru into her mouth like it was delicious.

  We also filmed a thorny devil busily licking up ants from the sandy soil. The one-of-a-kind lizard is covered with big, lumpy, bumpy scales and spikes.

  “When it rains,” Steve told the camera, “the water droplets run along its body and end up channeling over its face, so that if there is any rain at all, the thorny devil can get a drink without having to look for water!”

  It’s a pity she won’t remember any of it, I thought, watching Bindi crouch down to examine the thorny devil’s tongue as it madly ate ants. But we had the photos and the footage. What a lucky little girl, I thought. We’ll have all these special experiences recorded for her to take out and enjoy anytime she wants to remember.

  Our life proceeded in stages. Steve traveled to East Timor to film. The Australian Diggers had contacted us about a captive crocodile that needed our help. At the time, the country was at war, so Steve had to tackle the project without Bindi and me. But I knew that for the next trip, we would be together as a family.

  First I had planned a visit to Oregon; then Steve would join us after Bindi and I promoted our new Crocodile Hunter toy line at the big annual toy fair in New York City. Being on the road together was stacks of fun. We’d jump in a hotel tub bubble bath, order room service, and eat breakfast in bed. Traveling with Steve always meant there’d be loads of adventures.

  So Bindi and I flew to the United States ahead of Steve. We drove down to the Oregon coast, where my sister and I share a small beach cabin. We couldn’t contact Steve because mobile phones weren’t in range. There was no phone at the cabin, either, only a pay phone across the street at a gas station. It was one of the rare periods when we were out of touch for days at a time.

  During this time, Steve’s parents had decided to move closer to us at the zoo. They would manage our property on the Great Dividing Range, which we’d named Ironbark Station. Lyn was particularly thrilled about being closer to the family. She and Bob had been living in Rosedale, on the Queensland coast, a four-and-a-half-hour drive from the zoo. Ironbark Station was only two hours away.

  We’d purchased conservation land over a period of many years, and we were attempting to restore the native bush. We began planting eucalypts not long after we bought the property. First we planted dozens, then hundreds, and finally thousands. Steve worked into the night planting trees. If the rain didn’t come immediately, he would dutifully water each and every seedling. We had high hopes that one day the land would offer refuge to everything from koalas to phascogales.

  “It will take a lifetime to establish these trees,” he said. “But one day they will be big, they will have hollows, and there will be a place where animals can live again.” Even in its raw, cattle-ravaged state, the land was heaven. The rufous bettongs were out in force every night, and the white-winged choughs flew down to keep an eye on us wherever we worked.

  We had pieced together land parcels for a total of six hundred and fifty acres. This was the property Lyn and Bob were taking over in 1999.

  I was sound asleep at the Oregon beach cabin one night when there was a knock at the door. A woman who said she was from the Red Cross stood on the front porch. I was foggy-headed. At first, I could not get through my brain what she was saying.

  “I don’t mean to alarm you,” she said. “But you need to call home immediately.”

  Terror struck me. My mind raced. Where was Steve? Bindi lay asleep in the bedroom. I asked the woman from the Red Cross to stay on the porch while I went across the street to the pay phone. The international calling procedure seemed immensely complicated that morning, and terribly slow. I tried to keep my fingers steady as I dialed.

  The sun had not yet risen. I was in my robe. It was February of 2000, and I remember thinking, It’s always the coldest just before the sun comes up.

  I heard Steve’s voice on the other end of the phone and experienced an immediate flood of relief. He’s alive. But something was terribly wrong. Steve was incoherent. I couldn’t figure out what had happened.

  Not long before, we had lost our favorite crocodile to old age, and I thought that something had happened to one of our animals. But the tone of Steve’s voice was different. He was sobbing, but finally managed to choke out the words.

  His mother had been killed in a car accident.

  I felt the blood drain from my face. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He tried to explain, but he couldn’t really talk. The next thing I knew, the line went dead.

  It took a few frantic calls to find out what had happened. In the process of moving to their new home on our property, Lyn had left Rosedale to make one last trip with a few remaining family possessions. She was driving with the family malamute, Aylic, in the passenger seat beside her, and Sharon, their bird-eating spider, in a glass terrarium tank in the back of the truck. Lyn left the Rosedale house early, about three o’clock in the morning.

  As she approached Ironbark Station, her Ute left the road traveling sixty miles an hour. The truck hit a tree and she died instantly. Aylic was killed as well, and the tank holding the bird-eating spider was smashed to pieces.

  Early in the morning, at the precise moment when the crash happened, Steve was working on the backhoe at the zoo. He suddenly felt as if he had been hit by something that knocked him over, and he fell violently off the machine, hitting the ground so hard that his sunglasses came off. He told me later that he knew something terrible had happened.

  Steve got in his Ute and started driving. He had no idea what had happened, but he knew where he had to go. It was still early. With uncanny precision, he drove toward where the accident occurred. His mobile phone rang. It was Frank. When his brother-in-law told him what had happened and where, Steve realized he was already headed there.

  I immediately packed up Bindi and went to catch the next plane home. The family was in free fall. Steve was in shock, and Bob was even worse off. Lyn had always acted as the matriarch, the one who kept everything together. She was such a strong figure, a leader. Her death didn’t seem real.

  I sat on that plane and looked down at Bindi. Life is changed forever now, I thought. As we arrived home, I didn’t know what to expect. I had never dealt with grief like this before. Lyn was only in her fifties, and it seemed cruel to have her life cut short, as she was on the brink of a dream she had held in her heart forever. These were going to be her golden years. She and Bob could embark on the life they had worked so hard to achieve. They would be together, near their family, where they could take care of the land and enjoy the wildlife they loved.

  I couldn’t imagine what Steve, his dad, and his sisters were going through. My heart was broken. Bindi’s gran was gone just when they had most looked forward to spending time together. The aftermath of Lyn’s death was every bit as awful as I could have imagined. Steve was absolutely inconsolable, and Bob was very obviously unable to cope. Joy and Mandy were trying to keep things together, but they were distraught and heartbroken. Everyone at the zoo was somber. I felt I needed to do something, yet I felt helpless, sad, and lost.

  Steve’s younger sister Mandy performed the mournful task of sifting through the smashed items from the truck. One of the objects Lyn had packed was Bob’s teapot. There was nothing Bob enjoyed more than a cup of tea. As Mandy went to wash out the teapot, she noticed movement. Inside was Sharon, the bird-eating spider, the sole survivor of the accident. Although her tank had been smashed to bits, she had managed to crawl into the teapot to hide.

  After the funeral, tim
e appeared to slow down and then stop entirely. Steve talked about moving out to Ironbark Station. He couldn’t seem to order his thoughts. He no longer saw a reason for going on with all the projects on which we had worked so hard. Bindi was upset but didn’t have the understanding to know why. She was too young to get her head around what had happened. She simply cried when she saw her daddy crying.

  It would be a long time before life returned to anything like normalcy. Lyn’s death was something that Steve would never truly overcome. His connection with his mum, like that of so many mothers and sons, was unusually close. Lyn Irwin was a pioneer in wildlife rehabilitation work. She had given her son a great legacy, and eventually that gift would win out over death. But in the wake of her accident, all we could see was loss.

  Steve headed out into the bush alone, with just Sui and his swag. He reverted to his youth, to his solitary formative years. But grief trailed him. My heart broke for my husband. I was not sure he would ever find his way back.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Coming Back

  When the going gets hard, sometimes the best you can do is be there for people. All I wanted was to make things better, but this was something I just couldn’t fix. I didn’t know if I should dwell on what had happened or focus on the future. This was the dilemma I faced with Steve after Lyn’s death. I so much wanted to turn back the clock, but there was no way I could.

  Steve coped by throwing himself into working on the land. Up on the driver’s seat of a backhoe or a bulldozer, he could be alone with his thoughts. He worked the property around the zoo to prepare it for expansion. His idea was to create a mini-Madagascar, an island habitat for the zoo. We would develop a magical island with giant land tortoises, and the trees above filled with lemurs.

  True to his ideal of getting wildlife into people’s hearts, Steve thought zoo visitors shouldn’t have to stare across the water at the animals. They would take a boat ride to adventure and disembark among land tortoises and lemurs. If the lemurs felt like coming down to play, they could. If they wanted to stay up in the trees, they could do that, too. The island would be a place where they would roam free.

  Using heavy equipment, Steve carved away at our property just beyond what was then the northern boundary of the zoo. There would be a cheetah run here also, and space for a new hospital for rescued wildlife. But watching him work an excavator from afar, I felt like Steve wasn’t thinking about the future so much as trying to cope with the immediate past.

  Just then Hollywood came calling. If you could design a place as far removed as possible from the real-life questions of grief and loss, Hollywood would be it. No one really noticed that it was an emotionally scarred Steve who showed up at the Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony that year. Most of them were too busy with their own problems to worry about anyone else’s.

  Croc Files was a fun show, with each episode taking kids on a new adventure with stacks of exciting wildlife. It had been nominated in the category of Outstanding Children’s Series. The awards were held in May 2000 at the Century Plaza in Los Angeles.

  The hustle and bustle of the Emmys didn’t impress Steve much. In his present frame of mind, he was loath to go anywhere. The big city wasn’t where Steve wanted to be, even in the best of times, and now it was even harder because he would never again be able to share his achievements with his mum.

  As it happened, the night belonged to Disney Channel’s Bill Nye, the Science Guy, which took home a total of four Emmys, including the one for Outstanding Children’s Series. I felt badly for John Stainton and Judi Bailey who, as producers of Croc Files, would have been the ones actually receiving the award. I felt it was a big deal to be nominated at all.

  Hollywood wasn’t through with us yet.

  We entered into initial exploratory talks with MGM, one of the major Hollywood studios, about doing a Crocodile Hunter movie.

  Gearing up to film a movie would prove to be completely different from packing up and going bush to film a documentary. So much work goes on behind the scenes before the cameras roll: contracts, logistics, script development, and budgeting. In spring 2000, we were still in the who, what, when, where, and how phases of filming a movie. We were nowhere near actually knuckling down to do it. Although the negotiations were tedious, conducted in rooms full of Hollywood heavy hitters, Steve never wavered in his conviction that the movie would have a strong conservation message.

  He convinced John Stainton to agree that there would be no CGI (computer-generated imagery) wildlife in the movie. We didn’t want to pretend to react to an animal in front of a green screen, and then have computer graphic technicians complete the shot later. That was how Hollywood would normally have done it, but that wasn’t an option for Steve.

  “All the animals have to be real,” he insisted to the executives at MGM. “I’m doing all of my own stunts. Otherwise, I am not interested.”

  I always believed that Steve would excel at anything he put his mind to, and a movie would be no different. The camera loved him. As talks ground on at MGM, we came up with a title: Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course. But mostly we had phone calls and meetings.

  The main sticking point was that no insurance company would touch us. No underwriter would write a policy for a project that required Steve to be working with real live crocodiles.

  As negotiations seemed to be grinding to a halt, we were all feeling frustrated. Steve looked around at John, Judi, and the others. He could see that everybody had gotten a bit stretched on all our various projects. He decided we needed a break.

  He didn’t lead us into the bush this time. Instead, Steve said a magic word. “Samoa.”

  “Sea snakes?” I asked.

  “Surfing,” he said. He planned a ten-day shoot for a surfing documentary.

  Steve loved surfing almost as much as he loved wildlife. The pounding his body had taken playing rugby, wrestling crocs, and doing heavy construction at the zoo had left him with problem knees and a bad shoulder. He felt his time tackling some of the biggest surf might be nearing an end.

  In Samoa, Steve didn’t spend just a few hours out in the waves. He would be out there twelve to fourteen hours a day. I didn’t surf, but I was awestruck at Steve’s ability to stare down the face of a wave that was as high as a building. He had endurance beyond any surfer I had ever seen. Steve had a support boat nearby, so he could swim over, get hydrated, or grab a protein bar. But that was it. He didn’t stop for lunch. He would eat breakfast, surf all day, and then eat a big dinner.

  I knew this was the best therapy for him. Surfing at Boulders was downright dangerous, but Steve reveled in the challenge. He surfed with Wes, his best mate in the world. I sat on a rocky point with my eye glued to the camera so I wouldn’t miss a single wave. While Bindi gathered shells and played on the beach under her nanny’s watchful eye, I admired Steve with his long arms and broad shoulders, powerfully paddling onto wave after wave.

  Not even the Pacific Ocean with its most powerful sets could slow him down. He caught the most amazing barrels I have ever seen, and carved up the waves with such ferocity that I didn’t want the camera to miss a single moment.

  On the beach in Samoa, while Bindi helped her dad wax his board, I caught a glimpse of joy in eyes that had been so sad.

  Along with John and Judi, we took a big risk and started filming on the movie before we had a contract signed with MGM. There didn’t seem to be any choice. I imagined all the insurance underwriters across the world reacting to the phrase “live crocodiles.” Those two words would be enough to blow them right out of their cubicles. So we began shooting with our zoo crocodiles, but without signatures on the dotted line for the movie.

  A particular scene in the script—and a good example of an insurance man’s nightmare—had a crocodile trying to lunge into a boat. Only Steve’s expertise could make this happen, since the action called for Steve and me to be in the boat at the time. If the lunging crocodile happened to hook his head over the edge of the boat, he would tip us bot
h into the water. That would be a one-way trip.

  “How are you going to work it?” I asked Steve.

  “Get the crocs accustomed to the dinghy first,” he said. “Then I’ll see if I can get them interacting with me while I’m in the boat.”

  First he tried Agro, one of our biggest male crocs. Agro was too wary of the boat. He’s a smart crocodile. I think he remembered back when he was captured. He didn’t want any of it. We decided to try with our friend Charlie.

  Charlie had been very close to ending up at a farm, his skin turned into boots, bags, and belts. He definitely had attitude. He spent a lot of his time trying to kill everything within range. Steve felt good about the possibility of Charlie having a go.

  Because he was filming a movie and not shooting a documentary, John had a more complex setup than usual, utilizing three thirty-five-millimeter cameras. Each one would film in staggered succession, so that the film magazine changes would never happen all at once. There would never be a time when film was not rolling. We couldn’t very well ask a crocodile to wait while a fresh mag was loaded into a camera.

  “You need to be careful to stay out of Charlie’s line of sight,” Steve said to me. “I want Charlie focusing only on me. If he changes focus and starts attacking you, it’s going to be too difficult for me to control the situation.”

  Right. Steve got no argument from me. Getting anywhere near those bone-crushing jaws was the furthest thing from my mind. I wasn’t keen on being down on the water with a huge saltwater crocodile trying to get me. I would have to totally rely on Steve to keep me safe.

  We stepped into the dinghy, which was moored in Charlie’s enclosure, secured front and back with ropes. Charlie came over immediately to investigate. It didn’t take much to encourage him to have a go at Steve. Steve grabbed a top-jaw rope. He worked on roping Charlie while the cameras rolled.

  Time and time again, Charlie hurled himself straight at Steve, a half ton of reptile flesh exploding up out of the water a few feet away from me. I tried to hang on precariously and keep the boat counterbalanced. I didn’t want Steve to lose his footing and topple in. Charlie was one angry crocodile. He would have loved nothing more than to get his teeth into Steve.