Terri Irwin
Feature
Life on Planet Irwin
by Diana Wichtel
Despite the tragic loss of her Crocodile Hunter husband, Terri Irwin has grabbed life by the tail.
True to overachieving form – her idea of fun as a child, she will tell me, was to play with her father’s adding machine – Terri Irwin arrives early for her 8.30am keynote address. Attentive, friendly, hyper-organised, she looks a little wan in repose. Poor thing. The audience of travel agents assembled at the ASB Showgrounds for G’Day NZ Australia Week turns out to be about as animated as the plates of scrambled eggs congealing in front of them. When, at the end of her 45 minutes, Irwin calls for questions – any questions – from the floor, the silence is excruciating. Welcome to New Zealand.
Never mind. Irwin isn’t fazed. She’s a force of nature, picking up where late husband Steve left off, radiating missionary zeal. The talk is fast, furious, and a little mad. As you’d expect of one who, as a 28-year-old American wildlife enthusiast, found the sight of Steve doing his seam-straining action crouch in his King Gee shorts (motto: “Any tougher, they’d rust”) blindingly irresistible. The travel agents hear all the stories, including such possibly over-informative asides as “I used to say Steve was hot in the cot but he generally slept with his little dog, Sui.” Nothing is sacred when it comes to getting her carbon-friendly, unashamedly hokey “Crocs rule!” conservation message across.
Irwin’s energy is valiant, considering it’s only 18 months since the town of Beerwah, Queensland, witnessed scenes that called to mind the pandemonium following the death of Princess Diana. The news that the Crocodile Hunter had been stabbed through the heart by one of the creatures he hunted was as deeply shocking and retrospectively unsurprising as Diana’s end, fleeing the paparazzi who hunted her.
What you won’t forget in a hurry are Terri Irwin’s interviews, after the catastrophe, with Ray Martin in Australia and Barbara Walters in the US. Irwin was nakedly distraught. When we meet upstairs after breakfast, you have to ask. That must have been hard to do. “Extraordinarily. I can’t watch it or I’ll go back to there, so I’ve never seen it. I couldn’t tell you half of what I said.”
Such public pain. But then Irwin lives in the middle of Australia Zoo and at the carefully managed epicentre of a media whirlwind. When your nine-year-old daughter has just been trademarked, privacy is a relative concept.
“All our lives have been shared,” she says airily. “I’ve given birth twice on television.” Bindi was six days old when she went on her first shoot. Robert, four, wants his own show. “If there’s anything I could impart about who Steve was and why his work was important … I still have that sense of wanting to try to make a difference. This is how I get up in the morning.”
Steve was the XOS personality that held everything together. And, no, he wasn’t sending himself up. “He’s not an actor playing a part that you could critique. If you don’t like him, you don’t like Steve Irwin. Fair enough.”
She must have worried that, with the star gone, the whole shebang might come crashing down. “That’s an interesting question,” says Irwin. “Steve would say, ‘What are you going to do if anything happens to me?’ It made me uncomfortable, so I would defuse it with humour. I’d say, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, sweetheart. Have you ever heard of Graceland?’ ”
Graceland! This is an audacious anecdote, simultaneously casting her husband as Elvis at his most excessive and needling those who fret when Irwin proclaims that Australia Zoo should be a tourist destination on a par with Disneyland. Not so much a joke as a prophecy.
It’s hard to tell how calculated Irwin is. She can go from deeply earnest to loose cannon, sometimes in the same sentence. She’s certainly crafty. She gets her red-carpet frocks off the rack and donates the cost of a designer gown. Reporters innocently enquiring who she’s wearing get a wildlife lecture. “All of a sudden we’re talking conservation!”
Yet when I put it to her that she’s subversive, she doesn’t seem to know what that means. Raise Germaine Greer’s graceless attack on Steve Irwin after his death – “There was not an animal he was not prepared to manhandle”, etc – and she says “Who is Germaine Greer?”
The topic of the alleged problems between Irwin and Steve’s father, Bob, is handled with sweet and masterful spin. “I’m a bit confused,” says Irwin, of talk of a rift. Bob retired in 1992, she points out. He has now moved from a conservation property he ran at Steve’s behest to a property provided by Irwin as part of a A$1 million package. Bob had been struggling, she says. Trying to fill the void. “He’d say to me, ‘Can I help with Wildlife Warriors? Can I help with the zoo? Can I help with the croc trip?’ I kept saying, ‘The 3500 acres you’re managing, growing eucalyptus leaves for the koalas … what you’ve been doing since the year 2000, that’s what we need you to do.’ ”
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