The original Crocodile Kid
IN Melbourne's footy-mad Essendon, seven years after Dame Edna Everage put nearby Moonee Ponds on the map, a golden-haired child emerged, crying out for attention.
Steven Robert Irwin was born on February 22, 1962. A lifetime in front of him, or half of one at least. Crocodiles and cartoon caricatures. Conservation and canonisation. Could he ever have imagined it?
Irwin is now gone killed by a stingray's barb that pierced his heart on the Great Barrier Reef. But if you believe in magic, you already have a grasp of who he was. If you don't, you need to understand his parents, Bob and Lyn. From Victoria's Dandenong Ranges, Bob was a successful plumber with an after-hours obsession for native flora and reptiles. He and Lyn, who lived in the nearby town of Boronia, had met as kids. Their friendship swelled into teenage love.
Bob was 20 when they married, Lyn had turned 18. While Lyn embarked on a career as a maternity nurse, her instinctive passion rehabilitating sick and injured wildlife triggered a tidal convergence with Bob's interests.
Pretty soon, the family's Primrose St home was the whispered talk of their patch of Essendon. The place crawled with snakes and lizards (caught by Bob and Steve) and harboured Lyn's furry patients.
"There were (animals) everywhere," recalls Irwin's childhood neighbour Tony Piscitelli. "Steve had an old pool out in the back yard. He had taken all the water out of it and filled it with sand and had reptiles living in there. Dad thought he was always a little crazy. And he was, I suppose."
But Irwin wasn't yet six. That particular coming-of-age was marked by Bob and Lyn's gift of a non-venomous 3.65m scrub python, which Irwin named Fred. The impish boy loved the snake dearly, and Fred would become the first animal collected for what was later to evolve into the Beerwah Reptile Park on Queensland's Sunshine Coast.
Still, Irwin had a habit of wearing down his father's patience. "I would describe Steven as a monster," Bob told ABC's
Australian Story in 2003. "He was never where he was supposed to be. He was always missing. There was a time, one of the very few times, when we were to go away on a holiday. He was down the local creek chasing lizards."
At age seven, Irwin and his father were in the northern Victorian bush searching for snakes when a moment of pride proved false. Irwin had drifted off and, with his plastic-sandalled foot, pinned a huge, deadly brown snake mid-body.
"Dad, Dad, I've got one. I've got one," he yelled.
Bob bolted over, and the next thing young Steve felt was his father's powerful forearm belting his shoulder and sending him airborne. "You bloody idiot!" Bob hollered. "But Dad," Irwin whimpered. Irwin once said that his father's wrath that day "crushed him like a bug". He began crying so hard "I couldn't get my breath". But he had been warned repeatedly not to touch venomous snakes. The brown had been preparing to bite, and Bob's stiff-arm probably saved his son's life.
Even gifts require guidance, and Irwin, Bob always maintained in his no-nonsense way, had the gift. Years later, Irwin's documentary film crews would refer to this hands-on affinity with dangerous animals as "The Force".
In November 1970, Bob and Lyn decided to realise their dream of a fully fledged wildlife sanctuary. They purchased the property which is now the kernel of Australia Zoo and shipped the family, which included Irwin's older sister Joy and younger sibling Mandy, north. It took three years of unrelenting toil to get the place stocked, secured and fit for an audience. In the meantime, a nine-year-old Irwin got his first ride on the back of a crocodile.
His dad, who had pioneered venomous snake and crocodile capture techniques, had been seconded by the Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service to catch and relocate a colony of freshwater
crocs in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
One night, as Bob held the dinner-plate eyes of a metre-long croc under spotlight, Irwin was sent to the bow of their aluminium dinghy. As he poised (an early rendition of the famously parodied spring-loaded crouch), he listened for his father's command. "Wait, son, wait . . . now!"
"My fingers clamped around the croc's thick neck, my chin slammed into its bony head, my chest landed on its back and my legs wrapped around the base of the tail," Irwin recounted in his 2002 book
The Crocodile Hunter. "I was being thrashed around in the muddy water. I saw pulses of light as I was being rolled over and over. I sensed the strength and warmth of my dad's arm feeling for my body. Whoosh! The next thing, both croc and I were slammed into the floor of the boat: 'Are you all right?'
" 'Yeah, I got him, Dad.' I saw his face in the beam. He was shaking his head in disbelief with a grin from ear to ear. That was the start of my croc-jumping career. By the age of 12, I'd become quite skilled at spearing myself out of the front of a boat. And I took this responsibility very seriously."
Irwin attended Caloundra State High School, but found himself yearning for creature comforts even during recreational pursuits such as sport.
After the disappointment of scoring a duck at a schoolboy cricket match, he wandered to an adjacent creek to check out lizards. Instead, he encountered a lethal red-bellied black snake, dodged a series of menacing strikes, lifted it by the tail, emptied his bus driver's Esky of food and bundled the seething reptile in before slamming down the lid. "Gotcha."
Over the next two hours, Irwin located another six red-bellied blacks and imprisoned them in the driver's icebox. He thought his dad would be impressed with the haul.
"I was getting really good at it and had most of both cricket teams oohing and aahing," he wrote in
The Crocodile Hunter. But someone dobbed him into the bus driver on the trip home: "He's got snakes in your Esky."
The ashen driver pumped the accelerator, arriving at Irwin's reptile park in freakish time. The entire team alighted and escorted Irwin, the Esky and the driver inside the premises to seek out Irwin's father.
"Yeah, Dad, I've got seven real nice red-bellies," Irwin chirped. "Red-bellies!" Bob exploded. "Get in the house now. How dare you risk people's lives with your stupidity." Irwin recalled: "He's sunk his boot right up my bum so hard, I dropped the Esky."
Irwin was 18 when a new name, the Queensland Reptile and Fauna Park, was installed to reflect the park's expanded collection. About six years later, he would choose to leave on a path of his own. What turned into a five-year mission involved rescuing big saltwater crocs that had been deemed too threatening to remote north Queensland communities and were to be eliminated.
His astonishing ordeals, tracked on a video camera sent to him by Bob, were the precursor to a phenomenon. The original Crocodile Kid was about to be launched to the world, but Irwin could put it much better than that: "Born into it, mate, hatched in a crocodile enclosure and incubated in the sun."
Words by Matthew Fynes-Clinton, Trent Dalton, Glenis Green, Melissa Maugeri, Michael Madigan, John Wright, Fiona Hudson and Nick Papps
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REPTILES great and small . . . Steve Irwin gets chummy with a snake.
TUSTLE . . .Steve helps wrestle a crocodile into submission after it attacked Australia Zoo staff member Wes Mannion.
