A larrikin who touched us all
'He was just like a guy in the street and he just had this ability to get through to people' ¿ Steve's proud father Bob
I DIDN'T know Steve Irwin well but I knew him well enough to know that, like so many other people, I'm having a hard time saying goodbye.
Some people won't understand this, just as they don't understand the long, sad, collective sigh that has accompanied his passing. But the thing I've always thought about Steve Irwin, from the very first time I met him up at what was then a Beerwah reptile park, is that here was a man who was always going to polarise people.
Back then I was a first-year journalist and he was, quite simply, the most astounding person I had ever met in my life.
Big muddy workboots, clad head-to-toe in khaki, a whirling dervish of a man with eyes flashing fire as he spoke of his passion for conservation, jumping up on tables to demonstrate how to catch a croc without harming it, leaping from one topic to another like a darting dragonfly, grinning good-naturedly while recounting a long list of his numerous brushes with danger. It was meant to be an interview but it was all I could do to keep up.
I remember thinking three things that I had never, ever, met someone who talked so much and so quickly, that I had never, ever, met anybody so passionate about what they did for a living, and that he had possibly the world's worst mullet haircut I had ever seen.
This was before the world met Steve Irwin, before the television shows and the movies and the specials before this incredibly likeable bloke from Beerwah became "The Croc Hunter" and his life changed forever. His life would change but not he.
Over the next few years I would interview both Steve and his wife Terri quite a few times and I would always be struck by how, despite his ever-increasing fame, he somehow managed to hold on to who he was and how he never, no matter where he was in the world, forgot where he came from.
One time, a call from America, where Steve and Terri were promoting their movie as the crowds gathered below their room: "Fran," he said, "there's hundreds of 'em out there. It's unbelievable."
"How does that make you feel?" I asked.
"Well, I look down there and I see them all and I think, 'Crikey, what the bloody hell have I done?' "
On his beloved Bindi's birth: "Her little head was coming out and the doctor asked if I would like to get her out and I said, 'Yeah, you bet! Cos, you know, I've caught a lot of things in my day.' "
On his wife Terri: "On the day I met Terri, I really liked her straight away, but you know what sealed the deal? She was leaving the zoo and on her way out she whacked her head on a post. It must have really hurt, so I asked if she was all right and she said, 'Yes, no worries.'
"I thought 'Crikey, a good- looking sheila who loves wildlife and can take a good hit on the head that's got to be the woman for me'."
He had his own way with words and he had his own way with life. He didn't wade through it, like so many of us do, just trying to keep our heads above water. He didn't tip-toe through it, either, afraid of his own shadow. And he certainly didn't cruise through it, taking the easy road.
No, Steve Irwin jumped into life with both feet flying, his arms in the air shouting "woohoo!" as he went. And he invited anyone who was game enough to go with him.
Sometimes as people who fly too high inevitably do he came crashing back to Earth.
Sometimes his mouth and his actions got him into trouble. And as his fame grew, people began to whisper that he was not who he said he was.
"Fraud", they said, "charlatan", "he doesn't care about wildlife", "his marriage is a sham" there were those who simply could not believe that this bloke was for real, that anyone could be that happy, that energetic, so completely and utterly over the top all of the time.
As I said, he was always going to polarise people something Steve himself knew.
"People," he told me one lazy afternoon at Australia Zoo when he had finally stopped moving for an instant, "either get me or they don't."
And you know who "got" Steve Irwin long before the rest of the world caught on? Kids.
It was kids who drove the
Crocodile Hunter series' first success, kids who told each other about this bloke who ran through the bush and jumped on crocs and wrapped snakes around his neck and told silly jokes and never stopped moving.
Kids got Steve Irwin and kids can smell a fake at 15 paces.
In a world where kids are always being told to behave, not to go there, don't touch that, don't do this, don't cry, don't shout, don't scream, don't get over-excited, Steve Irwin taught them that it was OK to feel happiness so strong it could make you giddy, to laugh so hard you actually fell over, and sadness so deep it could make you cry even when everyone was looking.
He was quick to laughter and quick to tears, quick to anger and quick to forgiveness.
He was funny, he was kind, he was bright, he was generous, he was, at times, foolhardy and he was, at times, inappropriate.
But he was never, ever anything but one hundred per cent himself.
And in a world where so many of us cower and hide and try to be something we are not, for that act of bravery alone, he will be rightly missed.
