Steve & Me

by Terri Irwin

  Despite her impressive background, Harriet remained attractively modest. She had a sweet personality like a little dog. She loved hibiscus flowers, and certain veggies were her favorites. Steve carried on a practice that his parents had implemented: Whatever you feed animals should be good enough for you to eat. Thus Harriet got the most beautiful mustard greens, kale, eggplant, zucchinis, and even roses.

  In return, Harriet gave zoo visitors a rare chance to watch her keepers cuddle and scratch one of the grandest creatures on earth. She was the oldest living chelonian and the only living creature to have met Charles Darwin and traveled aboard the Beagle. And she gave us all something else, too—a lesson in how to live a long life. Don’t worry too much. Take it easy. Stop and munch the flowers.

  It was a lesson Steve noted and understood but could never quite take to heart. He was a meteor. Harriet was more of a mountain. In this world, we need both.

  Meanwhile, I was still an out-of-her-element novice from Oregon. Steve wanted to help me feel as comfortable with snakes as I was with my mammal friends. I’d had some experience with reptiles before, but it certainly wasn’t my forte. Since I was living every day with about a hundred and fifty snakes, in a country that was home to the top eleven most venomous snakes in the world, it was time for a Stevo snake education.

  He knew just the right teacher. “Let me introduce you to Rosie,” Steve said to me one day, bringing out a beautiful boa constrictor. She was eight feet long, as fat as my arm, and very sweet. But when I first met her, I was a bit more nervous than I wanted to admit.

  “The first step is to get to know each other,” Steve explained.

  I tried. While Steve cooked dinner, I sat at one end of the sofa. Rosie lay coiled at the other. I eyed her suspiciously. She eyed me the same way, both of us hoping that we each didn’t just suddenly fling ourselves at the other in attack. I was worried about her, and she must have been worried about me, too. Friend or foe? Back when we first met, neither of us knew.

  Finally there came a revelation. I watched her, curled up on her end of the sofa, and I realized Rosie was actually more wary of me than I was of her. That’s when I started to understand the thought process of the snake. Snakes are very logical: If it’s bigger than me, I’m afraid of it. If it’s smaller than me, I will eat it. Fortunately, I was way too big for Rosie to think of me as a snack.

  I inched closer to her. Rosie tentatively stretched her neck out, flicked her tongue a few times, and slid into my lap. It was a monumental moment and a huge new experience for me. We began to check each other out. I stroked her soft, smooth skin. She smelled every little bit of me, and since snakes smell with their tongues, this meant a lot of flicking and licking. She licked down the front of my knee and flicked her tongue at my shoelaces. After a long day traipsing around the zoo, my shoes must have smelled…interesting.

  Up she came. As she approached my face, I felt myself instinctively recoil. Incredibly, even though I betrayed none of my inner thoughts, Rosie seemed to sense my anxiety. She slowed down and hesitated. As I relaxed, she relaxed.

  As time went by, I was able to tolerate Rosie around my shoulders. Soon I did the dishes with Rosie around my neck, and paperwork with her stretched out on the table. We began doing most of my household chores together. She preferred small indoor spaces where she felt secure, but she became braver and braver as she trusted me more.

  Before I met Rosie, I’d believed that a snake’s personality was rather like that of a goldfish. But Rosie enjoyed exploring. She stretched her head out and flicked her tongue at anything I showed her. Soon she was meeting visitors at the zoo. Children derived the most delight from this. Some adults had their barriers and their suspicions about wildlife, but most children were very receptive. They would laugh as Rosie’s forked tongue tickled their cheeks or touched their hair.

  Rosie soon became my best friend and my favorite snake. I could always use her as a therapist, to help people with a snake phobia get over their fear. She had excellent camera presence and was a director’s dream: She’d park herself on a tree limb and just stay there. Most important for the zoo, Rosie was absolutely bulletproof with children. During the course of a busy day, she often had kids lying in her coils, each one without worry or fear.

  Rosie became a great snake ambassador at the zoo, and I became a convert to the wonderful world of snakes. It would not have mattered what herpetological books I read or what lectures I attended. I would never have developed a relationship with Rosie if Steve hadn’t encouraged me to sit down and have dinner with her one night.

  I grew to love her so much, it was all the more difficult for me when one day I let her down.

  I had set her on the floor while I cleaned out her enclosure, but then I got distracted by a phone call. When I turned back around, Rosie had vanished. I looked everywhere. She was not in the living room, not in the kitchen, not down the hall. I felt panic well up within me. There’s a boa constrictor on the loose and I can’t find her! As I turned the corner and looked in the bathroom, I saw the dark maroon tip of her tail poking out from the vanity unit.

  I couldn’t believe what she had done. Rosie had managed to weave her body through all the drawers of the bathroom’s vanity unit, wedging herself completely tight inside of it. I could not budge her. She had jammed herself in.

  I screwed up all my courage, found Steve, and explained what had happened.

  “What?” he exclaimed, upset. “You can’t take your eyes off a snake for a second!” He examined the situation in the bathroom. His first concern was for the safety of the snake. He tried to work the drawers out of the vanity unit, but to no avail. Finally he simply tore the unit apart bare-handed.

  The smaller the pieces of the unit became, the smaller I felt. Snakes have no ears, so they pick up vibrations instead. Tearing apart the vanity must have scared Rosie to death. We finally eased her out of the completely smashed unit, and I got her back in her enclosure. Steve headed back out to work. I sat down with my pile of rubble, where the sink once stood.

  Through Rosie’s ambassadorship, I was able to participate more in the hands-on running of the zoo. Steve gave me my own area to work in. I had baby crocodiles (saltwater and freshwater both) and lots of lizards. It was wintertime when I first took over their care. I had to be careful about feeding them. If baby crocs ate too much and it wasn’t warm enough, they wouldn’t be able to digest their food. All reptiles rely on the temperature of their surroundings to regulate their bodily functions. They can’t heat their own bodies as mammals do. I had to crank up the heaters in their rooms, keep their tubs clean, and monitor them closely.

  In addition to the crocodile babies, I also had spectacular lizards in my care: perenties, Mertens’ water monitors, mangrove monitors, and lace goannas. Part of the walls of the room they were in folded out in order to expose the lizards to natural sunlight.

  “Make sure they don’t have any newspaper in with them,” Steve said. “They’ll hide under it, won’t get any sun, and get too cold.” Getting too hot was also a potential problem. Out in the bush, a lizard could sit on a rock virtually all day in the sun and be “fine as frog’s hair,” as Steve would say. The same lizard in an enclosure could not last in ten minutes in the sun. They needed to be able to thermoregulate themselves.

  A consistent theme of operating the zoo was money management. Although we were in the subtropics, it did get cool in winter. Finances were tight. We couldn’t afford the specific type of several-hundred-dollar heater we needed to keep the animals warm. I remember the triumph we felt when we located two kerosene heaters for only eighty-five dollars. They held enough fuel to burn twelve hours, so we were able to keep the baby crocodiles and lizards at comfortable temperatures.

  I was the one-woman marketing department for the zoo. My budget was twelve hundred dollars for the whole year. I often fielded complaints from tourism board representatives, who considered me awfully cheap when I couldn’t come up with fifty dollars for an advertisement in a
local newspaper. Money was just that scarce.

  There was no e-mail or fax machine. Everything had to be done by phone. Steve didn’t even own a typewriter. Personal computer? No such thing. Filing system? No way. The Irwins had a simple but effective tool for keeping track of zoo business: a calendar diary. I used a calculator to do payroll and instituted a file-card system for keeping track of people with whom we did business.

  Life was simpler then. Steve’s sister Mandy worked with us, and in addition we employed three full-time staffers and one part-time staffer. That was the whole zoo crew.

  My learning curve was steep not only at the zoo but around the house, too. The simplest routines back home in Oregon were totally different in the subtropics. For example, I couldn’t load the dishwasher and leave it to sit, because we would end up with a house full of ants. If I left a light on in the bathroom at night, insects would somehow get in from outside and fly across the room whenever anyone entered.

  I kept a wary eye on the large huntsman spiders, which grew as big as your hand. It took me a long time to get my mind around the fact that Steve wasn’t going to come running every time I saw a spider or a big bug. After a while I figured out that there was really nothing from which he needed to save me. Neither the strange insects nor the spiders were dangerous.

  In fact, eventually one of the giant spiders would eat one of the giant cockroaches. The subtropics featured great indoor ecosystems, as well as outdoor ones.

  Steve always patiently explained to me that the giant huntsman spiders rarely bit humans. One night he had the opportunity to prove himself wrong. He rolled over one in his sleep, and the next morning he had a bruise and two little fang marks on his body. He was most concerned because of the specific location of the bite. I gleefully explained to anyone who would listen that Steve had this giant spider-bite bruise on a part of his anatomy that “will remain undisclosed.”

  That story made the rounds for a long time.

  As precious as our money was, I had two holes into which I poured quite a lot of it. Their names were Shasta and Malina. I was determined to bring my two best animal friends from Oregon and make them part of my new life at the zoo. I missed them dearly.

  No fax, no e-mail, only international long distance. The process was not easy.

  I made the appropriate contacts with the Australasian Regional Association of Zoological Parks and Aquaria (ARAZPA). I also initiated the paperwork for the various government department approvals, in order to bring Malina to the zoo.

  I had been working to bring my dog Shasta to Australia too. Time, effort, and money went into vet checks, special transportation boxes, a four-month quarantine in Hawaii, and a five-month one in Sydney. Quarantine worked out to twenty-six dollars a day. All of our savings were consumed in the effort to bring my dog over. Steve loved Sui so much that he understood completely why it was worth it to me.

  The process took forever, and I spent my days tangled in red tape. I despaired. I loved my life and I loved the zoo, but there were times during that desperate first winter when it seemed we were fighting a losing battle.

  Then our documentaries started to air on Australian television. The first one, on the Cattle Creek croc rescue, caused a minor stir. There was more interest in the zoo, and more excitement about Steve as a personality. We hurried to do more films with John Stainton. As those hit the airwaves, it felt like a slow-motion thunderclap. Croc Hunter fever began to take hold.

  The shows did well in Sydney, even better in Melbourne, and absolutely fabulous in Brisbane, where they beat out a long-running number one show, the first program to do so. I believe we struck a chord among Australians because Steve wasn’t a manufactured TV personality. He actually did head out into the bush to catch crocodiles. He ran a zoo. He wore khakis. Among all the people of the world, Australians have a fine sense of the genuine. Steve was the real deal.

  Although the first documentary was popular and we were continuing to film more, it would be years before we would see any financial gain from our film work. But Steve sat down with me one evening to talk about what we would do if all our grand plans ever came to fruition.

  “When we start to make a quid out of Crocodile Hunter,” he said, “we need to have a plan.”

  That evening, we made an agreement that would form the foundation of our marriage in regard to our working life together. Any money we made out of Crocodile Hunter—whether it was through documentaries, toys, or T-shirts (we barely dared to imagine that our future would hold spin-offs such as books and movies)—would go right back into conservation. We would earn a wage from working at the zoo like everybody else. But everything we earned outside of it would go toward helping wildlife, 100 percent. That was our deal.

  As a result of the documentaries, our zoo business turned from a trickle to a steady stream. Only months earlier, a big day to us might have been $650 in total receipts. When we did $3,500 worth of business one Sunday, and then the next Sunday upped that record to bring in $4,500, we knew our little business was taking off.

  Things were going so well that it was a total shock when I received a stern notice from the Australian immigration authorities. Suddenly it appeared that not only was it going to be a challenge to bring Shasta and Malina to my new home of Australia, I was encountering problems with my own immigration too.

  Just when Steve and I had made our first tentative steps to build a wonderful life together, it looked as though it could all come tumbling down.

  Chapter Seven

  Stacks of Fun

  Using typical bureaucratic logic, the Australian Consulate in San Francisco had informed me that it would not process my application for permanent residency in Australia unless I was residing in the United States. It wasn’t enough that I had married an Australian, or that I had a full-time job and wouldn’t be a drag on the economy.

  I had to leave to be able to stay.

  But before I went back to the States, we had the opportunity to continue filming, shooting scenes for the documentary The Crocodile Hunter Goes West. We packed up the truck and headed for Windorah, on the edge of the Simpson Desert. Steve’s parents, Bob and Lyn, came with us, as well as John Stainton and his crew, including Henry, the cameraman.

  Steve did most of the driving. On the twenty-four-hour trip out, I took the wheel for maybe three hours total. We had a flat tire and found ourselves paying two hundred dollars to get it fixed in Quilpie, on the edge of spinifex country. Waiting to get back up and running would seem to be dead time, but there wasn’t any such thing when Steve was around.

  The long, spiky spinifex harbored an immense variety of animal life. In among the grass were finger-sized burrow holes in the ground. I didn’t know what made them. Steve recognized them as the homes of bird-eating spiders.

  I was impressed. “There are spiders that eat birds?”

  “Sure thing, mate,” he said. “Birds, lizards, any little thing they can get their fangs into.”

  He wrangled two of them out of their underground homes, and I was able to get a close-up look at them. They looked like tarantulas, only their abdomens were much larger. They rarely encountered humans, and so the two Steve handled got all fired up. I could see the venom drip from their fangs.

  “These little beauties are being collected by the pet trade,” Steve said, gently handling one of the giant spiders. “But they don’t handle captivity well, so a lot of them die.”

  Henry filmed the whole episode. “When collectors dig up these beautiful spiders,” Steve explained to the camera, “they often destroy their underground homes and completely ruin an entire habitat.”

  It was the kind of situation that always made Steve sad. He set the big girl down to return to her burrow. “Crikey,” he said, “wasn’t she gorgeous?”

  I myself had never really considered using the words “gor geous” and “spider” in a sentence together. After getting to know the bird-eaters, I finally settled on my own description: “cool.” In their burrows, we found the remn
ants of their love lives. After a female met a male spider and had a passionate night of romance, she would kill and eat him.

  The spiders fed by sensing vibrations on the surface. They’d emerge from their burrows and strike, killing insects, lizards, rodents, even small birds. Their fangs were like hypodermic needles, and their venom killed quickly. They’d wrap their prey up and feast on its blood.

  Back on the road with all four tires intact, we immediately encountered a herd of young feral pigs. With Henry scrambling after us to film, Steve and I gave chase. Steve called the little piglets “piggy banks,” and as they shot off in every direction, we had to run like the wind. Steve would dive like a football hero, launching himself through the air to grab a pig. I’d try the same technique and would just look like a sick bear, flopping over on the ground. Luckily, Sui helped round them up.

  Steve caught a little black-and-white-spotted piglet and explained to the camera the harm that introduced species can do to the native environment, all the while trying to talk over the squealing pig he held in his arms.

  “They’re feral and not native to Australia,” he said. “In some places they are causing all kinds of problems.”

  Eventually, after running through the bush until I was exhausted, I finally managed to catch one of the piglets. I felt a great sense of accomplishment, holding the cute little pig and filming with Steve. When we were done, I set my little piglet down.

  “What is that smell?” I asked.

  Steve stopped and sniffed. “Ah, you won’t believe it,” he said, looking past me at something near the road. “Those pigs have been feeding on that carcass over there.”

  I looked up to see the long-dead, putrid body. The piglets had scampered happily back to their mama. Steve and I lived with the smell of death on our hands, arms, shoes, and even our hair—for days afterward.