by Terri Irwin
“He was never where we wanted him to be,” Lyn recalled with a laugh.
Steve’s childhood was “family, wildlife, and sport,” he told me. He played rugby league for the Caloundra Sharks in high school and was picked to play rugby for the Queensland Schoolboys and represent the state, but he chose to go on a field trip with his dad to catch reptiles instead.
Sometimes sport and wildlife mixed in unexpected ways. Bob was an expert badminton player, and a preteen Steve decided to lay out a badminton court in the family’s backyard one day. He had a brolga as a friend, a large bird that he called Brolly. Brolly objected to Steve rearranging her territory. She waited until his back was turned and then attacked. Wham! A brolga’s beak is a fearsome weapon, and Brolly’s slammed into the back of little Stevo’s head.
His bird friend knocked him out cold.
“Go ahead, feel it,” Steve said after regaling me with this story. He bent his head. I could still feel a knot of scar tissue, a souvenir of the brolga attack years earlier.
During a cricket match one afternoon, Steve was called up to bat on the second drop, but he was out for a duck. He became bored during the subsequent stretch of inactivity and investigated a nearby creek. Beneath an abandoned sheet of corrugated iron, Steve encountered a red-bellied black snake. Red-bellies are venomous. Steve knew this, but he thought that his father would prize a red-bellied black snake to add to the family’s menagerie. So a very young Steve tailed the red-belly.
Steve instinctively dodged each of the snake’s strikes, but he was now stuck for something to put the snake in, and it was becoming more aggressive by the second. “Finally one of me mates brought over our bus driver’s esky,” he said. “I dumped out all his sandwiches and managed to get him in. He was one cranky snake!”
To the cheers and wonderment of his cricket teammates, Steve caught another half-dozen red-bellies that afternoon. The bus driver didn’t realize that there were snakes on the bus, but when he found out, he made a point of telling Steve’s dad.
Bob was less than pleased. Steve, expecting to be praised, got a harsh reprimand instead. “Dad sunk a boot up my bum,” was how Steve explained the aftermath of the snakes-in-the-esky incident. Bob railed against Steve’s thoughtlessness for endangering his mates and the bus driver by bringing live venomous snakes into their midst.
Lyn’s passion for rehabilitation and Bob’s passion for crocodiles meshed together to prompt a new effort to save “problem” crocodiles by relocating them to areas where they would not bother humans.
Bob pioneered a kinder, gentler way to do it. At that point in time, the accepted method of croc capture was a cruel one. Park rangers and animal control officers would sink a barbed harpoon into the animal’s hide. They would then reel in the thrashing, bleeding croc. Oftentimes the harpoons would go astray and miss their mark, or the barbs would tear themselves out during the struggle, leaving a gaping, jagged hole.
“The way they were doing it,” Steve said, “there was maybe a one-in-five chance of success.”
His father’s approach was quite different, and quite ingenious, involving such practices as jumping, soft mesh trapping, and netting. The approach grew out of Bob’s knowledge of crocodilian behavior. Crocs are ambush predators, snatching their prey by lunging onto land from the water. Bob lured them to a trap with fresh meat, usually a feral pig. He hung a fist-sized piece of meat as lead-in bait in front of a trawler-mesh trap.
Saltwater crocs are very intelligent and wary of traps. The “free” feed would give them a sense of security, and they wouldn’t worry about the new thing in their territory. Then, after the lead-in bait disappeared a few nights in a row, Bob placed fresh meat deep within the trap.
The target crocodile would enter, pull on the meat (which released a trigger mechanism), and trip a weight bag. When the weight bag fell, it pulled the mouth of the trap shut like a drawstring, preventing the crocodile from escaping. Then came the tricky part. Bob and young Steve had to pin the croc by laying themselves on top of it. Bob would peel back the mesh, blindfold the animal and duct-tape its jaws, and then transport it in the trap or in a croc box.
The process developed by trial and error over the course of many years. Steve would later perfect it. There was no doubt that it was vastly superior to a harpoon barb. There is nothing, of course, more invasive than a bullet, and the crocs Bob captured faced a stark choice: They would be shot by their angry, fearful human neighbors, or relocated to safer environments. Bob preferred the momentary discomfort of the captured croc to seeing it lying dead on a riverbank.
Bob brought his young son along on his crocodilian relocation work. “I got so I could work the spotty, and Dad would jump the smaller ones,” Steve said. “He tossed them into the bottom of the boat, and I would dive on top to pin them. They used to thrash me, putting up a good fight.” Steve didn’t officially perform his first capture until he was nine years old. Father and son had been working together on croc relocation for a couple of years by then.
The Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service was confident that Bob’s croc-catching expertise could help remove a group of freshies on the Leichhardt River. Freshwater crocs are smaller, with long, narrow jaws. They are less aggressive than the salt water variety, but they still have fearsome sets of teeth and can lash out when cornered.
Steve and Bob worked together for several nights, moving one freshie after another out of a section of river that was about to be dammed. On their last night, while Bob wrangled one croc in the boat, Steve caught the red-eye shine of another with his spotlight.
He alerted his father. “Get up in front,” Bob said. “Hold him with your spotty.”
That’s when Steve realized that this capture was going to be different. He was in the front of the boat—which meant that he would be the one leaping on top of the croc in the water.
“Bob and I both thought it was a small one,” Steve recalled.
“But it wasn’t,” I said.
“It was bigger than I was,” Steve said, shaking his head in disbelief at the memory.
Bob made him wait until the last possible moment to jump. Steve kept his light shining into the croc’s eyes.
“Okay, I got him,” Bob said. He turned his own torch on and shined the croc. That was Steve’s signal to drop his own spotty and get ready to jump.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Bob cautioned, and the dinghy moved closer. Bob could barely contain his son, who was bursting with excitement. “Now!”
Steve leaped. As soon as he did, he realized that he had misjudged the croc’s size. It wasn’t a three-footer. It was more like four or five feet long, easily matching his weight.
The croc dove. No matter what, I’m not letting go, Steve thought. There was no way he was going to let his dad down. Just as Steve was about to run out of air, he felt his father’s strong arm reach down to bring both Steve and the croc into the boat.
Steve told me that when he looked at Bob’s face, he could see both worry and pride. Worry because Steve had actually been out of sight in the murky water for a long moment—and pride because he made a perfect capture, his first time out.
“Dad started grinning from ear to ear,” Steve recalled. “I had jumped my first croc. Even though I was only nine, it was one of the biggest moments of my life.”
Bob and Lyn set Steve on the path he traveled in life. What was incredible about Steve was how much he made it his own. He took the example of his parents and ran with it.
In 1980 Bob and Lyn decided to change the Beerwah Reptile Park to the Queensland Reptile and Fauna Park, the name under which I would first encounter it. Angry at the senseless slaughter of crocodilians, Bob began to expand the zoo to create habitats for rescued crocs.
I can pinpoint the exact period when Steve grew into the man who would become so well known to people around the world as the Crocodile Hunter. It was the time he spent alone, with his first dog, Chilli, in the bush for months at a time, trapping and relocating crocs for the governme
nt.
At the start of the 1980s, Steve was eighteen, a recent graduate of Caloundra State High School, and still under his father’s tutelage. Ten years later he had been transformed. He proved himself capable of doing some of the most dangerous wildlife work in the world, solo and with spectacular results. Years in the wilderness lent him a deep understanding of the natural world. More than that, he had reinforced a unique connection with wildlife that would stay with him throughout his whole life.
The legend of a giant black saltie in Cape York had been growing for years. It haunted a river system in north Queensland and eluded all attempts at capture or death. In 1988 the East Coast Crocodile Management Program enlisted Bob and Steve to remove this “problem” crocodile and relocate him back to their zoo.
It was a difficult assignment. At first they could find no sign of the mythical black croc. Perhaps it was a figment of the public imagination, tying together several incidents and sightings to create a single animal out of many. For months, Bob and Steve surveyed the mangrove swamps and riverbanks, finally locating a telltale belly slide that betrayed the presence of a huge male.
Then Bob gave his son the ultimate vote of confidence. He left him alone.
Bob went back to Beerwah. It was just Steve and his dog, Chilli. The huge saltwater crocodile had repeatedly outwitted hunters with high-powered rifles and “professionals” from crocodile farms sent in to exterminate him. Steve took up a hunt that had already lasted for years. Only he planned to save this modern-day dinosaur rather than kill it.
One night the croc almost took him instead. He spotted a smaller female and set a net across the river to snare her. But something was wrong. An incredible force pulled the net upstream, against the current and against all logic. Steve started his outboard, but it didn’t help. The bow of his boat pitched downward, taking on water. He rushed to cut the net free before the croc swamped the boat.
He needn’t have bothered. The bow of the boat suddenly surged upward and the net hung limp. Steve pulled it in and found a gaping hole as big as his dinghy. The heavy-duty trawler mesh had been torn straight through.
Another evening, Steve and Chilli watched a half-dozen feral pigs swim across the river. As the animals clambered up the opposite bank, the hindmost pig seemed to slip suddenly back into the water and disappear, without a thrash or squeal. Steve didn’t even see the big croc. It had been a stealth attack.
Stalking the black ghost, Steve became one with the river. He spent months at a time in the bush. He disregarded the mangrove mud that covered him until he was camouflaged as he sat silently in wait. He learned the river systems of the area like the back of his hand.
Then the croc made his move. Steve discovered that the lead-in bait for one of his traps had been eaten, grabbed down with such force that its nylon cord had wound up high in a mangrove tree. Steve chose a particularly smelly chunk of meat to bait the trap the next night. He placed it downstream and made his way through the swamp on foot, so he would leave no sign of his approach on the riverbank.
The next two days, nothing. Steve rebaited the trap, this time using the carcass of a whole boar. He woke in the middle of the night. Chilli had alerted him that something had disturbed the peace of the mangroves. Steve would have to wait until daylight to check the trap.
The next morning, Steve took his boat out and saw what had happened. The big male had triggered the trap and was snared in the mesh—sort of. Even though the rectangular-shaped net was the biggest he had, the croc’s tail and back leg stuck out. But the black ghost had finally been caught.
At Steve’s approach, the animal thrashed wildly, smashing apart mangrove trees on either side of the trap. Steve tried to top-jaw-rope the croc, but it was fighting too violently. Normally Chilli acted as a distraction, giving Steve the chance to secure the croc. But the dog wanted no part of this. She cowered on the floor of the dinghy, unwilling to face this monstrously large croc. Steve was truly on his own.
He finally secured a top-jaw rope and tied the other end to a tree. With a massive “death roll”—a defensive maneuver in which the reptile spins its enormous body—the big croc smashed the tree flat and snapped it off. Steve tried again; the croc thrashed, growling and roaring in protest at the trapper in khaki, lunging again and again to tear Steve apart.
Finally, the giant croc death-rolled so violently that he came off the bank and landed in the boat, which immediately sank. Chilli had jumped out and was swimming for shore as Steve worked against time. With the croc underwater, Steve lashed the croc, trap and all, in the dinghy. But moving the waterlogged boat and a ton of crocodile was simply too much. Steve sprinted several miles in the tropical heat to reach a cane farm, where he hoped to get help. The cane farmers were a bit hesitant to lend a hand, so Steve promised them a case of beer, and a deal was made. With a sturdy fishing boat secured to each side of Steve’s dinghy, they managed to tow it downriver where they could winch croc and boat onto dry land to get him into a crate. By this time, a crowd of spectators had gathered.
When Steve told me the story of the capture, I got the sense that he felt sorry he had to catch the crocodile at all.
“It seemed wrong to remove the king of the river,” Steve said. “That croc had lasted in his territory for decades. Here I was taking him out of it. The local people just seemed relieved, and a couple even joked about how many boots he’d make.”
Steve was very clever to include the local people and soon won them over to see just how special this crocodile really was. Just as he was dragged into his crate, the old croc attempted a final act of defiance, a death roll that forced Steve to pin him again.
“I whispered to him to calm him down,” Steve said.
“What did you say to him?” I asked.
“‘Please don’t die.’”
The black crocodile didn’t die. Steve brought him back to Beerwah, named him Acco, and gave him a beautiful big pond that Bob had prepared, with plenty of places to hide.
We were in the Crocodile Environmental Park at the zoo when Steve first told me the story of Acco’s capture. I just had to revisit him after hearing his story. There he was, the black ghost himself, magnificently sunning on the bank of his billabong.
Standing there next to this impressive animal, I tried to wrap my mind around the idea that people had wanted him dead. His huge, intimidating teeth made him look primeval, and his osteodermal plates gleamed black in the sun—a dinosaur, living here among us. I felt so emotional, contemplating the fear-based cruelty that prompted humans to hate these animals.
For his part, Acco still remembered his capture, even though it had happened nearly a decade before. Whenever Steve went into his enclosure, Acco would stalk him and strike, exploding out of the water with the intent to catch Steve unaware.
Despite the conflict in Steve’s soul over whether he had done the right thing, I decided that Acco’s capture had to be. In the zoo, Acco had his own territory to patrol and a beautiful female crocodile, Connie, who loved him dearly. Left in the wild, somebody would have eventually shot him. If the choice is between a bullet and living in the Crocodile Environmental Park, I think his new territory was much more preferable.
When I met Steve in 1991, he had just emerged from a solid decade in the bush, either with Bob or on his own, with just his dog Chilli, and later Sui. Those years had been like a test of fire. As a boy all Steve wanted to do was to be like his dad. At twenty-nine he’d become like Bob and then some.
He had done so much more than catch crocs. In the western deserts, he and Bob helped researchers from the Queensland Museum understand the intricacies of fierce snake behavior. Steve also embarked on a behavioral study of a rare and little-understood type of arboreal lizard, the canopy goanna, scrambling up into trees in the rain forests of Cape York Peninsula in pursuit of herpetological knowledge.
As much as Steve had become a natural for television, over the course of the 1980s he had become a serious naturalist as well. His hands-on experience, gl
eaned from years in the bush, meshed well with the more abstract knowledge of the academics. No one had ever accomplished what he had, tracking and trapping crocodiles for months at a time on his own.
He would hand on to Bindi and Robert his knowledge of nature and the bush, just as Bob and Lyn had handed it down to him. This is what few people understood about Steve—his relationship with his family, and the tradition of passion and commitment and understanding that passed from generation to generation.
Later on, that Irwin family tradition would bring Steve untold grief, when outsiders misjudged his effort to educate his children and crucified him for it.
Chapter Thirteen
On the Road Again
When Steve and I brought Bindi home in July of 1998, we felt complete. Now we were a family, and this beautiful baby girl would add a whole new dimension to our adventures. Sui, for her part, was less than thrilled with the new addition to the household, a little crying person the size of a loaf of bread. Sui’s initial reaction reminded me of the reception I got from her when I first arrived.
“Listen, Sui,” Steve said, talking to her intently as if she were human. “You need to take care of my little Bindi. You need to help me protect her.”
From the expression on her face, it looked like she was thinking, All right, I’ll do it as a favor for you, Stevo, but I’m not that wild about it.
The dead of winter on the Sunshine Coast is not exactly Antarctica. There is never any snow. But the old Queenslander we lived in on the zoo grounds was drafty and hard to heat, with high ceilings. It also had a lot of steps leading up to the front and back doors. The combination of stairs and a new baby made me nervous. Even keeping Bindi warm was challenging, but we made do. We brought in space heaters and bundled her up constantly. It made me realize that the cozy little brick house that Bob first built for his family really was a much better design.
