Crikey we still miss him
MATTHEW CONDON AND so it has proved, a decade on from his death, that the most profound thing this man, this force of nature, left behind, has been the towering silence of his absence.
When Stephen Robert “Steve” Irwin, 44, the Crocodile Hunter, was killed by a stingray in the waters off Port Douglas in Queensland at about 11am on September 4, 2006, the suddenness, the shock of it, was surreal.
He was snorkelling in 2m of warm water at Batt Reef, 32 nautical miles offshore, filming a segment for a documentary for cable TV station Animal Planet, when he paddled above a large 2.5m bull ray.
At that moment the ray inexplicably struck at Irwin, piercing his heart with its poisonous tail barb. In an instant, he was gone. How could it be? The man and the manner of his passing didn’t compute. Irwin was larger than life, courageous, fearless, and made his name pressing his face, almost daily, against death. He had wrestled lethal crocodiles for our entertainment. Manhandled deadly snakes.
As a human being, he was infinitely bigger than the sum of his parts. His appetite for life was titanic, his enthusiasm for it infectious.
And the noise of him, that ceaseless wind tunnel of words, a rhapsodic jumble of Aussie slang, emotions and truisms and thoughts that came rapidfire from the brain and straight off the tongue, freshly-minted, unfiltered, and without a consideration for class or place.
Irwin seemed to have stepped straight out of another Australian era with his “strine”, with his strewths and his crikeys. He was the embodiment of what the nation’s so-called sophisticates thought we’d left well and truly behind.
Instead of saying “no”, he said “nuh”. Nothing became nothin’. It was a dialect that some Australians cringed at.
In a television interview with media personality Rove McManus in 2002, he was asked if he deliberately ramped up the “ockerisms” when he was in the United States.
After a slight pause, he answered: “Nuh.”
A feature story on Irwin published in The Australian the day after his death noted that the “cultural cringe was palpable when Irwin took to, and conquered, the world stage”. It added: “Steve Irwin’s fame always seemed a little hard for the urban elite to swallow.
“He came across like some crazed Aussie caricature dreamt up by central casting on a Hollywood backlot. A poor man’s Hoges. “Or Dame Edna in khaki.” He was a rough diamond with tousled hair, a character, a larrikin, yet he was adored by hundreds of millions of people around the world.
What did they see in him that we, as Australians, some- times cynically took for granted? How was it that we lagged so far behind in understanding and appreciating Irwin and his message?
Just peruse some of his Crocodile Hunter documentaries and the answer is immediately apparent.
Irwin had genuine passion for his work. He was perennially kinetic, a fly in a bottle, a blur of hand gestures and running and wrestling and squatting and climbing.
And often, when he explained something to his viewers, his eyes would widen in wonder, like a child, which, in the nicest of ways, he was.
He described himself to interviewer Andrew Denton as “the boy who never grew up”.
And you see it most touchingly in his worship of his own children, Bindi, now 18, and Bob, now almost 13.
In a world strangling itself with technology, Steve Irwin was the antithesis of our shining societal and technological progress.
He was raw and earthy. He wanted to take you outside in your plain and humble khakis and show you the wonder of the world. Not just take you outside, but take you out of your- self. Look how small we are compared to all this, he told us through his nature work.
He was, too, one of those rare people in history whose death lodged a small pin in our memory. I remember where I was when Steve Irwin died. His memory is secure. But it’s the life of him we lament. And the message, more important today than when he went away.
He was loud because he had to be. He was trying to tell us something, and we never listened hard enough.
Now it’s too quiet. And too late.