SLEEPOVER IN THE ZOO
Australia Zoo’s new luxury lodges are the fulfilment of Steve and Terri Irwin’s dream for visitors to be able to stay on-site
If there is any surer sign that the legacy of Steve Irwin lives on, it’s to be found within the walls of Australia Zoo’s newest extension, the Crocodile Hunter Lodge. And on them. The Lodge, a new, luxury resort nestled beside the zoo’s 280ha grounds at Beerwah on the Sunshine Coast is, Terri Irwin says, “the continuation of a conversation Steve and I began many years ago”.
“Steve used to talk about how amazing it would be if people could stay here at the zoo, and experience a whole different side to it,” she says. “It was an ongoing conversation between us.” It was a conversation that was silenced with the death of the man the world knew as The Crocodile Hunter on September 4, 2006.
At just 44 years old, Steve Irwin was killed while filming on location at Queensland’s Batt Reef, stabbed in the chest by a stingray’s barb.
His death sparked a global outpouring of grief for the khaki-clad Aussie wildlife champion, his widow Terri, then 41, his children Bindi, then 8, and Robert, just two.
It could have been the heartbreaking end to a conservation and tourism success story which began when the zoo, founded by Steve’s parents Bob and Lyn, and then known as the Beerwah Reptile Park, first opened its doors in 1970.
Instead it goes on, with new chapters added each year, and Steve Irwin still very much a part of each page, and stage.
Like this one. Because dotted around the Lodge, its reception area, restaurant, 25m infinity pool, and eight, two-bedroom cabins, is recycled timber from a number of wooden grandstands from the zoo’s original Crocodile Environmental Park, built by Steve’s calloused hands.
On a walk around the Lodge’s grounds, planted with some 3000 native plants, and past a mob of wild kangaroos that have taken up residence on a grassy expanse outside the Lodge’s main entrance, Terri smiles.
“Steve would be so excited to see all this. There’s so much of him here. When we took down the grandstands because they had become structurally unsafe, we kept the wood and I’m so glad we did. Because Steve drove all the thousands of nails into that wood himself. We didn’t have a nail gun back then and I can still hear him say to me at night when he came home, “I’ve got ants in my hands”, just that tingly feeling from hammering all day. He couldn’t sleep from it, it kept him awake through the night, but he’d be up early the next day back at it, hammering those nails in. Visitors to the Lodge can see and touch the nails embedded in the wood, there’s a real, tangible connection with Steve here.”
There is also Steve Irwin himself, smiling from a gallery of photos in the reception area. These, too, are framed by the old grandstand timbers, capturing the Irwin family’s most treasured moments with their husband and father: Steve and Terri, looking young and in love somewhere in the Outback, red rock behind them; Steve and a tiny Bindi sitting in a dinghy, light shining from their headlamps; Steve showing an owl to a baby Robert; and right in the centre, the whole family in the last picture ever taken of them together. Terri walks past this photo wall several times a day.
It doesn’t make her sad, she says, “it just makes me grateful for every single day we did have”.
It also makes her all the more determined to keep her husband’s legacy going, just as she has done since the day she lost him. It was, for example, the profits from her 2008 book My Steve that bought the parcel of land that the Lodge now stands on. It has taken, she notes wryly, “quite a while” to build it.
“When Steve and I used to talk about how staying at the zoo might look, we would look at how other zoological facilities around the world did it, and then think about how we would do it in our own way, and how, like everything Steve did, it would contribute to conservation.
“But after Steve died, for us as a family it was just survival mode, and then of course, the global financial crisis hit, and the million other things you have to work through in a business when you’ve lost the main part of that business. Because Steve wasn’t just an owner, he was the zoo’s major financial supporter. All the money from filming his television series went back into the business and back into conservation projects, so when he died the question was, ‘How are we going to keep going?’”
The answer for the Irwins was a simple one; they would keep going by keeping going. By doing what they had always done, working at the zoo, filming television series and specials, and following the 10-year expansion plan Steve had left behind, a blueprint he and Terri had compiled together just four months before his death.
Its boxes have been progressively ticked off – an African section in the zoo, a Wildlife Hospital, managing a 135,000ha national wildlife reserve in Cape York and, now, the realisation of the accommodation dream the couple first imagined all those years ago.
“I’ve got to say the Lodge looks very different from some of the ideas we had around staying at the zoo 20 years ago,” Terri says, then adds, “But the whole world looks very different from what it did 20 years ago, doesn’t it?”
Covid-19 has profoundly changed the way we live our lives, the way we work and interact, and the Irwin family is no different.
“The first manifestation of this project years ago was a campground, because we figured Australians love to camp, they’ll throw up a tent anywhere, then our international tourism began to really pick up, and we did lots of research about what people wanted, and it became clear they wanted a real bush experience, but a comfortable one. So we started planning for that experience before Covid; we had already actually spent seven figures ourselves on infrastructure, things like power and water, that was probably around 2017.”
Planning continued until the global
Steve would be so excited to see all this. There’s so much of him here. He drove the thousands of nails into that wood himself
pandemic brought businesses to a standstill, including at the zoo where visitor numbers plummeted and its gates were closed for 78 days. “We had to keep paying all the bills, feeding all the animals, and trying to keep on as many staff as we could, so for a long time there we were like everyone else just focusing on how to keep going.” But as the world started to tentatively emerge from lockdown, and Queensland began not so tentatively bidding for the Olympics, the project was once again kickstarted.
The Irwins had secured some funding from the state government for the expansion but, like all grants, it had an expiry date.
“We decided we would start building as if Queensland had already secured the Olympics – we hadn’t – but I thought we were in with a pretty good chance. I also started building with some sense of optimism because I felt that we had really done the research. Luke Reavley (Australia Zoo’s general manager) was a huge driver behind this project. We met with tourism operators, domestic and international market representatives, and one person said to me something that really stuck. He said, ‘Here’s how the resort market works, Terri. Someone opens a resort and it fails, then the next guy reopens it and it fails, then the third guy opens it and it succeeds.’ So I said, ‘Teach me how to be the third guy.’” She grins. “Or girl.” And what she learnt, she says “is to start small. Don’t go at it like a bull at a gate. So we did that, and also, when we were thinking about what we have that no one else does in this market, we realised it was each other. So we’ve tried to bring some of that in, that sense of our own family here.”
From the “Crikey” emblazoned front doormat at the entrance to each cabin, to the individual wildlife photos (also framed with the grandstand timbers) taken by Robert Irwin, now 18, there is an intimate, family feel to this resort.
There’s no mistaking who’s behind this endeavour – it’s luxury, served with an Irwin twist. And Terri is optimistic that both overseas and domestic travel is returning; a little worse for wear, a little more wary but definitely on its way back.
“I do see travel optimism, but it is travel with a layer of caution. People expect certain standards now in terms of safety and hygiene. Between every guest in the cabin, we steam clean everything: the pillows, the sofa, behind the sofa. The pandemic has changed how we have to be, especially for those people who are immunocompromised. But yes, we are seeing more American visitors I’ve noticed, and students from Singapore, so we are planning to expand – slowly. We have made sure that one of our cabins is accessible for folk with disabilities, that’s something we spent a lot of time on planning so it is truly not just accessible, but really comfortable.
“The next four cabins will be one bedroom, with bigger bathrooms, and then we will have three bedroom, family and group style cabins.”
Not might. Not could. But will. Because Terri Irwin is that most tricky of combinations, a realist and an optimist. “You have to have that mindset that failure is not a component so you embrace the varying degrees of success,” she says. “So if something isn’t as successful as you thought, okay, well learn and apply that lesson for the future, so it’s not a failure at all.”
And some of that optimism springs from the most unlikely of sources: the loss of her beloved Steve, the man she met, fell in love with, and married in 1992, leaving behind her family and friends at home in Eugene, Oregon, to start a new life in a reptile park in a small town called Beerwah on the Sunshine Coast.
“When Steve died, I had to find a way to move forward, especially for Bindi and Robert, so we adopted a family mantra. It was a daily mantra, it was just between us and it was three things, three questions, our ritual every day. It was, ‘What was your favourite part of today? What are you most looking forward to tomorrow, and what good thing have you done today?’ Because if you don’t look outside your own tragedy bubble, you are not going to ever get past it.”
Looking at the Irwin children – now adults – today, it’s clear that while they love and miss their father, they have done just that.
Bindi Irwin is now 24, married to Chandler Powell, 25, and a mother to Grace Warrior, 18 months. Robert is 18, in a management position at the zoo, and increasingly renowned as a wildlife photographer. He has just published his first photography book, Robert Irwin’s Australia, with all proceeds going into the family’s various wildlife conservation projects.
“It’s so great to watch them,” Terri says. “Bindi is an amazing mother, she really takes it seriously, and Grace is so happy and healthy. I admire her, I tell her all the time she knocks my mothering out of the ballpark. And Robert with his photography, it’s his passion, but I think the thing I am most proud about with both of them is that they are really nice people.”
Perhaps for Robert in particular, being Steve Irwin’s son might have come with its own set of extra challenges, but Terri shakes her head.
“You know I never have worried about that or had the feeling he was living in someone’s shadow. He’s only ever been very proud of what his dad achieved. He has always been his own guy, he’s never had that old bull, young bull thing. He never watched his dad with two rattlesnakes, one in each hand and been like ‘Right, I have to do this with three snakes’, no, he has always been, ‘Whoah, what is he doing?’” Terri laughs, “So no, nothing to prove, just love.”
Which, by the way, could also be the Irwin family mantra. They’re exceptionally close, this family, partly because of the way their work life and home life has always been entwined, living at the zoo, filming and travelling together – “Steve and I were those weirdo parents who said nothing was going to change for us once we had kids, and it didn’t. Bindi and Robert came everywhere with us” – partly because they leant into each other when their husband and father died and the eyes of the world were on them, and partly because Terri Irwin is a big believer in the “show-up”.
“Parenting … it can be very worrying but I learnt that you don’t sweat the small stuff,” Terri says. “Everything changes, and nothing is more consistent in a kid’s life than the fact that things change. I’ve learnt that pretty much all you have to do is be there. Every time I think ‘I wish I had done that differently’ the kids will say ‘Mum, you were always there’, and I think even if your job takes you away, if you’re, for example, a pilot or in the military, it’s really meaningful to your kids if you find ways to be there, phone calls, letters, all those ways to communicate with your children that they are the most important part of your life.” She chuckles. “I’m a big note leaver. Probably drives them crazy. This year, Robert drove to the Croc Research station by himself. It’s a huge trip (about 2000km from Beerwah to Cairns then to Cape York) so I popped a note in his car that said ‘You’ve got this’.”
The trip Terri is referring to is the Irwin family’s annual August trek to the Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve in Cape York. The 135,000ha of land was bought in Steve Irwin’s name by the federal government in 2007, and managed by the Irwins. West of the Cape, it’s bordered by the mighty Wenlock and Ducie rivers, and is home to 40 species of conservation significance.
Alongside the University of Queensland, the family conducts biodiversity research on site, tracks 170 crocodiles in the Wenlock, studies the hundreds of species living there, and works year round to protect its plant and wildlife.
One of the hardest things she has ever done, Terri says, was to personally take on a six-year, $5m battle with a mining company who wanted to clear sections of its land to extract the valuable bauxite beneath.
“That was from 2007 to 2013, and it was pretty hard going,” she says, “but it was vital to protect it, you have to think about the future, you have to think about the world you are leaving to the next generation, and the one after that, and after that …”
Sometimes, Terri thinks about her and Steve’s own next generation, their family, like the zoo itself, expanding as time marches on.
With the zoo, the reserve, their many conservation projects around the world – from financially supporting the Black Mambas, an all-female, anti-poaching unit that patrols South Africa’s Balule Nature Reserve to providing the University of Queensland with Steve Irwin’s purposely-built marine research vessel, Croc One for their shark research projects – the Irwins have more than most on the family dinner plate. Terri laughs.
“My attorney always says to me, ‘You are the only family I know who talk about wills together.’ But we have to, we have to think about legacy, we have to think about the projects we support, how to make sure it’s ongoing and effective. This business should outlive all of us, it’s been here for 52 years and it will be here many, many more I hope. My mission is not building lodges, but using what we do to make the world a better place. I am sincerely trying to do that.”
She pauses, then smiles. “I want to be the person who plants the tree, even if I never sit
under its shade.”