I love it when people say Dad got them into wildlife
Bindi Irwin tells Guy Kelly she’s continuing her late father Steve’s zoological legacy – and shows his same optimistic spirit
Idon’t know what the collective noun for a group of Irwins is – a “Crikey!”, probably – but I’ve found a smattering of them captive in a London hotel room, more than 9,000 miles from their natural habitat. In spite of the distance, they remain entirely bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, like sunshine swathed in khaki, bouncing to their feet and rapidly extending handshakes.
“Hi! I’m Bindi!” says a petite 20-year-old in a zookeeper’s shirt on which her name is stitched. Beside her, she introduces her equally polite and chipper boyfriend, a burly American called Chandler. Her mother, Terri, is in an adjoining room. And then there’s Robert.
“Grrrrreat to meet you, buddy!” Robert is in shorts and hiking boots, and despite being just 14, already has a grip that could restrain an angry crocodile. Which he does, actually, quite often.
Standing next to one another, the siblings’ likeness to their father, Steve Irwin, is overwhelming. And they seem to have inherited his energy, too. “Everybody says that!” they chorus in unison.
It has been a little over 12 years since Steve, a zookeeper, conservationist and global television star, died when a stingray’s barb pierced his heart while filming in Batt Reef, north of the family’s home at Australia Zoo in Queensland.
His death at just 44 provoked an outpouring of grief some Australians compared to Princess Diana’s. Then-prime minister John Howard gave a long tribute in parliament, and at least 10 (swiftly condemned) revenge killings of stingrays around the country followed. Yet among the shock was also profound sympathy for the young family he left behind; Bindi was eight, Robert just two.
At his memorial service, held in the zoo’s Crocoseum and attended by 5,000 people (as well as being broadcast to an estimated 300 million around the world), Bindi bravely stood up and gave a speech. “I have the best Daddy in the whole world and I will miss him every day,” she read, as everybody else in the vicinity wept. “I don’t want Daddy’s passion to ever end – I want to help endangered wildlife just as he did.”
A little over a decade later, she’s making good on that promise. She’s also still indefatigably cheerful.
“Isn’t it a beautiful day?” she says, ushering me to a seat by the window as Robert and the rest of the gang settle to listen in. It isn’t a beautiful day at all, and the view from the window is of bricks and a wire escape, but she says it with such calm optimism that I’m almost convinced.
In the aftermath of her father’s death, she says, the overwhelming emotion was confusion.
“My Dad was the biggest and strongest person in my life, so I thought, ‘How could the strongest one be taken away?’” she remembers. “It was tempting to curl up in a corner and say, ‘I’m done’, but I felt Dad wouldn’t have wanted us to be sad.
“When you lose someone you love, it feels like you’ll never find joy again, but you do. You can. And I was so thankful to have a close-knit little family. We got even closer.”
It was when the postman came that she began to appreciate just how important he was to people. Thousands of letters arrived from all over the world, as well as gifts, flowers, toys, and holy books from just about every religion on Earth. “We just had this mountain of mail in our office, I asked Mum what it was, and she told me this was people telling us how Dad affected their lives and offering us support. I vividly remember saying, ‘Well, we have to thank them all’. That’s when I decided I needed to speak at his memorial service. Then I had a defining moment in my life, committing to carrying on his legacy.”
The Irwin family – including Chandler, 21, whom Bindi met in the US in 2014 – still live at Australia Zoo, which is owned and managed by Terri, and they can be found working there on most days, helping to muck out one of the 1,200 animals kept on the 750-acre site, which includes the largest wildlife hospital of its kind in the world. Bindi and Robert grew up there, and to keep them together, Terri schooled them using “distance education” – an Australian alternative to boarding schools in which the learning is done online at home, with testing at physical buildings. Today, they’re almost preposterously nice to each other, and swear they’ve never had a fight. “I was really involved in taking care of him. I’m probably the one who tells him to put his helmet on and to stop climbing trees, so he sometimes snaps at me to stop being such a mother. But really he’s a best friend now,” she says. Across the room, Robert – who is an award- winning photographer as well as a keen biologist – turns in his chair and grins. “Thank you, Bindi.”
The khaki has also been a mainstay. “It’s so much simpler! I feel bad for women who have to get up and choose their heels and dresses,” Bindi says. It makes them instantly recognisable outside of the zoo, especially on television. After her father died, one of the first things she asked her mother was when filming might start again, because to her, that was normal.
Her entire life has been on camera: her birth was shown on The Crocodile Hunter, as was Robert’s – as were most of their fondest family memories. Even Steve’s death was caught on tape. “The camera crew became like part of the family. The amazing thing is that if memories I have of Dad fade, I can ask them to go back and check the archive,” she says. “It’s like getting little pieces of time back with Dad.”
The family’s latest programme is Crikey! It’s the Irwins, a documentary series that follows the gang as they carry on Steve’s work both at the zoo and around the world with his Wildlife Warriors conservation charity. In addition to the programme, Bindi and Robert are becoming stars themselves. Bindi won the US show Dancing With The Stars in 2015 (donating all the prize money to the zoo) and has 1.8million Instagram followers, while Robert frequently appears with his creatures on talk shows, just as his father did. They hope they can use their platform to inspire other young people to care for the planet.
“What hangs in the balance is all of our wildlife and our wild space,” she says. Blue Planet II poking Britain into waking up to the damage of ocean plastic has pleased her (Sir David Attenborough was her father’s hero), but if there’s one issue she thinks we should be concerned by, it’s overpopulation. “If you look at
‘I was so thankful to have a closeknit family. We got even closer’
‘If memories fade, I check the archive – and get little pieces of time back with Dad’
anything from climate change to plastics, it all stems from our exploding population.
“It’s a very unpopular topic, but I think now is the time we need to discuss it instead of burying our heads in the sand. There’s no one solution, but family planning is something we need to let women have. As young people, we can help to give women the freedom to choose, and educate them. I think there’s hope on the horizon.”
One day, Bindi plans to take over the zoo and run the Irwin empire full time. “I feel like I’ve already lived 10 lives, but I’m excited to stay here and carry on expanding the zoo, and maybe I’ll have some children to pass it on to after that,” she says. There are broader ambitions, too: “I hope that in our lifetime we see more kindness and peace to effect change on our planet.”
She beams again.
“What I love is when people come from all over the world to say they watched my Dad, and got into wildlife because of him. Every time someone does that, it’s like he’s back for a moment. We just want to make him proud.”