Terri Irwin
HER MOST EMOTIONAL INTERVIEW EVER
Grief is the natural consequence of love. No matter who we are, if we reach out and connect with another human being – husband, wife, mother, father, sister, brother – we will eventually feel grief’s devastating wound.
However, the depth of grief is sometimes felt in direct proportion to the intensity of love, death’s yin to life’s yang. Moreover, while it never truly heals, the pain eventually dissipates, yielding slowly to the life that remains.
If anyone knows the truth of that, it is Terri Irwin. Millions around the world mourned when her husband, Steve, died after being hit in the chest by a stingray’s barbed tail while filming on the Great Barrier Reef, on September 4, 2006.
Since then, Terri has navigated her way through an emotional labyrinth, trying to balance her own feelings with the welfare of her children, Bindi, now 18, and Robert, 12.
Terri has also worked to shoulder Steve’s environmental mantle as the champion of wildlife conservation in Australia, keeping his hopes and dreams alive both at Australia Zoo, the wildlife park the family operates at Beerwah on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, and in an ongoing crocodile research program that tags and releases crocs for scientific research.
While Terri’s grief over Steve’s death is no less today than it was 10 years ago, Terri has only recently managed to put some of the pain behind her, to finally reach a sense of equilibrium and acceptance that both motivates and encourages her in Steve’s name.
“It’s been 10 years,” says Terri, 52, “and it’s a journey that never really ends. No one is immune from grief. When Steve died, I called a psychologist, a friend of mine. I said, ‘What is this journey going to be like? Help me out here.’ He said, ‘You’ve lost part of your heart. You’re never going to get over it.’
“Everyone, if you love someone, will experience grief in their life. Some people think, get on with it. Some people try to move on.
“But that’s not what it’s like for everyone. I kept Steve’s clothes, his toothbrush and all his things in the cupboard, and kept them there for years. Saying that publicly, I know, has helped others deal with their grief journey, giving them permission to deal with it in their own way.
“As long as your grief is not hurting anyone else, it is all fine. If you’re leaving something familiar, whether it’s a photograph or a video or a piece of clothing or something you love about that person – I left Steve’s sarong on the end of our bed – then I don’t understand how that is bad or wrong.”
Terri says she was finally able to find a way forward about two years ago and it came almost imperceptibly. Recognising that with Robert and Bindi both growing up and growing older, the three of them needed more space, she decided to renovate their three-bedroom home, the same house Steve grew up in near Australia Zoo.
“We were in a house with one bathroom and as Bindi became a teenager, I thought it might be nice not to share a bathroom,” says Terri. “Of course, you have to move everything out when you do that. When it came to packing Steve’s stuff, I thought it might be difficult, but when it actually came to putting it away, then I was fine with it. It was years down the track, but I was fine with it.”
Steve’s things are now neatly packed away back in the Irwin house, but his office is almost exactly as he left it. Above his desk is the sign that boldly declared him as the original wildlife warrior. In a filing cabinet, all of his photographic negatives, taken around the world, of animals and birds in their myriad forms, photography being one of Steve’s many life-long passions.
That is not to say Terri doesn’t have her moments. She does, but she no longer feels self-conscious about it when it happens. “I don’t feel like a bad person when I become emotional over something that it doesn’t make sense to be emotional about,” she says.
“We’ll release a croc and suddenly I’m sad. Or I am giving a talk about science and I’ll cry in the
I kept Steve’s clothes, his toothbrush and all his things.”
middle of my lecture. Seriously. Grief is ridiculous. It sneaks up on you.”
Terri recalls an incident a couple of years after Steve’s death. She was in the midst of a makeover for The Weekly. After make-up, a hairdresser was about to trim her long hair, when suddenly Terri burst into tears.
“I’d been keeping my hair the same because that was the way that Steve liked it,” she recalls. “It was important to me keeping it like that in the months after Steve died. It wasn’t important to anyone else, but it was important to me. Was it hurting me? No. Was it hurting anyone else? No. So no big deal.
“But as I get older, I may embrace that makeover. Probably having long hair in my 80s is going to look weird, but for now I’m comfortable.”
Terri also recognises that, almost uniquely, her grief played out publicly. Steve’s popularity, his worldwide stardom as The Crocodile Hunter, meant Terri felt a responsibility to his fans, not just to speak to them, but also to carry on his legacy.
“It was very public, so on one hand, having your life laid out publicly can be very challenging, on the other, I don’t have to run into an old friend and have to explain what happened to Steve.
They already know,” she says. “So, it has all these nuances about it being so public, but Steve once said to me, ‘I don’t care if people remember me, as long as they remember my message’.”
Yet there was something messianic about Steve and his passion for wildlife. “Khaliah Ali, one of Muhammad Ali’s daughters, once said to me, ‘Steve was like the Gandhi of wildlife’. She said, ‘He tried to get everyone to love everything.’
Some people say, ‘I love koalas, but crocodiles are scary.’ Steve just said love everything – it’s all important, it’s all special, it’s all equal.
“That was a great message and it translates so well to so many people. If you love wildlife and wild places, then you are usually an open-minded, open-hearted, loving kind of person – and that is kind of what we are trying to do. We want to leave the world a little bit better than when we came into it. That’s our goal and our message.”
It was that message that attracted her to Steve in the first place. Terri was a young naturalist on an educational trip to Australia when she visited Australia Zoo in the early 1990s. Within months, they were married and while on their honeymoon, Steve whisked her off on a wild, crazy adventure to save crocodiles.
“The first time I jumped a croc was on our honeymoon. Steve and I got married in Oregon and then there was an opportunity to catch a couple of crocodiles that some poachers were after. The bad guys were going to shoot the crocs they didn’t like. So, we zoomed back to Australia.
“We filmed catching a couple of crocs and the male ended up getting shot and we found it. Then the female we caught. She was about nine-and-a -half feet [three metres] long, so pretty big for a female. She was in a mesh trap and Steve said, ‘You jump on her and then I’ll get the net off.’ It was like I hadn’t heard him correctly.
“I flung myself on her head and, first of all, I was amazed at the strength. They are like a flexed muscle. They’re just powerful. Then, as I’m
The first time I jumped a croc was on our honeymoon.
leaning over her, she exhaled and her breath blew my fringe up, she exhaled so hard, and I remember thinking how interesting it was that her breath was odourless; it didn’t smell like fish or pig, it didn’t smell like anything.
“Then I remember thinking it was like being with a dinosaur. It stopped being scary and became a privilege really quickly. It was just amazing.”
Terri continues that fascination even today, with annual trips to the Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve on the Cape York Peninsula, 135,000 hectares of pristine wilderness. There, along with scientists from The University of Queensland’s Franklin Eco-laboratory, the team catches and tags wild crocodiles to map their mating, travel and habitats.
“Steve started all that and we do it because we need to understand more of what our crocodiles represent as apex predators,” says Terri. “If we understand them, then we should be able to avoid them and perhaps reduce the number of deaths. That’s an important outcome.”
It was that sense of awe, understanding and passion that held Steve to Terri. “I think if I hadn’t met Steve, I probably would never have married because I wasn’t looking for love when I met him,” she says. “I think that what we had was incredible.”
Terri says that gossipmongers have linked her with 16 different men over the years but the fact is she has never even been on a date since Steve’s death. That’s not out of some misplaced devotion to Steve.
“While I haven’t been on a single date since Steve died – and I don’t have any intention to – even so I’m not burning some crazy candle for Steve,” she says. “I miss him and I love him, and we had this great relationship.
“It doesn’t mean it’s wrong if you are married more than once through loss, whether it’s death or divorce. It’s fine to love again, but I am loving my kids and loving my life, and not looking. I would never say never.
But I am not looking.”
In that, Steve is still very much all around Terri,
Bindi and Robert. His vision dominates every aspect of Australia Zoo, from the crocodile enclosures to the vast animal hospital that treats as many as 100,000 animals a year.
Yet, says Terri, Australia Zoo isn’t a shrine. “It’s honouring his message, yes, his legacy and what he was trying to achieve,” she says. “If I can pick up where he left off and potentially my kids pick up where I leave off, that’s really special. It doesn’t mean my kids have to do this, but if they want to – and at this point they love it – then that’s okay. For now, they both intend to continue in conservation and that’s awesome, to see the beat go on.”
Steve’s beat definitely pounds in Robert’s heart. At just 12, Robert is already an accomplished photographer, specialising in wildlife, of course. One of his recent images – a beautiful shot of a crocodile’s big teeth and smile – will feature in the Australian Geographic
Nature Photographer Of The Year exhibition at both the South Australian Museum and the Australian Museum from August 19 to October 9.
“Robert is so passionate about photography,” says Terri. “What is really bizarre is that when you question whether personality is nurture or nature, there’s so much about Robert that’s like Steve, things he couldn’t have remembered. Robert was two when Steve died. Yet Steve was into dinosaurs and photography. If you go into Steve’s office, there are albums and albums of slides he took. Robert loves it and he has a good eye. He’s the next Crocodile Hunter because he’s hunting wildlife with a camera lens.”
That’s not the only similarity, says Terri. “Steve used to sign his name with a dot at the end,” she says. “Not like punctuation at the end, but mid-way through. Robert uses the same dot. So many things he does are just like Steve – the way he walks, the way he talks, the way he stands. It’s strange, but really lovely.”
If I hadn’t met Steve, I probably would never have married.