Call of the wild child
A year after the dramatic death of Steve Irwin, ‘the Croc Hunter’, his unstoppable nine-year-old daughter, Bindi, says she wants to carry on his mission. Is she, as she claims, the luckiest child on the planet? Or is her life turning into a circus?Jane Cadzow
Bindi Irwin turned nine last month. Thousands of fans crammed into an auditorium to sing Happy Birthday. Cards arrived from around the world and her party was on the evening news. Granted an audience with the wunderkind, I ask tentatively if all this attention gets a bit overwhelming. Not at all, she says. “I love it!”
Bindi is the most famous child in Australia and, in her opinion, the luckiest kid on the planet. She has her own television series, her own magazine column and her own fashion label. She even has her own zoo, home to friends such as Blackie the black-headed python. What more could a girl want? Oh, yes. “I have the greatest, most perfect family!” she says. “My mum is the greatest thing that ever happened to me! Same as my dad and my brother! I love them all very much!”

It’s an Irwin thing, this exclamatory style of speaking. “Crikey!” her father, Steve, would holler as he tangled with one dangerous beast after another on his internationally popular wildlife documentary series, The Crocodile Hunter. Testy tigers, rampant rhinos, cranky crocs – Steve loved them all. Very much! And the deadlier the creature, the more convinced he seemed to be that what it needed was a good hug. “Look at this little bewdy!” he would say as he grasped the writhing coils of a venomous sea snake. “If he wanted to kill me, he could! Quite easily!”
In the end, it was a stingray that killed Irwin, stabbing him in the chest with its barbed tail at Batt Reef off the north Queensland coast last September. His memorial service included tributes from the prime minister, John Howard, and the Oscar-winner Russell Crowe.
But the most poised participant was Bindi, then aged eight, who strode confidently to centre stage and read a eulogy she had written herself, delivering it with such aplomb that her global audience was simultaneously entranced and disconcerted. As the US news broadcast doyenne Barbara Walters said, “No tears. You almost wondered, ‘Does she understand?’ ’’
The question hung in the air when Bindi filled in for her father as a presenter at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards in Sydney the following month. “It’s kind of sad he couldn’t be here,” she said, as if Steve had missed a plane or got stuck in traffic, “but it’s nice that I could do it!”

Nearly a year has passed since then. It’s lunch time at Australia Zoo, her family’s wildlife park an hour’s drive north of Brisbane, and Bindi, who is home-schooled, has just finished classes for the day. In a back room at the main arena, the Crocoseum, she climbs into a make-up chair and has a snack while a hairdresser curls her tresses in preparation for an afternoon of filming. Khaki-clad staff with crackling walkie-talkies wander in and out. “How’s it going, superstar?” asks one.

Bindi has intelligent brown eyes and a sweet, piping voice. Though physically small, she is somehow larger than life, with the animated expression and extravagant gestures of an actor playing to the gallery. “Thank you! Thank you very much!” she cries, when I congratulate her on Bindi the Jungle Girl, the TV series showing in Australia and in the US. Like everyone else, I am struck by her self-assurance and sunny disposition. “Most times, kids can be annoying,” says John Stainton, the Irwins’ longtime manager and producer. “Tantrums. But Bindi is so even-tempered – she doesn’t get upset.”
Her father wore his heart on his sleeve. On YouTube, there is a clip of Steve in paroxysms of grief over the death of one of the crocodiles in the zoo. “This is a really special friend of mine,” he says, gesturing at an inert body on a muddy bank. “Her name is Mary and when I caught her she was over 100 years of age. She’s one of the most beautiful animals I’ve ever seen in my entire life and I love her like I love my wife. I just love Mary so much!” Then he collapses in shuddering sobs, clasping the corpse in a heartbroken embrace.
Bindi – named after another favourite croc – is altogether more sanguine. “Sometimes, when you lose somebody, you get closer to somebody else,” she tells me. “Like, I was really close to my dad, and now that he’s passed away, I’m really close to my mum. We’re best friends now!”
Terri Irwin, 43, who hails from Oregon, is a warm, outgoing blonde with a wardrobe of well-cut safari clothes. On TV, she was the straight woman to Steve’s permanently agog adventurer, but in person she is pretty exuberant herself. “She is the greatest, funniest… She’s perfect!” Bindi says.
Bindi was two weeks old when she took her first international flight – to the US, where Steve romped with Texan rattlesnakes and attempted to befriend Californian tarantulas. “Bindi seemed intrigued by the giant spiders, trying hard to focus on them when they strolled past,” Terri wrote in her half of the memoir The Crocodile Hunter (the other half was written by Steve). From then on, the little girl was often on the road with the Irwins and their film crew as they scoured the globe for scary animals in photogenic settings. Dressed in teensy khaki shirts and shorts, Bindi made cameo appearances with her parents and soon was being invited onto US talk shows. Aged three, she toddled onto the set of Oprah draped in a python.

No wonder she didn’t fit in at nursery school. How many tots had bathed in the applause of a studio audience or knew a komodo dragon when they saw one? “She spent a year of not being happy,” says Terri, who subsequently engaged a private tutor. Bindi is very fond of Miss Emma, as she calls her, and feels fortunate to have her to herself. “With 28 kids in a class, you don’t learn as much,” she says.
The Irwins maintain a multi-million-dollar canal-front house at nearby Minyama, on the Sunshine Coast, but spend most of their time in the modest brick bungalow in the zoo grounds originally occupied by Steve’s parents. Living there is a privilege, from Bindi’s point of view: “It’s amazing to wake up and you’ve got muffled sounds of, like, elephants trumpeting and crocodiles snapping and tigers growling.”
Even so, isn’t all this a bit isolating? The whole nation takes an interest in Bindi’s upbringing, and various pundits have expressed concern that so many of her buddies have fur or scales and names like Bimbo, Prickle and Jub Jub. But Bindi insists she is absolutely fine. “I just love this life so much!” she says. “I couldn’t stand it if I was in an apartment with a goldfish!”
Terri says both Bindi and her three-year-old son, Robert – known on both sides of the Pacific as Baby Bob – have plenty of opportunities to mix with other children. “I wouldn’t say Bindi has lots of friends. She has several friends,” says Terri, pointing out that her daughter appreciates the company of adults. When filming overseas, she will often ask: “May I phone Miss Emma?”

Today, her teacher appears to be doubling as her personal assistant. As Bindi, Terri and a sizable entourage move through the zoo towards the elephant enclosure, Miss Emma holds a pair of neatly ironed, Bindi-sized khaki trousers in one arm and a deluxe case containing Candy, Bindi’s pet rat, in the other. We pause at the echidna pen, where Bindi presses herself against the fence. “That’s Fatso, just there. He’s my favourite!” she says. “Hello, Fatso! Hello!”

Zoo patrons nudge each other and whisper, “It’s her.” A girl of four or five races towards her, waving and calling her name. Bindi waves back. She tells me she doesn’t mind at all being approached by strangers. “I think it’s really, really comforting that people can say, ‘Oh, I loved your show’ and ‘You’re doing a great job. We love everything you’re doing.’”

After all, an entertainer is nowhere without her fan-base. “I know one thing, which is, when people stop asking, ‘Could we please have your photo and autograph?’, it’s all over.”
Bindi can sound much older than her years. “Your mind can be your worst enemy or your best friend,” she says at one point. Startled, I ask what she means. “You can be all sad and never be happy,” she explains, “like, ‘My life is terrible.’ Or you could say, like, ‘Oh, my life is great! I have the best mum, the greatest brother, I know my dad is still with us, I have a filming career that’s absolutely perfect and I can teach people about wildlife.’ You’ve got to look on the bright side!”
Bindi often speaks of Steve in the present tense, and anyone who has visited the zoo lately will understand why. From the moment you turn off the Bruce Highway onto Steve Irwin Way and join the stream of family sedans and tourist coaches heading for the entrance, it’s as if that whole stingray business was just a bad dream.
On roadside billboards and the sides of buses, the Crocodile Hunter grins reassuringly. Inside the gates, he hams it up on the Crocoseum movie screen and giant wallposters. Posing with Terri and the kids, leaping Bruce Lee-like into the air – he’s everywhere, looking as fit as a flea and as high-spirited as ever.

In the zoo shops, his image is emblazoned on a bewildering array of merchandise – from surfboards, calendars, oven mitts, keyrings, snow domes and board games to Talking Steve dolls and action-figure play sets with names such as Snappin’ Croc Steve and Scuba Diving Steve with Tiger Shark. Like Bindi, he has his own clothing range. His is called Steve Lives.

To add to the confusion, Bindi’s father co-stars with her in Jungle Girl, helping her introduce young viewers to the wonders of the animal kingdom while impressing on them the importance of protecting endangered species. According to John Stainton, seven episodes of the 26-part series were in the can before the accident at Batt Reef. Stainton has produced and directed all the Irwins’ TV programmes as well as their one feature film, The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course. With hundreds of hours of footage of Steve at his disposal, he was able to stitch together the remaining Jungle Girl episodes by deftly interspersing old clips with new ones. Steve gambols with gorillas. Bindi shows us round her tree house (“Up here is Corny the corn snake! We sleep together!”). Steve swims with sharks. Bindi sings and dances with her back-up group, the Crocmen.

The formula doesn’t appeal to everyone. Under the headline “A snake around her neck and a tragedy in her past”, The New York Times television reviewer Ginia Bellafante said Jungle Girl gave her the creeps, and not only because of the return-from-the-grave factor. It was Bindi herself, “the Shirley Temple of the wildlife conservation movement”, who unsettled Bellafante. “Miss Irwin seems to be affecting childhood rather than experiencing it,” she said.

Most of the notices have been good, though, and Bindi says she has relished every minute of filming. Terri isn’t surprised: “Every time Bindi does a good job, there’s a whole crew of people applauding and saying, ‘Good job, Bindi!’” It isn’t as if her daughter needs encouragement to flick the switch to vaudeville. “We’ll be at a playground and she’ll start performing,” says Terri. “Parents of children at the playground will gather round and she’ll just perform for them. Make up songs and stories and dances.” It happened in London late last year: “Here we are in Hyde Park with Bindi performing for passers-by.”

It has been a busy year for Bindi. Apart from launching her television show, she has hosted the TV special My Daddy the Croc Hunter, presented a series on the Animal Planet channel with Terri, released an exercise DVD, Bindi Kidfitness, started a column in The Australian Women’s Weekly, and strutted her stuff at a couple of all-Australian concerts in the US. At the zoo, Bindi’s face is on the cover of Crikey! magazine, and Bindi dolls have appeared on the shelves, joining Bindi watches, Bindi drink bottles and Bindi’s Friends cuddly toys. The Bindi Wear junior fashion range (jungle print for the under-12s) jostles for space with Bindi T-shirts, one of which has a picture on it of Bindi balancing a green iguana on her head. The caption is “I Want to be Just Like My Dad”.

Actually, Bindi wants to do more than just emulate her father. “I want to try and be him!” she told the US talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres. And she thought perhaps she had succeeded.

“I feel like I am him! All over!” This sort of thing seems to run in the family. Steve often said he wanted to be his father, Bob Irwin, a Melbourne plumber and snake fancier who in 1970 bought two hectares of southeast Queensland bushland and opened the Beerwah Reptile Park, humble forerunner of the present zoo.

It may seem to some that Steve’s greatest achievement was making crocodile-wrestling both thrilling and hilarious, but it is clear from reading his book that he saw himself as a modern-day St Francis, having inherited an almost mystical ability to communicate with wildlife, along with a special responsibility to care for creatures great and small. “I have a gift,” he would say. “God put me on this planet with a mission.”

Before Bindi was out of nappies, he and Terri were convinced that she too had these powers. “Her intuition is incredible,” Terri wrote in the memoir. “She will often worry about an animal before Steve and I discover that it’s sick or injured. This uncanny connection reminds me of the abilities Steve has with wildlife, a strange sixth sense that we refer to as ‘the force’.”

To Terri, it was no surprise that Bindi had an instant rapport with the Dalai Lama when he visited the zoo recently. “He would lean in to her and they would touch foreheads,” Terri tells me. “She would talk to him about wildlife. She was very casual, as if she were meeting an old friend.”

Australia Zoo is more than 15 times its original size, employing 550 staff and attracting close to a million visitors a year. This thriving enterprise is the centre of the booming business that is Irwin Inc, reminiscent of the headquarters of a quasi-religious cult. All those uniformed attendants radiating a sense of higher purpose. The constant exhortations to protect animals and save the planet. The deification of the fallen leader. The anointing of Bindi as his successor.

The Croc Hunter’s daughter may get a kick out of showbiz, but she says her real goal is to spread “the message” and carry on Steve’s work. “We’re not actors or anything like that,” she says earnestly. “We’re teachers! We teach people about conservation.” A pause. “I think I’d rather be known as a conservationist than a supermodel or anything like that.”

At the US Nickelodeon awards, Bindi presented the award for best male singer to the teen idol Justin Timberlake. “This young lady will change the world,” Timberlake said.

For the moment, though, she is nibbling crackers and dangling her short legs from a canvas chair as she waits for the afternoon shoot to begin. John Stainton sits on one side of her. Miss Emma stands on the other, a jacket at the ready in case her young charge gets cold. People mill about with lights, cameras and clipboards. A make-up artist dashes forward with a brush and gently dusts Bindi’s cheeks. At last everyone is ready. “Let’s go, kiddo!” someone says. She’s on.

One of the Crocmen, Paul Guerin, vividly remembers arriving with Bindi at a glittering party in Los Angeles to promote Australian tourism. When their car pulled up, she asked him and the other three members of her group if they had walked on a red carpet before. “It’s pretty full-on,” she warned. And it was. Photographers jostled. Cameras flashed. Microphones were shoved in their faces. As planned, the Crocmen lifted Bindi to their shoulders and carried her through the throng, listening all the while to her directions: “Okay, turn to the left. All right, now smile slowly, turn to the right…” Guerin talks about Bindi with affectionate incredulity. “She’s definitely not your average nine-year-old,” he says. “Nine, possibly going on 29.”

If Bindi is a grown-up sort of kid, her father was the opposite, an oddly childlike adult. “Steve couldn’t believe himself sometimes,” Stainton once said. “There’d be times when he was doing a voice-over and a scene would completely take his attention. He couldn’t take his eyes off the screen, watching himself. Then he’d look at me and say, ‘John, look at what that guy just did!’ He was talking in the third person about himself. It was really weird.”

Stainton is credited with transforming Irwin from backwoods bumpkin to international celebrity. The way the film-maker tells it, the eureka moment came in 1990, when he visited the family reptile park while scouting locations for a beer commercial. Stainton had met Steve previously but hadn’t realised until he saw him in his natural habitat quite how unusual and compulsively watchable he was. “All my radar went up and I thought, ‘God, this guy’s so good.’ That was the beginning of the partnership.”

Terri entered the picture the following year, when she called in at the park during a holiday in Australia and struck up a conversation with Steve. They fell in love and spent their 1992 honeymoon making the first of their documentaries. Terri had always had an entrepreneurial streak: by the time she was 20, she was in charge of her family’s highway-management business in the US. When she locked eyes with the future Crocodile Hunter, she saw untapped potential. “Steve and I are a really great combination,” she was quoted as saying. “He’s got great instincts for animals and I’m very good at promotion.” Terri understood that Irwin’s appeal lay in his apparent naivety. “John’s genius,” she says now, “was making sure that Steve never changed – didn’t put on airs or try to be something he wasn’t.”

Over time, The Crocodile Hunter became a mainstay of the rapidly expanding Discovery cable network. By 2003, Irwin was the biggest name among guests at a barbecue hosted by John Howard for the visiting US president, George W Bush. The Irwins’ programmes – including endlessly replayed spin-offs such as Croc Files, The Crocodile Hunter Diaries and New Breed Vets – are seen by as many as 300m people in more than 150 countries.

Though Stainton was devastated by Steve’s death, he proved to be nothing if not adaptable. Within hours of the Croc Hunter’s demise, his mentor was looking to the future, telling journalists through his tears that Steve’s daughter would be the next big thing. A week later, he was confident Bindi was bound for megastardom: “I said to Steve a couple of months ago that she would eclipse him, and he said he’d love that.”

Before we knew it, Terri and Bindi were beaming bravely from the Christmas cover of Women’s Weekly. Then they were barnstorming across the US promoting Jungle Girl. Bindi was a guest on talk shows and became the first child to address Washington’s Press Club, but Stainton says the trip was not too arduous. “She does a few interviews in the morning, and in the afternoon we do special things. We spent a whole afternoon in one of those dolls’ shops. Then we went and spent an afternoon horse-riding. We made it a lot of fun.”

Stainton and Terri both make the point that it was Bindi who wanted to get back to filming shortly after her father’s death. “It would have been cruel to stop her,” says Stainton, and the Melbourne child psychologist Andrew Fuller agrees. “There was a lot of tut-tutting going on,” as Fuller recalls, but, in his opinion, “the worst thing you could do to somebody like that in a time of grief would be to change the routine for them”.

Those who know Bindi best say she is never more comfortable than in front of a camera. Remember The Truman Show, the Jim Carrey movie about a man whose entire life is a reality-TV show? “Bindi is Truman!” Terri says cheerfully. “She was born on television.”

That’s right: Stainton and a cameraman were in the delivery suite and incorporated the happy event into an episode of The Crocodile Hunter. “Look at this little bewdy!” Steve is said to have shouted as his daughter slithered into his waiting arms. Stainton, who has no children of his own, felt that the film left room for improvement. “Bindi’s birth was our first attempt,” he says. “We got the chance to go back and shoot Robert’s birth and we were much better at it.”

A month after that birth, in 2004, Irwin caused outrage when he sought to amuse the crowd at Australia Zoo by dangling a piece of meat in front of a crocodile with one hand while clutching his infant son in the other. He hotly denied putting Baby Bob at risk.

Five years ago, the Australian magazine Business Review Weekly estimated the combined annual income of the Irwins and Stainton at A$16.3m (£6.7m) . But Bindi has not been raised as an heiress. “It’d be easy for her to develop an ‘I don’t need to work, I’ll do whatever the hell I want’ mind-set, thinking that life’s only about fun,” said Steve, shortly before his death. “That just ain’t true. Bindi has to earn her own money. She has to earn respect.”

Besides, the Irwins have always ploughed a lot of their cash back into the zoo, funding a large on-site animal hospital as well as wildlife breeding and protection programmes. They have paid millions to acquire the surrounding properties, giving themselves 600 hectares in which to expand, as well as buying 34,000 hectares across the country. (In addition, the federal government has given A$6m, about £2.5m, to establish a 135,000-hectare Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve on Cape York Peninsula.) The family continues to support Wildlife Warriors Worldwide, the charity Steve and Terri founded.

Soon after Steve died, Terri asked a psychologist about Bindi’s evident equanimity. Was it normal? He told her that everyone deals with grief in different ways, and if Bindi had called on inner resources, good for her. Terri thinks her daughter was helped by having seen birth and death at the zoo from an early age. Also, Steve had often told them that, in his line of work, he couldn’t guarantee he would reach old age. “It didn’t make the kids feel morbid or sad,” Terri says. “If anything, it got their heads around it.”

Wes Mannion, the zoo’s director and a family friend, says Bindi has bad days like everyone else but on the whole has shown enormous resilience. “Kids are quite amazing,” he adds. “I’ve spent a lot of time in Africa and you’ll see kids who have gone through the worst hardship, yet they’re smiling and having fun. We tend to feel sorry for ourselves a lot, while kids get on with the job.”
The Melbourne child psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg would worry if he thought Bindi felt in any way obliged to follow in Steve’s footsteps. “Those are big shoes,” he says. “That’s an awful lot of pressure.” But to Joal Ryan, author of Former Child Stars: The Story of America’s Least Wanted, Bindi seems an exceptionally pleasant, well-adjusted person who enjoys doing the same things as her father. “There is no sense that she is a programmed robot or that she is doing this against her will,” she says.
For her part, Bindi has the serene air of one who has found her calling. “When I’m out there singing about animals,” she says, “I just feel like, ‘This is where I’m going to be! This is me!’ It’s really, really nice!”