Life after Steve Irwin
After the death of Australian naturalist Steve Irwin, his widow Terri was criticised for keeping her children in the spotlight. But she says that’s what Steve would have wantedLuke Leitch
Steve Irwin died nearly 14 months ago but not a day passes when his widow, Terri, and their children, Bindi and Robert, don’t see his face and hear his voice. “I watch a Steve show every morning with the kids. Every morning,” Terri says.
Even if the family chose to skip a viewing, the late Crocodile Hunter would still surround them, anyway. His family live in Australia Zoo, the wildlife park that Steve took over from his parents and which Terri, an American, now owns and runs.
Steve’s wide-eyed, open-mouthed, faux-shocked face is emblazoned on signs across the 70-acre property. The man in khaki and his family adorn plates, coasters, keyrings, clothes, pens and more in the zoo’s gift shop. “CRIKEY!” proclaims Steve on 30ft-high ads dotted along the route that leads from Brisbane airport towards the Sunshine Coast, through the Glass House Mountains and down Steve Irwin Way, the recently renamed road to the zoo. It is open to the public 365 days a year. And visitor figures are up.
Steve, the wildlife expert and television personality who died last year after being fatally pierced in the chest by a stingray barb, made his wife promise to keep the zoo going and carry on with their conservation work whatever happened.
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She is sticking to her promise – and then some. In the next few years she plans to enlarge the zoo from 70 acres to more than 500, and to raise staff levels from 550 to about 3,000. The Irwins own tens of thousands of acres in Australia and elsewhere, which they have left alone to provide wildlife habitats.Terri, 43, intends to take Australian citizenship, as “a great symbol of my determination to stay here, so everyone feels confident”.

Steve remains part of those plans. Although he is dead, it is his ruddy mystique – Crocodile Dundee with a conscience – that continues to attract the visitors. He made seven episodes of Bindi The Jungle Girl with his daughter just before his death, and footage of him features in episodes made since. Ocean’s Deadliest,the documentary on which he was working when he died, was finished and aired (prompting one US critic to say that it felt “disconcertingly like a snuff film”).

Now Terri has written Steve & Me, to be launched at the zoo on November 15 – Steve Irwin Day – which is also a fund-raising day for the Irwin’s Wildlife Warriors conservation charity.

After Steve died, says Terri, “I sat down with my team and said ‘continue as if he was still here, because everything Steve stood for is in the present tense’. We’re still fighting the same fight, working on the same projects.”

She still talks to him sometimes, in her head – runs things by him, imagines what he would do in a given situation. She prefers to be called Steve’s wife rather than Steve’s widow.

The visitors come to see the animals, of course, but what draws them to this particular zoo is Steve, his documentaries, the drama of his freak death and the family that survive him.

The children are not on site today. Bindi, 9, is home-schooled but at the moment is at art class. Robert, who turns 4 in December (a birthday to be celebrated publicly at the zoo) is at the beach with his mates.

As Terri and her assistants, who are helping with the Times photoshoot, walk through the zoo, families stop wildlife-watching to catch a glimpse of her instead. She is dressed in a khaki shirt, utilitarian jeans and boots. Parents hang back respectfully but the children rush to her and she is brilliant, kneeling down to talk to them. One little chap in a Crocodile Hunter khaki shirt has an ostentatious plaster on his knee, which elicits a solicitous inquiry. “Crocs Rule!” is her invariable parting salute.

As we head for the Crocoseum (the stadium where Steve did his crocodile shows and where Bindi read her eulogy at his memorial service, watched by 300 million worldwide), a trembling middle-aged woman asks to give Terri a kiss. The beach-blond security man in wraparound sunglasses straightens his back ever so slightly but Terri agrees. Her embracer trembles as they hug, and tells Terri that she is an inspiration.

Terri Raines was raised a in Eugene, Oregon. Her father is a policeman-turned-trucker-turned-entrepreneur, and Terri wanted to be an achiever just like him: at the age of 6 she squeezed blackberries to make juice and allowed other children to sell it for a percentage. At 8 she learnt to type, and at 12 she enrolled herself in business school over summer. She ended up in the family business – but she was obsessive about saving cougars, too, and it was this passion that led her to meet Steve.

Bindi has spent her life at the zoo or travelling the world and filming with her parents. Many people feel uneasy about Bindi’s kee-ness to be in front of the camera – to be like her dad. She wanted to shoot more episodes of her show almost immediately after Steve died and, after consulting a psychologist, Terri allowed her to.

The Queensland politician Bill Hefferman was among the critics. He told the newspaper The Australian: “Every child deserves their childhood . . . there’s a real danger that that kid is going to be exploited.” He added: “There’s a very strong suggestion that there’s this artificial environment being built around her for a commercial purpose.”

When, soon after Steve’s death, Bindi made presentations at an awards ceremony in place of her father, she seemed oddly glib about her loss, saying: “It’s kind of sad that he couldn’t be here, but it’s nice that I can be here to do it.” “She’s obviously a very poised, mature eight-year-old,” commented the child psychologist Alison Garton, “but some of these public statements are probably a bit extreme at this point in time.”

It was not the first time that the family had been accused of putting its children in harm’s way. In January 2004 Steve was castigated for holding Robert, then a baby, as he fed an enormous crocodile called Murray during one of his Crocoseum shows. “Bloody Idiot!”, one Australian headline concluded. But Steve – who was given a python for his sixth birthday and started handling crocs when he was 9 – insisted that Robert had never been in danger: he had done the same thing with Bindi and was determined that his children, like him, would become “croc-savvy”. He did apologise for frightening people, though.

Bindi does normal nine-year-old things, Terri says. She goes horse-riding with her best friend Rosie and likes to rollerblade with Candy, her pet rat – but Terri accepts that critics will focus on the atypical aspects of her upbringing: the fame and perceived danger: “Parenting is like politics and religion – it’s something we all talk about. And whether it’s the stereotypical mother-in-law or someone else who is critical of what you’re doing, we all cop it. What is weird is doing it on a world stage.”

While Terri insists that her children are loved, and live what to them is a normal, wonderful life, she is also trying to prepare Bindi for future scrutiny.

“I told her it is OK to make mistakes,” she says. “Irrespective of whether you keep filming, you’re going to be in the limelight . . . and life doesn’t end if you make a mistake.”
Robert is doing some film work now, too, but Terri insists that it’s only because he wants to. She does egg him on but denies any suggestion of exploitation: “If Robert wants to hit Bindi on the head, I discourage that. But if he enjoys filming, I encourage it. If I see that he could do something better, I will get him over the hump – ‘you can do it; one more time’. That’s not standing there making him sew wallets in a basement.”
No, it’s not, but Robert is only 3: surely being cajoled to do something better for the camera must put him under some pressure.
Should Bindi, Robert or both of them choose to turn their backs on the family calling, Terri says that she will support them. She would be happy to downsize the zoo, she says, if that’s the way the cards fall. Her children will not be under pressure to generate more and more publicity and cash for the conservation work and the zoo.
“Bindi is lucky in that opportunities come in thick and fast – and they are turned down thick and fast,” says Terri. “She has Australia Zoo, she is a Wildlife Warrior with the charity, she has her Bindi Wear international clothing range and she has her filming. And that’s where it ends. You don’t see Bindi endorsing some fast-food restaurant or a new trendy anything, because she’s a kid. We’re not actors or musicians, we’re Wildlife Warriors.”
The list of Bindi’s commitments may still strike many people as all-consuming for a nine-year-old, however firmly her mother insists that her children’s happiness and safety come first. And Steve often spoke about Bindi following in his footsteps, even joking that he would retire when she had picked up his mantle.
For all the continuing reminders of his ebullient personality, though, Steve has gone and Terri is a grieving widow, smile gamely as she may for the benefit of the zoo’s visitors. It must be tough to be without him after 14 years together.

“He was hot in the cot and I miss him desperately,” she says, laughing with just her mouth. “In some ways I miss him more now, because it hits me that he’s not coming home.”

A woman Terri once met wrote her a “fabulous” letter after Steve’s death to say that when her husband, a policeman, died in the line of duty, she found that “after about three years your grief walks beside you” rather than filling almost every waking moment. This has helped Terri to contemplate a receding of the rawness: “I thought, thank you for that because it feels like I have a cinder-block where my heart was, and I ponder how long you feel that way.”
The Dalai Lama visited the zoo in June. “One of the things he said was how everything in life is going to happen. You cannot change some things,” says Terri. “No one could have anticipated what happened to Steve – it was just a bizarre accident. What I can change is how I react to it.”
Terri had been single for two years before she met Steve at the age of 27, so she was used to living alone. But the loneliness now is hard to bear. “He was a lucky find,” she says. “If you find a macho guy, he’s usually kind of an ass; and if you find a sensitive guy he’s usually kind of a wimp. To get someone who is sensitive, yet strong . . . Steve was that.”
They both said that it was love at first sight. Terri moved from America to be with Steve, who had yet to start his TV career; they married within months. For Terri it is far too early to contemplate ever being with another man, though she doesn’t rule out the possibility, one day. “You can’t ever say never,” she says. “I find it wonderful when people live, love and laugh again.”
Soon after Steve died, Terri consulted a psychologist. “He said ‘part of you has died’, she recalls. ‘You won’t get that back. You won’t get better; you’ll get different. You will get more moments of joy’. And I do. At first Robert’s grief was much more agonised than his sister’s, and Terri and others were concerned that Bindi seemed almost too successful at pushing away her grief. But Bindi does get sad sometimes, her mother says, and at those times she wants to be alone.
As for Terri: “When I come back from being away and I walk in the house by myself, that’s the hardest time,” she says. Yet she feels touched by destiny: “I’ve got purpose. I always used to think I was here to be with Steve. After losing him, it struck me that maybe I was responsible, instead, for the future of what Steve lived and died for.”