By Glenis Green

Irwin scientists find rare springs on proposed mine site

Terri Irwin has vowed to “fight to the end” to stop mining in the Cape York wilderness area dedicated last year to her late wildlife warrior husband Steve Irwin.

The Australia Zoo director said yesterday there could be no compromise which would allow mining within the 135,000ha Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve because even the removal of a small section of bauxite would affect the site’s delicate ecology.

Instead Ms Irwin said she was drawing up a world-class management plan for the reserve which would not only see the area preserved as a conservation property but also become a focus of international wildlife study, the arts and medical research.

Calling her fight Save Steve’s Place, Ms Irwin has begun an email campaign (sign the petition) to garner international support against mining plans.

The Federal Government bought the land for $6.3 million to be owned and managed by the Irwin family trust. But mining company Cape Alumina Pty Ltd has applied to remove more than 50 million tones of bauxite over 10 years from within 12,300ha of the reserve.

Ms Irwin said perched springs, a special type of underground water supply, had been discovered on the site.

"One wetland ecologist has spent his entire career searching for perched springs in the Cape and didn’t find any and we have found five so far (in the area) which has been earmarked for mining," she said.Both Cape Alumina and Australia Zoo have commissioned environmental impact studies.
Cape Alumina chief executive officer Paul Messenger said it was premature to take any action against his company’s mining proposals as its environmental study was not sue for completion until next year.

"There’s been a lot of emotion in the last day or so,” he said. It’s too early, too premature to comment when the EIS is not even prepared yet."

By Glenis Green

Irwin's widow fights company over plans for wildlife reserve

A Key crocodile research area dedicated to the memory of Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin is under threat from strip-mining.

The 135,000ha Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve on Queensland Cape York Peninsula was one of the last places visited by Irwin for his annual crocodile tagging expedition only weeks before he was fatally wounded by a stingray barb in September 2006.

It was bought for $6.3 million last year by the Federal Government to be owned and managed by the Irwin family trust. However, mining company Cape Alumina has lodged mining lease applications targeting more than 50 million tonnes of bauxite within 12,300ha of the reserve.

Terri Irwin, Australia Zoo principal and widow of the wildlife icon, said the reserve’s ecological value was irreplaceable and needed to be preserved in order to protect Australian habitat.

Ms Irwin said it was home to three important spring-fed wetlands that provided a critical water source to threatened, a permanent flow of water to the Wenlock river, and were home to rare and vulnerable plants and wildlife.

The proposed area for mining on the reserve contained the headwaters of irreplaceable waterways and unique bio-diversity which would not recover after mining was finished, she said.

The Wenlock River also supported a critical population of endangered spear-tooth sharks, sawfish, and the now-vulnerable estuarine crocodile.

“I am a realist and I understand that mining is an important industry,” she said.

“However, we have learned over the past 50 years of bauxite mining that it is critical to set aside the most environmentally sensitive areas such as Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve and not consider mining them.

“Responsible mining companies are already doing this as part of developing carbon credit programs,”

Cape Alumina chief executive officer Paul Messenger said yesterday that he agreed areas of sensitivity needed to be preserved and there were no plans to mine any wetland, only dry bauxite, plateaus covered by common vegetation which would be consistently  rehabilitated.

He said his company has started a full environment impact study of the area last year, which would not be completed until next year, taking half of former Bertiehaugh  Pastoral Station within the reserve area, plus and adjoining section of Aboriginal land.

Mr Messenger said the company would be conducting extensive consultation and held the view that the project could benefit all stakeholders, especially the Aboriginal community.

Bindi Irwin continued to carve out her own niche in the Australian entertainment industry last night, picking up the gong for the best new female talent at the Logie Awards in Melbourne.

The nine-year-old daughter of the late Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin won the award for her ABC show Bindi: The Jungle Girl, beating talent such as Home and Away’s Charlotte Best and Neighbour’s Adelaide Kane.

It was one of seven Logies taken home by the public broadcaster, which was beaten by the Seven Network, with eight gongs, at a glittering ceremony in Melbourne’s Crown Entertainment Complex.

With her teary-eyed mum Terri standing close by on stage, an obviously excited Bindi dedicated the Logie to her late father.

“ This is so exciting- I can’t believe it,” she said.
“I’d like to thank the ABC for helping me get the conservation message out.
“I’d definitely like to dedicate this to my mum and my dad and would also like to thank everybody out there who helped by watching Bindi: The Jungle Girl.”

And with special mention to her manager John Stainton “who helped me all the way through”, she gave a squeal that would have done any nine-year-old girl proud and skipped of stage to thunderous applause, with beaming mum Terri in tow…

By Vanesa Salvia

When a whale is sighted from the bow of a modern whaling boat, gunners will shoot it with an explosive harpoon. If the detonation doesn’t kill the whale, a second harpoon or high-caliber rifle may fire the lethal shot, after which a pulley system will haul the animal aboard ship. The carcass will be weighed and measured. If female, its ovaries will be examined to obtain reproductive status and history. A plug of wax will be taken from the ear to determine its age. The intestinal contents—mostly small fish and krill—will be emptied and examined. The whale, probably a minke but possibly a fin whale or even an endangered humpback, will be flensed of skin, its blubber measured then cut away and hewn into thick white slabs. The pink, oily meat will end up in Japanese markets as sushi, canned in whale stew, added to pet food or deep-fried for distribution by government funded school lunch programs. International Whaling Commission (IWC) regulations require that whales killed for research be utilized after the data is obtained, but conservationists take a long, hard look at modern-day scientific whaling and call it commercial fishing in disguise. Supporters vow not to lose Japan’s centuries-old tradition of whaling, while Japanese officials attest that they must cull whales—from the same populations, in the same waters, year after year—to accurately set quotas for their harvests the following year. This irony of killing whales to justify more killing is not lost on native Eugenean Terri Irwin, the widow of “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin. She has recently pledged her support of Oregon State University marine mammal biology professor Bruce Mate and his plan to study whales without killing them.

Eugenean Terri Irwin teams with OSU in support of non-lethal whale research

B y Vanesa Salvia

She expected condolence mail related to Steve’s previous filming in Antarctica with OSU researchers. “For some reason I just opened it, and Bruce wrote the most interesting story,” Terri remembers. While in Antarctica, some of Steve’s prepaid boat time had not been used, and Mate was offered use of the boat. “Bruce was tagging humpbacks using Steve’s boat,” says Terri, and in gratitude he named one of the humpbacks “Steve.” As Terri remembers, “He contacted me to say it was the darndest thing, because Steve the Whale left Antarctica faster than any whale they’d ever tracked. We had a good laugh about that!” Terri later met with Mate at Newport’s Hatfield Marine Science Center. There he presented Terri with a plaque showing where and when Steve the Whale was tagged. “I looked at the plaque and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’” she says. “They tagged Steve the Whale on February 22, Steve’s birthday. I told him, ‘I think we were meant to work together.’” Mate’s past work had included the monitoring of whales in shipping channels, and urging shipping companies to alter their movements to avoid hitting whales. “I was so impressed that Bruce was not just doing valuable research for the sake of research, but was accomplishing something tangible,” Terri says. “I told him I really wanted to get involved.”

The science of conservation

One year ago, Terri purchased a whale-watching company on Australia’s Sunshine Coast. “We take visitors out five months out of the year to see the humpbacks when they’re migrating, so I thought this research would be the next step,” she says. It would also be a way to honour Steve’s passion for protecting whales, which he hadn’t been able to see to fruition. “There’s a real lack of knowledge in the Southern Hemisphere with what’s going on with the whales,” Terri says. “I was astounded, the more I learned, to find that we really don’t know anything.” Whalers argue that information gleaned from necropsies is useful in predicting how whale populations are growing, which helps establish the number of whales available for harvest. But “there are other ways of getting reproductive intervals besides ovary harvest,” says Mate, who has been studying various species since 1973. Long-term photo identification is very effective at linking females with their calves, he says, and at providing information on exact ages of specific individuals and mortality rates. Back in 1986, the IWC enacted a moratorium on whaling under scientific permit. Since then, only Japan, Norway and Iceland have defied the ban, and in recent years Norway has ceased. Japan’s quota for 2007-08 allows it to take as many as 935 Antarctic minke whales, as well as 50 fin whales and 50 humpback whales … although conservationists celebrated a small victory recently when Japan announced it would delay the humpback take until at least June 2008. “Populations are a far ways from being recovered enough for quota-based harvests,” says Mate, and whaling fleets notoriously flout laws. In January, for instance, a Japanese whaling ship was spotted from the air in protected New Zealand waters. “I think we need this global approach to encourage Japan—that by stopping whaling they can set a precedent and be heroes,” Terri Irwin says. “With all due respect to Japan, if I am to assume that they are doing bona fide research, it’s exciting to know that we have the means to do the research without killing whales.”

A whale of a plan

While admittedly done with an eye toward halting scientific whaling, the intent of the research being performed by Mate’s team is to gain information. “We don’t know where blue whales calve,” says Terri. “We don’t know how many humpback whales are migrating, and we don’t know [population] numbers on a lot of the whales. So finding out information about the whales is of first and foremost importance.” Terri is helping to underwrite a two year, $1.5-million whale-research project by Mate and his team. “Hopefully our relationship will just go from there,” she says. While exact details are still being ironed out, the plan will likely involve two studies per year in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres on humpback whales and other endangered species. The research will use minimally invasive high-tech science to link foraging and breeding areas, which has not been done before for most southern and many northern whale populations. “This allows us to determine what breeding stock is being influenced when whales are taken in a specific feeding area, such as the area that was proposed for humpback harvest this year,” Mate says. “This is very basic biology related to these populations.” Mapping critical whale habitats identifies which countries need to help with recovery efforts and what other risks whales may face, such as ship strikes, fishing gear entanglements or mineral extraction issues. “Terri and Steve have both made a big difference in many wildlife conservation issues,” says Mate. “They have been effective personally and publicly as voices for conservation, so the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University will benefit not only from their funds, but also from folks who will take Terri’s commitment to MMI as a serious endorsement of what we are doing for whales.” Funding shortages are always barriers to conservation oriented work, and Mate hopes that more “like-minded” folks who care about whales will also help support MMI’s other important work in contributing to enlightened management decisions.

The effort continues

The Irwin family honours the memory and passion of their husband and father through ongoing conservation and protection efforts. Nine-year-old Bindi has filmed 26 episodes of a wildlife documentary called “Bindi the Jungle Girl”; the first seven episodes include Steve. “After we lost Steve, Bindi was still keen to continue filming,” Terri says. “It’s really uplifting because we’ve got footage of Steve throughout the show.” Bindi recently filmed a video for kids on eating healthy, and she has put her stamp on Bindi Wear, an international clothing line with messages like “Extinct Stinks.” Four-year-old Robert appears in Bindi’s show and is a wildlife wrangler in the making. “He catches everything now—there’s not a lizard that is safe!” says Terri. She says she travels everywhere with the kids, and her parents and siblings still live in Eugene. As a result, the Irwin’s enjoy the Oregon Coast with the senior Raineses, and Terri’s sisters and nephews, a couple of times each year. “My children are very lucky to go back and forth from Australia to Eugene,” Terri says. “There’s no place like home, and I really enjoy the place I grew up.” Terri recently allowed The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to rename one of its boats the Steve Irwin. Director Paul Watson reels in miles of fishing line, and has pledged to disrupt whaling operations. “Steve always saw Paul as a bit of a hero and definitely a wildlife warrior,” says Terri. “I admire Paul because he stays within the law, he doesn’t harm anyone. He’s simply someone out there saying, ‘This must be stopped.’ “I’m very proud to be a part of that, and I get a kick out of headlines reading ‘Steve Irwin stops Japanese whaling vessel!’” she adds. “That’s pretty cool.” Vanessa Salvia is a contributing editor of Eugene Magazine. She lives with her family in Lowell.

By Jane Gardner

Four years ago, an old avocado packing shed at Beerwah was converted in to a makeshift hospital for sick and injured wildlife with the blessing of passionate conservationist Steve Irwin.
Veterinarian Gail Gipp became the first member of staff.
Ms Gipp, who is now the general manager of the Australian Wildlife Hospital, had no idea then she was about to become the driving force behind the establishment of the world’s biggest wildlife hospital.
As it is, the little old shed has to cope under the pressure of 20 full-time staff and 80 volunteers who treat 6000 animals each year in trying conditions.
There is one small operating room which houses the tables, reception, equipment and an x-ray machine that when in use requires all staff to leave the building.
Upstairs, there are two even tinier rooms, one for reptiles another for the staff and intensive care patients and a bunk for the hospital manager Ms Gail Gipp to sleep.

Before his death, the greatest Wildlife Warrior of them all- Steve Irwin- recognised the need for a “you beaut” hospital by pitching in $1 million to build his dream.
In June, Steve’s dream will be realised, as the Wildlife Warriors move in to a facility next door, seven times the size of their current headquarters.
The $5 million “eco-facility” will be the largest wildlife hospital in the world.
Yesterday, half-a-dozen trades-men from Walten Constructions donated their time to help the great Steve Irwin’s dream come to fruition.
They helped install a $60,000 smart lighting system, called C-Bus, donated by Eaton Electrical Group and Clipsal.
The system automatically switches off the light when some one leaves the room.
It’s just one of the many fantastic environmentally friendly initiatives used in the construction of the facility.
Architect Andrew Webb, below right, took on the project 20months ago, with a mission to use building materials that would cause the least harm to the environment and smart design concepts that minimise power use.
“We considered where materials have come from, how they are best used in building and where they will end up ultimately when the building is demolished or changed,” he said.
“It’s probably six or seven times the size of the old building. “They’re not going to know themselves.“It’s really going to change Wildlife Warriors operations.“It’s really exciting for them and a wonderful project to be involved in”.

“When Gail first rang me she said they were currently in an avocado packing shed and I thought ‘well, maybe they want a slightly bigger shed’, but, the scale of this being the largest Wildlife Hospital in the world has been a fantastic challenge. Virtually all the hospital facilities, they do have ambulances that come in and public drop off, they cover quite a large area with these services.“It’s just amazing; we have our painters starting today so I’m very anxious to see the finishing touches come together. It has been a challenge.”
The new building is built out of hay and mudbrick and maximises natural lighting to save power and to make the animals feel more at home.
It has two operating theatres with ceiling to floor glass windows for student vets to watch operations.
There are two treatment rooms, separate intensive care units for mammals, birds and reptiles, a staff room, five toilets, a CAT scan room, an ambulance and public drop off area, a pharmacy, a nursery and a waiting room.
It also features a conference room that will be hired out to generate funds for the hospital and made available free of charge to companies who have donated time and materials to build the hospital.
“It’s overwhelming and it’s so exciting to see our dream materialise and also Steve and Terri’s dream,” she said.
“I hope all of Australia can be proud of what we’ve achieved.
We’ve had some absolutely amazing donations…we’re so lucky we have (medical) equipment other people dream about.”

Eco Facts
Eco features of the new 24-hour Australian Wildlife Hospital:

• Use of natural, low toxicity materials that are renewable or readily  recyclable.
• Straw Bale and rammed earth walls.
• No timber from rainforests or sensitive ecosystems.
• Daylighting wherever possible to reduce the need for electricity.
• Use of local products to limit greenhouse effects of transport.
• The building is faced to the north for sun shading in warm months and sun penetration in cooler months.

By Elisabeth Wynhausen

She’s the girl from Oregon who married the Croc Hunter. Now Terri Irwin is alone and managing a global brand – as well as her grief. She spoke to Elisabeth Wynhausen.
    The Bengal Tiger cub seems to be trying to bite her neck. The cute three-month-old has already left a nasty scratch on her arm. Now its whiskers are against her chin and its jaw is pressed against her throat. But the winning, wide-open smile never leaves Terri Irwin’s face.
    As people even in remote corners of the Earth are aware, Irwin’s husband, Steve, died in September last year after a stingray barb pierced his chest. Fourteen months later, Irwin has written a book about him that she says will show the world what he was like when the cameras weren’t rolling. Called My Steve in Australia and Steve and Me in the US, it hits bookshops in both countries this week.
The Americans wanted to subtitle it “Life with the Crocodile Hunter” or something like that. Terri Irwin tells The Weekend Australian Magazine she refused. “I said that’s not what I wrote about. I didn’t write about the guy you see on TV.”
    Some might find it difficult to imagine. There have been cameramen around their zoo, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, from the time Steve Irwin and his American bride cut short their honeymoon in 1992 to film with a croc, until the day of his death – an event recorded on a piece of film that has since been destroyed.
    But practically everything else has been on television. “In fact we watch Steve videos every morning. My kids and I find it comforting,” Irwin tells me. If you apologise for asking about her private life she will say: “There’s no private. I’ve given birth twice on international television.” Crikey.
    Founded as a small reptile park by Steve Irwin’s parents, Bob and Lyn, Australia Zoo, about an hour’s drive north of Brisbane, is known the world over. Millions have watched television series such as The Crocodile Hunter, Croc Files and Croc Diaries.
    “We had our first filming opportunity literally right after we got married in Oregon,” Irwin says. They had talked about it beforehand with television producer John Stainton. “John called and said, ‘There’s this problem croc and the zoo’s been calling, do you want to film it?’ ” That year the reptile park had four employees. Now there are 550.
    There’s a zoo employee with a video camera following Irwin around the day she poses for the magazine’s photographer, who finds himself trying to capture candid images of a woman whose image depends on a projection of “naturalness” calculated to morph into the legend she and Stainton built up around her husband. Dressed in the khakis that have become part of the brand, with her long, straight, blonde hair falling over her shoulders, Irwin, 43, keeps on smiling and mugging for the camera whether standing nose-to-trunk with a couple of Burmese elephants or being nuzzled by an adorable tiger cub about to sink its milk teeth into her tanned skin.
    She has been made-up beforehand. “The older I get, the longer it takes,” she jokes as she strides up, apologising for being late. Her make-up woman is there to effect on-the-spot repairs. It isn’t every day you see someone standing between two elephants having her nose powdered while she clowns around.
    It’s evident that Irwin is quick-witted and amusing, with a nice line in self-deprecating humour. But the graciously easygoing woman on display today is surrounded by employees anxiously making sure nothing goes wrong. The entourage assembled for the magazine’s photo-shoot includes her personal assistant, a personal trainer muscled up like the Michelin man, the zoo’s still photographer, the person holding the video camera, a team of marketing and media people and assorted teams of animal keepers. Forty minutes later, as she heads to the office for our formal interview, Irwin volunteers that when she was hurrying through Sunshine Coast Airport earlier that week with daughter Bindi she saw the guy she’s come to consider her personal paparazzo. She even knows his name: James. Irwin said something to him about being “papped” and James said: “You’re famous.” Stretching credulity a bit, Irwin is claiming she hadn’t really thought of herself as famous until that very moment. “I think of myself as the girl from Eugene, Oregon,” she says.
    This is the girl from Eugene, Oregon, whose expected arrival at the elephant enclosure is announced by staff members on walkie-talkies, while other staff on walkie-talkies check her daughter’s appointments. “Bin’s just finishing her morning tea.” “Copy that,” someone replies. “I’ll have her in the Green Room at 11.”
    Of course, Bindi has her own DVD, her own television show (Bindi the Jungle Girl, on the Discovery Kids network in the US and on the Australia’s ABC-TV) and her own line of children’s clothing and says cute, precocious things about animal conservation. Some wag has even produced a “Save Bindi” website.
    The eerily self-possessed nine-year old with her own team of publicists is nowhere to be seen on this day, as if the Irwins’ celebrity is carefully rationed out, but her mum has seated herself at the rustic table in the boardroom and is radiating both an earnest desire to be as helpful as possible and a warmth that appears genuine – not that you’d ever know. Irwin is a consummate professional you can’t help liking, even as you wonder if you’re being duchessed. Before you leave, you will be handed photographs of yourself stroking a tiger cub, with Irwin smilingly looking on, as if you, too, have become part of the zoo family.
    Irwin says she can talk underwater with a mullet in her mouth and proceeds to prove it when asked why she still thinks of herself as the girl from Eugene. “Growing up in Eugene and working in the family construction business and doing wildlife rehabilitation, I was really happy. I did everything I wanted to do,” she says. “I think I just am who I was, the little girl from Ferry Street. You know, I never thought poorly of myself. I never thought I was any better than anybody. So when I see celebrities who are so talented and beautiful and well-off, it’s not an association, you know.                                                                         ”She used to joke about their fame, once telling a reporter from her home-town paper, The Register-Guard, about the people who recognised her in the street. “And they all have a story. ‘I have a chameleon and his name is Jack …’” Now that all eyes really are on her, the last thing Irwin seems inclined to do is to parade as a celebrity – or even talk much about her present self. Her minders have vanished. There are only the two of us in the boardroom but Irwin’s side of the conversation could easily be shown on television. She doesn’t fidget or waggle her head. She doesn’t um or ah. But if you happen to ask if she likes performing in front of a camera, there’s a brief hesitation before she says: “You know it’s interesting because I came into it with Steve. I said to Steve: ‘You are so incredible and you’re doing all these incredible things and you’re hiding your light under a bushel.’
    ”Then the first film – the one with the problem croc – came up. “And Steve said: ‘This is great because you can run the zoo while I’m away filming.’ ” Irwin says she told him that she would prefer to go with him when he went on filming trips. She says she didn’t mind if she was onscreen or not but believed she needed to go along for the sake of their marriage.
    “I was looking back on this just the other day and I really thought about the influences in my life and how they were men and how interesting it was that dad always believed I could do anything I wanted. But Steve always believed I could do what I didn’t think I could do.
    “We go on this film trip and he’s like, ‘I’ll grab the boat, you grab the motor …’” Irwin goes through the motions, pretending to struggle to lift the motor while encouraging herself, “Well, he thinks I can do this.”

 LONG BEFORE SHE WAS showing her mettle by jumping on crocs and picking up carpet pythons, she had established herself in a man’s world, driving long-haul trucks when she was just 18. Born many years after her two older sisters she was essentially raised as an only child – and a tomboy. “Steve always called me Terri-boy Terri,” she says. “Not a lot of people know that.” She went to Eugene Christian School as her devout mother wished, and then to local high schools, going straight on to work in the family trucking business, Westates Flagman Inc, transporting construction equipment and escorting trucks with oversized loads.
       It was all she had ever wanted to do. She had even done a business course as a 12-year-old, she says. “At 20, I took the business over.” It meant learning management techniques that would stand her in good stead later if she and Irwin ever disagreed about anything. “It’s a great skill to tell a 60-somethingyear-old truck driver who’s been driving for 40 years what to do when you know you’re right and he’s wrong,” she says.
    Terri Raines, as she was then, was caring for injured animals long before she met Irwin because her father, Clarence, a former cop who sometimes worked as a long-haul trucker, brought home some of the injured animals he found by the side of the road. In due course his daughter adopted a cougar cub she called Malina, housing it out the back of the family home – where her parents still live – and taking it with her when she gave talks in schools. She had set up a small wildlife rehabilitation service called Cougar Country, which released animals back into the wild.   
    “She was very dedicated,” says Louise Schimmel, the director of Cascades Raptor Centre in Eugene, who knew her before she was married. “Terri and I were both deeply involved in wildlife rehabilitation.”
    She was always in good spirits, says Schimmel. “I remember the first time a small hawk latched on to her – she was even in good spirits about that.”
    Irwin believes in facing down her fears. “I used to have this recurring nightmare that I got hit by a truck,” she says. “I can see the truck coming at me and the grille coming at me and I wake up. Finally one night I dreamt it and I knew I was dreaming. You know what I did? I ran at the truck … I ran at the damn truck. The truck disappeared and I’ve never had that dream [again].”
    Her gritty resolve would come in handy after she married her “real-life action man”. Sometimes he’d decide to go bush on an hour’s notice. It would be up to action man’s missus to cancel everything and organise things at the zoo and pack. “And we’d be gone for three weeks. That was Steve.”
    She says she resolved to play a game where she would never say: I can’t do this. “The only time I said no was our last croc trip. He said, ‘Would you stay for a couple of days extra?’, and we’d been gone for over a month. I thought about it. I thought of everything I had lined up and I never answered him and I realised he’d walked off. I wondered why I didn’t say yes. I always said yes. It was really strange.
    “But we ended on the most perfect happy note. We had the best month of our life together.” The television footage soon after revealed how shattered Terri Irwin was by her husband’s death. The public saw a woman who looked as if she might be consumed by her grief. Instead she forced herself to write the book. She says she did so because of the amazing public reaction to Steve’s death. But that didn’t make it any easier.
    “No, it was not therapy and it didn’t make me feel better. It made me feel infinitely worse,” she says. Rather than working on the book at their home in the grounds of the zoo, Irwin lugged her manuscript with her to Oregon and from Oregon to New York City. “I couldn’t just sit down and do it. Because of all these commitments after losing Steve and not wanting to drop the ball. I was determined not to drop the ball.” She would be talking to politicians while in tears, she says. “I’m a determined woman.”
    Some of that strength comes from religion, she says. “I go to church. I read the kids the Bible. We discuss it. We have the monks and nuns from Tibet in regularly. But I just think, I don’t know, it’s like that when someone says, ‘No you can’t do that’ – then I’m definitely doing it.”
    She produced a manuscript three times longer than the publisher wanted. “I’ve got that for my kids. I’ve got 900 pages of life with dad. In that respect I’m really glad I did it.
    ”Robert was just two-and-a-half when his father died. “It has been harder for him than Bindi and I wouldn’t have expected that because he was so young,” she says. “I would have thought a lot of it went over his head. He very much remembers and talks about Steve.”
    When the boy was a month old, in January 2004, his father held him under his arm while feeding a crocodile.
    The media was invited to watch “Bob’s croc-feeding debut”. Terri Irwin blames the storm of criticism that followed on a media feeding frenzy rather than on behaviour that suggested the famous croc hunter might have had an impulse disorder. “It is difficult to grasp the atmosphere at the centre of a media attack unless it has happened to you,” she writes in her new book.
    “I felt as though the mob was going to be outside our gates with lighted torches. All of a sudden my wonderful, sharing, protective husband was being condemned. His crime was sharing wildlife experiences with Robert exactly as he had done for the last five-and-a-half years with Bindi.
    ” When he went to Antarctica not long after, “reporters seemed to be lying in wait for Steve”, according to the book. “This time he was attacked for filming with the wildlife of Antarctica. Just months after being devastated by claims that he wasn’t a good father, Steve faced charges that he was a wildlife harasser, instead of a wildlife warrior r.” “He was not like us mortal men,” Terri Irwin tells me. “I used to say that what would drive me the craziest about Steve is that inevitably he was always right.”
    Nothing in her new book dispels the Steve Irwin legend, assiduously cultivated almost from the first – except that she is determined to show that Irwin had a gentle side the films did not show. She writes: “It never ceased to amaze me how tough Steve was on the outside, but how deeply loving he was on the inside. He showed his feelings more than any man I ever met. Years after he lost his dog Chili (which was shot by a pig hunter), he still mourned.” She says now: “He couldn’t talk about his children without crying.”
    Thought to be the brains behind the process that turned Steve Irwin into a household name, she portrays their collaboration as mutual. She was a little more playful and less cautious talking about her role in the partnership before her husband died. Five years ago, Register-Guard reporter Bob Keefer asked Irwin if she was as crazy as her husband. “No, I’m the sane one,” she said. “If you get our action figures, when you squeeze them, mine says the intelligent things.” That tart take on things has now been airbrushed out.
    The Crocodile Hunter is being mythologised so rapidly that Queensland is celebrating Steve Irwin Day on the 15th of this month. The zoo, near the town of Beerwah, is on a road renamed Steve Irwin Way. Larger in death even than he was in life, Steve’s image looms up on billboards with the usual deadly reptile dangling from his hands or draped around his neck, images so unavoidable on the zoo’s website it’s almost as if he isn’t quite gone. How long can this go on? “I don’t know, Elisabeth,” she says. “It’s uncharted territory for me.”
    Not for producer John Stainton. In September, a year after Irwin’s death, he told The Daily Telegraph in Sydney: “He will always be around. His personality was so strong in real life that it will last for centuries.”    
    The public response to Irwin’s death is invoked to explain many of the commercial decisions that rely on keeping his name alive. Visitor numbers shot up after his death. Marketing manager Wayne Poole says a million people a year now visit Australia Zoo. In 2002, 10 years after they formed a partnership, BRW listed Steve Irwin and John Stainton as having estimated gross earnings of $16.3 million. Though it proves difficult to get more current figures on its earnings, Australia Zoo will soon embark on a $100 million expansion. “Crocodiles were a good base but we realise we’ve now got a position in world tourism,” says Poole.    
    In My Steve, Irwin writes of having a meeting with zoo director Wes Mannion, her late husband’s friend since both were boys: “‘this was Steve’s plan for Australia Zoo over the next 10 years,’ I said. ‘I want to do it in five.’
    ”She tells this magazine: “I get up in the morning and I think … ‘If Steve were still here, what would the conversation be? What would he say?’ ”
    In one of the last conversations they had, only days before Irwin headed off on the underwater filming expedition that cost him his life, he expressed frustration at the lack of progress in spreading his conservation ideas. “It’s eerie,” she says now. “I said, ‘Well, Steve, everything you’ve said will be in schoolbooks in classrooms one day but it’s probably not until you’re six feet under that people will appreciate just how knowledgeable you were with crocodiles.’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, probably.’ ”In fact, Irwin often came under fire from scientists inclined to suggest that the emphasis on conservation (that gives a commercial venture an aura of scientific respectability) was in conflict with a tendency to treat the animals as protagonists in a spectacle.
    Irwin’s television programs showed him handling – or manhandling – wild animals, crocs in particular, rather than letting the sight of the animals in their natural habitat speak for itself. It might be said to be a speciality of the zoo, where visitors get to see cheetahs – as well as wombats – taken for a walk on a leash. Two keepers are in the enclosure with full-grown tigers – as you admire the animals, a small, mean part of your brain is calculating the likelihood that a tiger will pounce on one of them.
    Steve was a big fan of the Coliseum-type arenas of the Roman gladiator days, Terri Irwin writes, explaining her husband’s idea for the Crocoseum. “‘How is it going to work, Steve?’ I asked. ‘How are you going to convince a crocodile to come out exactly at show time, try to kill and eat the keeper, and then go back home again?’” Clearly, it did work.
    THE WEEK’S TROPICAL storms have blown away, leaving an unseasonably hot day, but the car park is filling fast by 9am, even though entering the place costs a small fortune ($49 for adults, $29 for children and $146 for a family of four). In the boardroom at the zoo, Terri Irwin is saying she still thinks of herself as a wife, rather than a widow. In My Steve she recounts the hours after his death. “I lay there while the clock ticked by. Here is another minute I have survived without Steve.” Towards the end of her book she writes: “I am still waiting for Steve to walk through the door. His sarong still hangs on the bed. His toothbrush is in the bathroom.”
    Her husband often talked as if he wouldn’t live long, she says quietly. “Steve had a very uncanny feeling that he wasn’t going to be around long. He would tell the children, ‘If anything ever happens to me, I just want you to know I love you so much.’
    “Steve and I used to have this running joke … [he] used to talk to me and say, ‘What are you going to do – with the zoo – if something happens to me?’ I would want to defuse that conversation because I didn’t want to think about the possibility of losing Steve. So I would say, slickly, ‘Oh baby, have you ever heard of Graceland? Don’t worry about it, you know.’ I see that kind of feeling, not that Steve’s Elvis Presley, but that kind of feeling that Steve was a big moment in history.
    “But I do know, for me personally, I have this sense of continuing as if Steve were still here. That’s how I am playing it. I’m telling everyone to relax and be like they were when he was still here.”
    Not long ago a magazine in the US claimed that Terri Irwin was having an affair with John Stainton. No one bothered to check with her before the story ran in a publication in Australia. There’s nothing to it, says Irwin.
    “It’s comical to make up something like that. Everybody’s different. And everybody should live, laugh and love again. But I am at the point in my grief where I don’t like people calling me Steve’s widow. I say I’m Steve’s wife. It’s not that I’m lonely – I’m lonely for Steve. I miss him desperately …”
    But she won’t let it deter her. “I feel that the harder it gets, the more I’m going to fight,” says Irwin. “You know, I have that real sense of purpose. I always thought being Steve’s right-hand woman was my destiny. That everything I’d been groomed for in my life had led to this point. And then I realised it wasn’t. I’d been groomed for after Steve was gone.”

To help mark the largest donation in the history of Queensland zoos, Sunshine Coast families have the opportunity to win a pass to Australia Zoo in the coming weeks.

Queensland Diagnostic Imaging has recently donated nearly half a million dollars’ worth of ultrasound machines to the Australian WildlifeHospital- a major project of the Australia Zoo and Australian Wildlife Warriors.

The two machines, nick-named Crikey 1 and Crikey 2, were given to the hospital in honour of founder Steve Irwin to help save endangered and vulnerable species.

The machines can be used to diagnose injuries and disease and check the reproductive health of thousands of the hospital’s patients each year.

QDI offered to donate the ultrasounds to the hospital following a significant upgrade of its diagnostic equipment on the Sunshine Coast.

To mark QDI’s partnership with the Australian Wildlife Hospital, patients visiting QDI sites on the Sunshine Coast in the coming weeks have the opportunity to win free or discounted family passes to Australia Zoo.

Up to 300 passes will be given out on a first in, best dressed basis.

Four-year-old Clayton Powell had more reason than most to take some special time out on the Sunshine Coast over the weekend.

The Jimboomba youngster, who was diagnosed with leukaemia last May, joined other Camp Quality kids and their families for a big dose of “fun therapy”, enjoying water sports in the Noosa area on Saturday before an outing as special guests to Australia Zoo yesterday.

Clayton’s mum Danielle said it was a welcome change from his daily chemotherapy treatments, which are likely to continue until July 2010.

“It’s a chance for him to be a normal four-year old for a weekend,” she said.

“Clay’s just has a ball and he’s really come out of his shell.

“For him, it’s all fun and takes him out of the routine of being a sick child.

“They’ve just been blown away by it- it’s all so exciting.”

The Powells were one of three Camp Quality families treated to a weekend of fun on the Coast.

Apart from getting up close and personal with the Zoo inhabitants, they also took to the water for activities such as jet skiing, body boarding, and canoeing, as well as games in the park.