‘I want to find my own place in the world’: Robert Irwin on stepping out of his famous dad’s shadow
Out of the shadow of his father’s legacy, Robert Irwin is forging his own path. This is his most candid interview yet.
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We’re driving along a dirt road, its rough surface shimmering in the heat.
A chorus of magpies warbles from the branches of ghost white eucalypts, a breeze carries the sharp scent of wattle, and just when you think, “This couldn’t get any more Australian”, it does.
The car in front of ours stops, and in a flash of khaki, Robert Irwin jumps from its driver’s seat, darts across the road, launches (there is no other word for it) into the bush, and shimmies straight up a tree.
Legs propelling him upwards, arms clasped around the trunk, he grins from the top of its branches.
“Lace monitor,” he calls down, “Ab-so-lute-ly beautiful.”
We’re somewhere deep in the sprawling grounds of Australia Zoo, and in this moment, there is a familiarity to this scene, an echo of another Irwin who was given to launching himself into the landscape – Robert’s father, Australia Zoo’s beloved conservationist and television star Steve Irwin.
Known by millions around the world as the Crocodile Hunter, Irwin died aged 44, on September 4, 2006, while filming at Batt Reef, near Queensland’s Port Douglas.
His death from a stingray’s barb caused a tsunami of global grief, with flags flying at half mast on Sydney Harbour Bridge, and bouquets piling up into a forest of grief outside Australia Zoo’s gates.
Robert Irwin was just three when his father died.
Now 19, he is still very much his father’s son – in his appearance, his voice, the way he nonchalantly wraps a snake around his neck the way most of us wrap a scarf – but he is also carving his own path.
He carries his father’s legacy, he says “with nothing but gratitude” but also understands the importance of creating his own.
And one of the ways he is doing it, even as his own fame grows, is not from in front of a camera, but behind it.
Photography – along with conservation – is Robert Irwin’s passion.
When he is not appearing on our screens on Crikey! It’s The Irwins, or as the soon to be co-host of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, he is taking photos.
Or planning to take photos. Or studying photos he’s taken and “thinking about how I could have done it better”.
He is also very good at it, the recipient of several prestigious wildlife photography awards and his work appearing in publications such as Australian Geographic.
He has to be good at it because celebrity offspring who venture outside their wheelhouse are judged harshly (David and Victoria Beckham’s son Brooklyn’s 2017 photography book What I See was greeted with howls of derision).
Irwin also has his own photography book, 2022’s Robert Irwin’s Australia, four years in the making, the first in a series, and met, not with derision, but critical acclaim.
“I wanted to do it for a long time, but I knew I didn’t have enough imagery,” Robert says over lunch at Australia Zoo’s Warrior restaurant.
“For every 10,000 images I take there is maybe one or two I like. No one is more critical of my photos than me.
“I wanted to tell a story of Australia and its landscapes and wildlife and all the challenges it faces through photos, and I knew that if I wanted to tell it properly, those photos had better be good.” Irwin smiles widely.
“Luckily I was taught by the best.” Irwin credits regular Qweekend photographer Russell Shakespeare with “giving me the belief I could do it”.
“Russell has been photographing my family for years,” he says.
“From when I was about five, or six, I think. I grew up around cameras, and I had a real fascination for them, especially the mechanics of them, but Russell was really the first person who was willing to turn the camera around from me, to me, and say, ‘Here’s how I got that shot’, ‘Here’s how this works’. The patience he showed to this annoying kid saying ‘Why’d you use that lens?’, ‘Why are you changing cameras?’ was pretty amazing.”
Seeing her son’s interest, his mother, Terri, now 59, found an old camera in a cupboard of their family home, which he used for a few years.
Right up until, he says, the best day of his (childhood) life. His smile widens, like a split tomato.
“My 10th birthday, oh man, that was the day I got my first DSLR, manual control camera, and the first day I was allowed to feed a croc. What a day! I think I peaked at 10, at double digits.”
His smile, although it almost doesn’t seem possible, widens further.
“First camera, first croc, inside the Crocoseum at the Zoo, with hundreds of people watching, I was nervous, but it was amazing.”
Suffice to say, the Irwin childrens’ birthdays were a little different to yours or mine.
“Anyway, after that, I just kept learning, and then when I was about 12 or 13, I found out something about my Dad I didn’t know before, which was just how much he loved photography. Not many people knew about that, everyone knew him as that popular guy in the camera’s eyes, but not many knew of his love of being behind it.” Irwin pauses.
“You know, all my life all I’ve ever wanted was to be exactly like Dad, but also to find my own place in his world. I was just itching to find that place and photography gave me that. But it also gave me a connection to Dad, and a purpose. How do I use these images to push Dad’s legacy of wildlife protection? Because everything he did, everything he recorded, everything he documented, well, it kind of stopped, and it stopped abruptly, which is what happens when someone dies unexpectedly. And this is one of my ways of continuing his work.”
All the proceeds from Robert Irwin’s Australia, go towards Australia Zoo and their global charity, Wildlife Warriors’ various conservation efforts, including Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Rhino Conservancy, and the Black Mambas all female, anti-poaching unit in South Africa.
“Photography is a platform for me to talk about and document the stark issues that face our wildlife, climate change, the ever expanding population, deforestation, extinction, bushfires. But it can also capture hope.
The book has images of the singed koalas on Kangaroo Island (South Australia) after the bushfires of 2020, to those same koalas being treated at our hospital at Australia Zoo.”
Photography gives Irwin other gifts too – stillness, quietness, privacy.
“Photography gives you an adrenaline hit and a patience hit in the one hit,” he grins.
“I can be out in the bush by myself trying to find a palm cockatoo for three days’ straight, and then you finally see it, and you get this rush, but you have to suppress it, all the excitement, and be still, be in the moment. I try to talk to hunters about taking photos of animals instead of killing them.”
Irwin sighs heavily.
“I won’t use the language I want to use to describe these vile, horrible, ridiculous people who kill for no reason and say ‘Oh I do it because I want to be out in nature, I just love to be at one with nature.’
“Myself and other photographers try to have conversations with them where we say, ‘You know you get the same primal rush if you just take their photo. You’ve got an animal you want to target, you’re staying downwind, you’re staying quiet, you have to use all your knowledge about that animal, all your instincts to get the shot. You’re looking through the scope, and if you do it properly the animal won’t even know you’re there. You can still take home your trophy, your proof that you’ve done it, but the animal lives.’ I mean, come on.”
He shakes his head, and throws his hands up in the air.
It’s a rare flash of anger from the usually affable Irwin, who can’t walk through Australia Zoo these days without crowd controllers beside him.
Because these days Robert Irwin is famous, and growing more so every day.
One day, he might even be more famous than his Dad.
There was no social media in Steve Irwin’s day – his son’s Instagram account, @robertirwinphotography, has 4.6 million followers.
He is a regular guest on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight show, he is no longer able to move about a city – any city – freely, which is, in part, why he loves going bush. To literally get away from it all.
“Fame, isn’t that weird?” Irwin posits.
Earlier, walking through the zoo to the restaurant, it was interesting to witness the reactions of mums, dads, kids, teenagers – one young woman audibly gasps – as he passes.
After they get over their initial shock, they all want their moment with him.
“I don’t mind at all, it means a lot actually. But you would think growing up with it, it’s just normal to me – it’s really not. It’s still odd to me, particularly the more unusual parts to it, like the paparazzi waiting when the plane lands, or photos of you shopping at a supermarket. I mean, who cares?” he says.
“But 90 percent of the time, it’s just people who are glad to see you, who want to say, ‘I love what you do’, ‘I love what your Dad did’, and grab a quick picture. No worries. There are times, however, when it becomes frustrating. I hate it when there’s in-fighting.
“I don’t cop it as much as Dad did, but sometimes you can get caught in a crowd of 300 people and adults will cut in, in front of a little kid who’s been waiting for 20 minutes to get his picture taken. That’s when you start feeling less like a human being, and more like a trophy. It’s that amplified herd mentality. But then you get that little kid wearing the full khakis running over to you hugging your legs, not letting go, holding on tight, and that’s beautiful.”
Despite his growing popularity, Irwin remains grounded.
So does his sister, Bindi, now 25, married to Chandler Powell, and with a two-year-old daughter, Grace.
The Irwin offspring are known to be unfailingly polite, solicitous of others and gracious under the sometimes harsh glare of public scrutiny.
And Robert Irwin says that’s all down to one person. Not Steve Irwin, but Terri.
“Oh, Mum. Mum,’’ he says.
“Bindi and I are pretty steady. I look at other kids raised in the limelight and lots of the time, it’s not pretty, or it doesn’t end well, or they go off the rails for a bit before they thankfully find their way back, but Bindi and I, well we’ve pretty much stayed on the rails, I think, and that’s Mum. That’s all Mum. She has been just this beacon of strength and grace and love for us. Nothing about her is ever fake, or forced. She leads by example. She says to us and she always has, ‘You’re your own people, you do what you want to do, if you want to get up and leave all this, the zoo, I am behind you 100 per cent. If this life is not for you, then go live the one you want to.’ That’s why it makes me laugh when I hear people say, ‘Oh Terri this, and Terri that, forcing her kids to be on camera, when what she was really saying was the opposite. She was always telling us to go if we wanted to, but we never wanted to, because she’s awesome to be with. She’s funny, she’s kind, she’s honest and no matter what is happening, losing Dad, running the zoo, dealing with the business, going through Covid when we shut down, her number one concern, her number one priority is family.”
And like a lot of children who grow up and realise their parents are people too, it’s only recently, Robert says, that he’s realised just what his mother went through when his father died.
“She lost the love of her life, but there was this whole other level,’’ he says.
“The stuff she had to put up with. The constant scrutiny, the constant spotlight where everything you do is wrong; she’s forcing those kids to be on camera – she never did, not once, and now I see her just putting one foot in front of the other, and the easy thing to do, which would have been understandable, was to sell up, move somewhere quiet, have the big house, the big property and live out her life in peace, but instead she kept it all going and, not only that, makes the zoo bigger and better, becomes involved in even more conservation projects – every single success we’ve had is Mum.
“Everyone talks about the legacy Dad left behind, and that is very true, but there’s the person who keeps it going, and that’s Mum.’’
The lunch is drawing to its close, and soon Robert Irwin will go back to doing what the Irwin family does (feeding a croc, giving a quokka a cuddle, rescuing the odd brown snake).
It is, he knows, a highly unusual life, one that he says he is grateful for, every single day.
“I wish every child could have the childhood I had. Growing up in a zoo – how do you top that?’’ he says.
“I never had to worry about a disconnect with nature, I was a free-range kid my whole life. At the zoo, on our property, travelling to reserves all over the world. I wish every kid had that. Every day I think about how lucky I am, every single day. I thank my lucky stars that I get to wake up in the morning and do what I love.”
And these days, Irwin has someone he loves beside him – Rorie Buckey, his 19-year-old girlfriend.
A physiotherapy student from Perth, Buckey is the niece of the late and adored actor, Heath Ledger, who died in 2008 at just 28 years old.
Her mother, Kate, is Ledger’s older sister, so Irwin’s girlfriend is also well acquainted with losing someone beloved far too soon.
The young couple, who met in 2022, went public with their romance with an instagram post in August this year.
While Irwin largely prefers to let his photos of Buckey do the talking (the latest, a Halloween shot of the two of them dressed as Ken and Barbie) he will say this about the young woman whose sense of adventure, by all accounts, matches his own: “Whether it’s photography, travel, wildlife conservation or work at the zoo, everything’s better with Rorie. Life is great.”
Here’s the thing. Life is great for Robert Irwin.
It is filled with purpose, adventure and love.
Every day brings something extraordinary with it.
That’s part of the reason he wants to photograph it.
Get it all down.
Capture all the moments.
Just like his Dad.
Just like himself.
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Originally published as ‘I want to find my own place in the world’: Robert Irwin on stepping out of his famous dad’s shadow
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