‘I want to be prepared for what’s coming next’: Terri Irwin on surviving Covid pandemic and future for Australia Zoo
Australia Zoo was closed for 78 consecutive days and some 300 staff were laid off during the pandemic. Now Terri Irwin says she’s prepping for what’s around the corner.
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Sometimes Terri Irwin feels like nothing has changed at all.
Like she could just round a corner at Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast, and her husband Steve would come smiling towards her in his signature khaki shirt and shorts.
Mostly she feels this way when she takes her eight-month-old granddaughter Grace for their early morning walk along the zoo’s paths, long before the daytrippers arrive.
Beneath the doe-eyed gazes of the giraffes, and past the bobbing heads of the meerkats, Irwin, now 57, feels the years peel away to when she was a young mum on this same, early morning walk. Back to when Grace’s mother Bindi, now 23, was in her arms, and later Bindi’s brother Robert, now 17.
Against the soundtrack of the zoo’s full- throated dawn chorus, she allows herself to reminisce a little, before the public business of being an Irwin encroaches on the private one. Before the gates of the zoo, nestled behind the long snake of Queensland’s Bruce Highway, open and the real world streams in. Because nothing is the same for Terri Irwin, or any of us.
Covid has touched every corner of the globe, including this sprawling 283ha zoo, and all the animals in it.
And Steve Irwin isn’t rounding any corner of it, the man the world knew as the Crocodile Hunter felled just over 15 years ago by a stingray barb to his chest, his death on September 4, 2006, headline news around the world.
Terri Irwin was 41, Bindi, 8, and Robert, two, when Steve Irwin, 44, died, and there were many who predicted that without its brightest star, the lights would eventually dim at Australia Zoo also.
His American widow, it was speculated, would probably scoop up Steve’s kids and return to her hometown, the mountain-fringed Eugene, Oregon, where her own family could put their arms around her.
It was, she recalls now, a reckoning of sorts, a time when she knew the world’s eyes were on her, watching what she would do next.
But here’s the thing about Terri Irwin, something Steve Irwin, if not others, knew about the woman he once described as “not just a wildlife warrior, but a deadset warrior all round”. She doesn’t mind the odd reckoning.
“Aaah, Covid, it’s an interesting beast,” Irwin says of the pandemic that has caused havoc and heartache globally. “It’s like we are all in the same storm, but in different boats. I don’t know if there is anyone who hasn’t been affected by it, one way or the other.”
The zoo itself included, from locking down in March last year for 78 consecutive days, to seeing its post-lockdown numbers plummet.
At the height of Steve Irwin’s popularity throughout the ’90s, an average of 2700 daily visitors poured through its gates.
Post pandemic, with international and interstate tourism ground to a halt, that number has trickled to about 200.
“Ours is a tricky one, because we can’t go into hibernation. We have 1200 animals to feed every day, and our bills just for the animals are about $80,000 a week. So, we’ve had some tough decisions to make, and a lot of cost cutting,” Irwin says at her house deep in the private grounds of the zoo.
“I thought our insurance would cover our losses, but it didn’t. I tried very hard to keep as many staff on as possible, but in the end we went from 500 to 200. But it wasn’t enough, I needed help.”
In April, 2020, Australia Zoo, along with other eligible zoos around Australia, received part of the federal government’s $95m “zoo rescue” package, which Irwin calls “a lifebuoy”. A state government grant of $3m for a new camping and cabin accommodation project was also reimagined.
“We were going to just stop the build altogether, but we were told that if this stops, the grant stops, and it might be hard to get another, so we streamlined the whole thing into something more manageable under Covid.”
If all goes to plan, that project, the Croc Hunter Lodge and eight high-end cabins within the zoo’s sprawling grounds, will open next June. The Irwins, as they are inclined to do, also rolled their sleeves up.
“We managed to leverage our online sales, and a lot of that was Robert and Bindi working their retail experience. Rob sold his photos (Robert Irwin is an award-winning nature and animal photographer) and Bindi wrote a book (Creating a Conservation Legacy), and then we also did drive-up retail sales at the gates of the zoo for takeaway food and merchandise.”
And while there has been much criticism surrounding Queensland becoming a “hermit state” under Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s strict border closures, Irwin says that despite the zoo’s losses, she backed Palaszczuk’s position.
“Economically, of course, it’s devastating, but this is not the fluwe are talking about. If you had open slather, then the health and wellbeing of the majority of people would have been devastating both in terms of the economy and human cost,” she says.
Irwin also reveals she has taken out a bank loan to cover “at least 20 years of fallout” from Covid.
“We are 11 years from the GFC and still feeling the ripples of that. So I want to be prepared for whatever’s coming next. Queensland is opening up again in December, and while I hope and pray there isn’t another wave … well, if there isn’t, we will be the only country that has avoided it … so I’ve been working hard on strategising different ways for us to keep going under different scenarios.”
In the meantime, between the worries, the job losses, and the regular phone calls to friends and family in America who have lost loved ones to Covid, she is feeling “so, so grateful”. Irwin smiles beneath her signature, blunt fringe.
“Firstly, I’m alive, so that’s the biggest gift. The zoo is still open, the animals are being taken care of, my children are happy and healthy and I’m a grandma.
“You know, Grace is just pure joy, she’s brought all the wonder back to us. When I take her for our early morning walks, introducing her to all the animals, I see it all through her eyes, and it just takes me back to when I first came here, then Steve and I had the kids, it’s full circle.”
Full circle. Life’s beat. Bindi and her husband, Chandler Powell, 24, and their baby daughter Grace Warrior Irwin Powell.
Named for when Bindi held her child for the first time and said “she’s our graceful warrior”. And also for her grandfather Steve’s “Wildlife Warrior” moniker.
Just like when Terri Irwin held her baby daughter in her arms 23 years ago, and her husband said “Let’s call her Bindi!” after his favourite crocodile in the zoo.
They’re not shy of an unusual name, the Irwins.
They’re also an unusually close family (notwithstanding a well documented estrangement from Steve’s father and original Australia Zoo founder Bob Irwin, which they have chosen not to speak about publicly).
They all live in the zoo, (of the zoo’s 283ha, only 44.5ha are open to the public).
They work together, travel together and often eat together at the end of the day.
Bindi and Chandler turn up, sans Grace who is napping, to watch Terri’s Qweekend photo shoot in a secluded macadamia orchard in a private corner of the zoo, and later Robert Irwin will pop by to say hello as well.
They are easy together, this family, and openly affectionate. They’re big huggers, all of them, including Chandler, who like another young American before him, visited Australia Zoo as a tourist, and fell in love across a crocodile enclosure.
“It’s a little crazy,” Bindi Irwin says, watching her mother twirl for the camera, macadamia nuts scattered like marbles at her feet.
“I met Chandler in almost the exact same spot where Mum met Dad for the first time, all those years ago.”
Actually, it’s 30 years, give or take, on October 4, 1991.
That is when a 27-year-old Terri Irwin, then Raines, stopped by Australia Zoo in her travels, “rocking a bitchin’ perm, look there’s no other word for it, it was bitchin’”, locked eyes with a young Steve Irwin (rocking his own bitchin’ mullet), fell in love, and married all within a matter of months.
And what is not often told in the well-documented story of Steve and Terri Irwin is the one that Terri left behind. Before Steve, and the kids, and the zoo and the crocs, and all that came with it, she had her own wildlife rehabilitation centre in Eugene, rescuing and releasing injured predatory animals like bobcats and cougars back into the wild.
“I knew no one when I moved here, apart from Steve. I remember my dad, Clarence, who was in the navy, said to me, ‘Don’t ever be ashamed of feeling homesick, you know there were men on the boats in World War II crying for their mothers, so don’t be embarrassed to be crying for yours’. So I’m very aware of making Chandler feel very welcome, particularly now when he cannot see his family in Florida.
“But for the most part I was too busy to be homesick … I did miss my family and my girlfriends, you know just to say, ‘Steve won’t unbutton his shirts, so when I wash them, I have to do it, and it’s driving me crazy’, just those little things you can talk about to your old friends.”
Irwin shakes her head. “But you know there was very little about Steve that drove me crazy. I was pretty crazy about him.”
She still is.
“I don’t think love ever goes away. I see Steve and his love for his family all the time. I saw it when Bindi had Grace, I see him in Grace,’’ Irwin grins.
“But here’s the thing, you know if Steve were physically here, I probably wouldn’t see Grace for dust. He’s be off with her in his arms showing her all the animals and the trees and the flowers and the sky just like he did with our kids.’’
Irwin laughs her big, deep bellied laugh. “I’d be left behind for sure.’’
When Terri Irwin really was left behind; when her husband died and it felt like the whole world was mourning, when the flowers left at the zoo’s gates grew like a wild, strange forest, she knows that there were those who thought those same gates would inevitably close.
“When we lost Steve I found it astonishing that people were amazed we kept the zoo going, amazed that I was not just this kind of I Love Lucy wife, and Steve did all the actual work, while I just kind of hung out.
“I mean Steve was a genius, you know, he’d be up at two in the morning setting all the plans for the zoo and the shoots, down to the food for the crew.
“But he was very happy to leave the functioning side of the business to me, the day-to-day accounting, the taxes.
“There’s still this perception, to a degree, you know, that if a woman fails it’s more of a blanket thing, that it’s because a woman couldn’t do that job – that’s why I’m pretty determined to stand up for the women here at the zoo, and make sure they have representation.
“We have more female than male employees in the tiger department, and more female than male employees with the crocodiles, and I’m pretty proud of that.”
Irwin smiles broadly, more “deadset warrior” than “I Love Lucy” sidekick.
It’s also not likely she’ll be anyone’s sidekick at all, anytime soon. Despite a long list of rumoured lovers, Russell Crowe and Richard Wilkins among them, Irwin is single or, as she puts it, “very, very, very single”.
“I’ve stopped counting all the men I am supposed to have had flings with … the more recent one is John Travolta,” Irwin laughs, “which is new to the mix.
“But you know, and I keep saying this, and I think maybe 15 years later people are finally starting to believe me, Steve was it for me. That’s just the way it is. I had a big, big love and it was enough to last a lifetime.”
Irwin also says she believes that people are now “more comfortable” with her single status. “Well, I think when you become a young widow, it can be uncomfortable for other couples, that whole, ‘oh well, now she’s single, is she looking around?’ And my male friends are more comfortable, they can see I’m not chasing them. I’m too busy to chase anybody,” Irwin laughs.
She is more comfortable these days too. In herself, in her own skin.
“So it’s interesting, you know, getting older.
“It’s not so easy to be photographed, like for this shoot, wearing these beautiful clothes, because you’re a little bit exposed, or vulnerable, or feeling like it’s “look at me, look at me”, but I’m good with it now, because I’m good with me now. Your photographer Russell (Shakespeare, long-time Qweekend photographer and chronicler of the Irwin family) taught me a bit about that.
“Because he will show me portraits he’s done over the years, sometimes photos of these older women he’s taken, much older than me, and he’ll say, ‘oh, look at her, she’s so beautiful’, and it took me a while but now I say ‘yes, she is’.
“Because all our faces are.
“All our faces tell our stories, and so I look at my wrinkles, when I see the lines here and here” – Irwin brings her fingers to her skin – “I think ‘well, that’s my story, it’s all there, all of it, and it is beautiful’.”
Terri Irwin’s story continues.
It’s on her skin.
It’s Bindi and Chandler and Grace Warrior.
It’s Robert Irwin taking his photos with his dad’s, now vintage, camera.
It’s the crocs and the turtles and the snakes and the whole damn menagerie in their back yard.
And it’s Steve Irwin. Still.
Meeting her eyes across a crocodile enclosure.
Laughing with his daughter Bindi as she holds a baby corn snake in her tiny hands.
Lifting his snowy haired, carbon-copy, son Robert to the sky.
Just around the corner at Australia Zoo, coming towards her in his signature khaki shirt and shorts.
Because sometimes for Terri Irwin, it feels like everything and nothing has changed at all.
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