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AND so it has proved, a decade on from his death, that the most profound thing this man, this iconic Queenslander, this force of nature, left behind, has been the towering silence of his absence.

When Stephen Robert “Steve” Irwin, 44, the Crocodile Hunter, was killed by a stingray in the waters off Port Douglas in Far North Queensland at around 11am on September 4, 2006, the suddenness, the shock of it, was surreal.

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The man was snorkelling in 2m of warm water at Batt Reef, 32 nautical miles offshore from Port Douglas, filming a segment for a documentary for cable television station Animal Planet, when he paddled above a large 2.5m bull ray. At that moment the ray inexplicably struck at Irwin, piercing his heart with its poisonous and serrated tail barb.

In an instant, he was gone.

How could it be? The man and the manner of his passing didn’t compute. Irwin was larger than life, courageous, fearless, and made his name pressing his face, almost daily, against death. He had wrestled lethal crocodiles for our entertainment. Manhandled deadly snakes. Kissed an alligator on the Oprah Winfrey show in the US.

But to be suddenly skewered in the heart by a stingray?

As a human being, he was infinitely bigger than the sum of his parts. His appetite for life was titanic, his enthusiasm for it infectious. He contained enough energy to light a suburb.

And the noise of him, that ceaseless wind tunnel of words, a rhapsodic jumble of Aussie slang and emotions and truisms and thoughts that came rapid-fire from the brain and straight off the tongue, freshly-minted, unfiltered, and without a consideration for class or place.

He said what he meant. He was who he was. In a phrase he himself might have chosen, if you didn’t like him, you could lump him.

Irwin seemed to have stepped straight out of another Australian era with his strine, with his strewths and his crikeys. He was the embodiment of what the nation’s so-called sophisticates thought we’d left well and truly behind.

Instead of saying “no”, he said “nuh”. Nothing became nothin’. It was a dialect that some Australians cringed at.

In a television interview with media personality Rove McManus in 2002, he was asked if he deliberately ramped up the “ockerisms” when he was in the United States.

After a slight pause, he answered: “Nuh.”

A feature story on Irwin published in The Australian the day after his death noted that the “cultural cringe was palpable when Irwin took to, and conquered, the world stage”.

It added: “Steve Irwin’s fame always seemed a little hard for the urban elite to swallow. He came across like some crazed Aussie caricature dreamt up by central casting on a Hollywood backlot. A poor man’s Hoges. Or Dame Edna in khaki.”

He was everywhere in that uniform of khaki shirt, shorts and work boots. Why khaki? It is a colour synonymous with dullness, of which he was the opposite. It blends into the background, not bringing attention to itself, again a characteristic that was the antithesis of Irwin.

In his television documentaries you see him gesticulating to the camera on land, and the next minute he has plunged into a body of water, still in the khakis. It wasn’t a uniform at all. The khakis were like another skin.

He was a rough diamond with tousled hair, a character, a larrikin, yet he was adored by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

What did they see in him that we, as Australians, sometimes cynically took for granted? How was it that we lagged so far behind in understanding and appreciating Irwin and his message?

Just peruse some of his Crocodile Hunter documentaries and the answer is immediately apparent.

Irwin had genuine passion for his work. He was perennially kinetic, a fly in a bottle, a blur of hand gestures and running and wrestling and squatting and climbing.

And often, when he explained something to his viewers, his eyes would widen in wonder, like a child, which, in the nicest of ways, he was.

It may have been this, being childlike, that endeared so many of us to him. With Irwin, the boy in him was never far away from the surface of the man.

With only a little imagination, you could absolutely see and hear what he would have been like as a child. The almost uncontainable enthusiasm and energy. The running and dashing about where grown-ups might walk. The cheeky humour. And the unbridled desire to share the excitement of an experience.

He described himself to interviewer Andrew Denton as “the boy who never grew up”.

And you see it most touchingly in his worship of his own children, Bindi, now 18, and Bob, now almost 13.

Given the enormity of his celebrity, much of Irwin’s adult life (and death) was filmed, along with the momentous private milestones. When his wife Terri alerted him to the fact that she was pregnant with their second child in 2003, the camera catches Irwin breaking the news to his father, Bob. “Hey Dad, I’ve got news! It’s like whoo hoo, Dad!” His pure emotion is as innocent as a kid’s.

In a world strangling itself with technology, in a society where, at an airport lounge, for instance, you might look around at 40 or 50 of your waiting fellow passengers and see each and every one of them staring at a device, captured, silent, internalising, Steve Irwin was the anathema of our shining societal and technological progress.

He was raw and earthy. He wanted to take you outside in your plain and humble khakis and show you the wonder of the world. Not just take you outside, but take you out of yourself. Look how small we are compared to all this, he told us through his nature work. Open your eyes. See what’s around you. Learn.

Where has the noise of him gone? Where is he to wake us from our collective comas?

He was, too, one of those rare people in history whose death lodged a small pin in our memory. Yes, I remember where I was when Steve Irwin died.

One columnist wrote in the Melbourne Age newspaper at the time of his passing: “For me, the news of Steve Irwin’s death caused a Diana moment: the molasses, freeze-time moment of shock that sears whatever one was doing – going to lunch, cleaning the fridge, having a shower – on one’s consciousness forever. I sat at my computer and cried.”

Why did we respond to him like this? What was it about him?

He was a knockabout bloke from Beerwah (though born in Melbourne) on the Sunshine Coast who became world famous. He was a conservationist with a limitless passion for the planet and its creatures. With his wildlife documentaries, watched by millions, we saw him grow rich.

They worshipped him in the United States because he shared their go get ‘em attitude, their self-confidence, their self-belief, and his personality multiplied that again by a factor of 10. His fame was such that he’d reached the “action doll” level. You could buy an Irwin doll that wrestled a plastic crocodile with a working jaw. Or the Croc Hunter Deluxe – Steve in scuba diving gear.

Yet he still lived in the house he grew up in as a child in the grounds of Australia Zoo, begun by his father as a small reptile park on the Sunshine Coast in 1970, and saw his wealth as a means to protect wildlife, purchasing thousands of hectares of bush to establish reserves to aid the continuance of endangered species.

Then a 20cm stingray barb entered his heart, a quick and ruthless strike, in the wide ocean off the coast of Queensland, and he was gone for good.

It was as if a giant life switch had been flicked off. The noise of him. The hyperactivity. The undisguised passion. There, then nothing.

In that Rove Live interview in 2002, Irwin strides into the studio in his khakis, short black socks and boots.

The crowd cheers.

Rove, in an expensive suit, shakes his hand then Irwin faces the studio audience, raises both arms and shouts: “Wooo hooo!”

“You are excitable,” Rove comments.

“I am, mate, I’m on fire.”

“They love you in the States,” Rove says. Irwin has just returned from the US after promoting his feature film The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course.

“Aw … mate, it’s going ballistic.” The crowd roars. “No, it’s going off. I’ve got to have bodyguards, minders, police escorts, you know, limousine convoys and secret agent doors (laughter). I’m putting on camouflage and disguises and stuff, mate (laughter), it’s weird …(but) you know what it’s good for? We’re conservationists, through and through, we live for conservation, and our message is so strong.

“We’re saving the world!”

The audience hoots again.

“Have a go at what’s happening, Rove,” Irwin continues. “We’ve got this dark cloud of terrorism, you know, September 11 and all that kind of stuff, and here’s this bloke from the bush up in Beerwah, Queensland, having a go and bringing goodness into the world, you know?

“In wildlife, in wilderness, conservation, greening up the earth, yeah.”

And Rove responds: “And you’re teaching people to pick up snakes.”

You see how Irwin was an object of mockery from the television audience. That the southern city slickers were laughing at him, not with him. They’re cackling at this hyper-excited quintessential ocker. (One journalist wrote after Irwin’s death that he was “as far from the quintessential Australian as you could get: a bush dweller and conservationist in a land of confirmed suburbanites indifferent to their ever-expanding environmental footprints”.)

You see how Irwin’s point to Rove about bringing goodness into the world in a time of terror had been completely lost on the host and his audience. They just didn’t get it. And more often than not, we just didn’t get it. It’s only now, in the howling silence he left behind, with the life of him stilled for so long, that we can begin to make sense of the architecture of his purpose.

Irwin’s intent was profound, but it was often obscured by the cyclone of his personality, by the celebrity we created around him and by the knockers who didn’t take him seriously.

With hindsight you can see how we, as Australians, were the last to get the point of Steve Irwin, the message and method in his madness. The rest of the world understood his purpose well before we did.

Irwin also knew something about himself, and the rest of us, that may have blinded his fellow Australians to his life mission.

He told Andrew Denton: “I’m very embarrassing to look at. You know why? Here’s why I’m embarrassing, ‘cause there’s a little bit of me in everybody….”

How right he was. He nailed it.

He knew there was a bit of Steve Irwin in every Australian, the true heart and soul of being an Aussie, the generosity, the raucousness, the unmistakably raw and unclipped and uncultured edge to our distinctive accent, all these things that we’d tried to suppress in our quest to be someone or something else, so long as it wasn’t Or-stralian. In doing that, still, we have lost a sense of who we were, who we are, and Steve Irwin got that.

I’m embarrassing ‘cause there’s a little bit of me in everyone. You can read that now as a regret, and a lament, too.

He would be 54 if he’d survived that freak encounter with a stingray. Still out there, replete in khaki, banging his conservation drum, trying to get the message through. His wife and children have continued his important work.

But what is deafening today is the absence of Irwin’s voice, the whirligig of his noise, the chaotic and random blur of his movement.

Ten years.

In the wake of his death has come an Irwin effigy in Madame Tussauds’ in Sydney, a marble statue of him and his children at Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast, a rainforest treesnail (Crikey steveirwini) and a turtle (Elseya irwini) named after him, an illustrated children’s book about his life (Who Was Steve Irwin?), a Steve Irwin Award for Ecotourism, an Adjunct Professorship with the University of Queensland’s School of Integrative Biology (wife Terri was awarded an honorary doctorate from UQ last year), a road named in his honour and a day each November slated Steve Irwin Day and in May this year a Steve Irwin Gala Dinner was held for the first time in Los Angeles in an attempt to raise awareness for global wildlife conservation, among other honours and tributes.

His memory is secure.

But it’s the life of him we lament. And the message, more important today than when he went away. He was loud because he had to be. He was trying to tell us something, and we never listened hard enough.

Now it’s too quiet. And too late.

The day after he died, his mate, the actor Russell Crowe, spoke of Irwin’s “absolute belief” about caring for the riches of Australia, for its fauna. “Over time,” Crowe presciently remarked, “we might just see how right he was.”

Crikey. Holy smoke. What a ripper. Wooo hooo.

How we miss him. How we need him.