Trent Dalton - Andrew McMillen
Trent Dalton - Andrew McMillen
Trent Dalton - Andrew McMillen
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where theStory<br />
<strong>Trent</strong> <strong>Dalton</strong><br />
arePhotography<br />
Russell Shakespeare<br />
Four years on, how does Steve Irwin’s family cope with missing<br />
him? They go crocodile hunting on Cape York.
conservation
Bindi Irwin props her right leg on<br />
a rock in the river bank, cringing<br />
as her mother details the moment<br />
of her conception. “Bindi was<br />
conceived after an awards show<br />
in LA,” Terri is saying. “We<br />
both didn’t want to go to the after-party …”<br />
“Oh great,” says 12-year-old Bindi, balancing<br />
on the rock now. “I’m gonna have to wear<br />
a paper bag over my head for the rest of my life.”<br />
“Hey, we’ve sexed crocodiles together, we<br />
can share anything,” says Terri.<br />
I have just inserted the middle finger of my<br />
right hand into the posterior opening of a Cape<br />
York crocodile, a watershed moment in a fourday<br />
croc research tour with the khaki-clad Irwins<br />
and a 30-strong team of scientists, animal<br />
wranglers, cooks and several bushmen with<br />
unnerving knives. There is no obvious organ<br />
rising inside the croc’s cloaca so I proclaim it<br />
a girl. “Spot on,” says Professor Craig Franklin.<br />
The University of Queensland zoologist is<br />
two years into a ten-year study of crocs in the<br />
pristine river systems of the Steve Irwin Wildlife<br />
Reserve, a 135,000ha Cape York sanctuary<br />
created by the Howard government in 2007 and<br />
run by the Irwin family as a living tribute to the<br />
late crocodile hunter. Wrestling the croc’s jaws<br />
shut, Terri smiles proudly as the beast covers<br />
my hand in a gush of slimy white fluid. Nothing<br />
brings people together like a crocodile sexing.<br />
Six-year-old Robert laughs hysterically at his<br />
mother’s recollections of Bindi’s conception.<br />
He throws a handful of dry leaves in the air.<br />
“That’s yuck!” he screams.<br />
Terri smiles at her son. “Wes helped us with<br />
your conception,” she says, referring to Australia<br />
Zoo director Wes Mannion, who was Steve’s<br />
best friend. Robert drops his head, hands over<br />
his ears. Terri explains she was working to<br />
a strict biological clock, endeavouring to have<br />
a boy. The family was camping on one of their<br />
North Queensland conservation properties.<br />
“The time came and we asked Wes to take<br />
Bindi for a walk to find some snakes,” she says.<br />
“Seven minutes later … ”<br />
“Oh, please?” begs Bindi.<br />
The Irwins got their boy, an irrepressible<br />
tearaway with dirt on his face and cuts on his<br />
legs. He seems less the product of a man and<br />
a woman than something grown from a seed<br />
dropped by a bushlark in the red outback dirt; a<br />
boy made of soil and saltwater. His resemblance<br />
to his father, who died on September 4, 2006, is<br />
as unsettling as it is profound: the way he skids<br />
down the steepest incline of a ridge while others<br />
walk around it; the way he converses in private<br />
with stink bugs, or hides in trees for hours just<br />
to capture nature’s endless pantomime from<br />
a gallery seat. He seems deeper than his dad,<br />
smarter. But I only saw Steve Irwin on television.<br />
“No, he was extremely intelligent,” says<br />
Franklin. “He was such a complex man. He was<br />
one of the best naturalists I’ve ever worked with.<br />
People only saw that image of him. And he was<br />
fully aware of that image and what it meant.”<br />
“Hi Mum!” Robert calls, high up a tree and<br />
reaching for a distant branch.<br />
“He is Steve,” says Terri. “It’s amazing. Bindi<br />
is so much like Steve with this empathy that she<br />
has. She’s hard on the outside and very soft on<br />
the inside. Robert just is Steve. Even the style<br />
of his writing, the mannerisms with his hands,<br />
the way he walks. It’s a really interesting study<br />
in nurture versus nature. There are little things<br />
about him that are so much like Steve that he<br />
couldn’t have gotten from mimicking his dad<br />
because he was only two when he lost his dad.”<br />
Robert hangs from a branch, sloth-like. His<br />
blond bowl-cut hair falls from his forehead, his<br />
eyes roll back inside his head. He’s chewing on<br />
something. “I’m just eating green ants,” he says.<br />
“You can eat green ants?” I ask.<br />
“Yeah, if their bums are big enough.”<br />
“What do they taste like?”<br />
Bindi kindly answers for her brother: “Like<br />
a sour lolly.”<br />
The kids are home-schooled. Robert briefly<br />
tried mainstream primary schooling but four<br />
walls and a whiteboard weren’t going to work<br />
for Steve Irwin’s son. “I’m glad we’re doing<br />
distance education,” says Terri. “He would<br />
have been the naughty kid because he would<br />
have been bored. When he got bored in school<br />
we had him tested and the teachers said, ‘You<br />
know, you have someone who is very gifted,<br />
he’s like a 98.6 percentile in his age group’.<br />
They recommended that he just learn at his<br />
own level. He’ll be starting fourth grade this<br />
month and he’s six years old. It’s not off-thecharts<br />
amazing but it is amazing.”<br />
Terri has the stance of an explorer; a hardy<br />
frontierswoman. She always seems to be<br />
marching uphill, pressing forth. Onward and<br />
upward. An optimist. She doesn’t read bad press.<br />
Don’t engage, she says. She doesn’t let her<br />
daughter Google her own name. If Bindi did<br />
she’d find, among fan pages from around the<br />
world, barbs of criticism from parents who think<br />
she’s too young to stand under the spotlight. She<br />
might find the new single from Australian singersongwriter<br />
Dan Kelly, Bindi Irwin Apocalypse Jam,<br />
a bizarre fantasy about Bindi helping save Kelly<br />
from flaming tornadoes ravaging the Earth. She<br />
might find comedian Fiona O’Loughlin’s<br />
controversial comments on ABC TV in March<br />
suggesting Bindi needed a slap in the face.<br />
Pouring scorn on a 12-year-old girl seems<br />
a cheap way to mine a laugh. To see Bindi in<br />
person – a deeply contemplative, sometimes<br />
Free spirit … The image of his father, six-year-old Robert<br />
has been protected from the media, not the natural world.<br />
sorrowful, unfailingly polite, extremely welladjusted<br />
and, yes, natural, young girl – such<br />
comments seem careless and ugly. Then there’s<br />
a moment – nothing stage-managed, just a little<br />
moment by a tree – when she looks you in the<br />
eye and says she wants to carry on the family<br />
business because it means she might save a few<br />
hundred thousand animals; because she thought<br />
her old man was the greatest thing in this world<br />
and following in his footsteps helps her feel close<br />
to him again, and you believe her. She knows the<br />
game because she learned it from her dad. The<br />
spotlight keeps the money rolling in and the<br />
money – millions of it – rolls on to the animals.<br />
“Don’t engage with the bad stuff,” says<br />
Terri. “I teach that to Bindi. If there’s<br />
something about us in a magazine I’ll look at<br />
it first before I let her read the magazine. One<br />
time I missed an article. It was a story about<br />
a man who was stalking the family. This man<br />
ended up going to jail. She didn’t know<br />
anything about it and I wanted to keep it that<br />
way. And she reads the magazine and she goes,<br />
‘This guy went to jail for stalking us!’ If she<br />
hadn’t read that she never would have known<br />
and a 12-year-old girl shouldn’t go through life<br />
fearful. You should go through life being<br />
optimistic and having fun and being a kid.”<br />
Robert slides down the tree trunk and zips<br />
past his mother toward an aluminium boat tied<br />
down at the edge of the Wenlock River.<br />
“C’mon, we’ve got crocodiles to catch,” he says.
You should go through<br />
life being optimistic<br />
and having fun and<br />
being a kid.<br />
His sister follows. In the boat, Bindi adjusts<br />
her brother’s life jacket. She picks a blade of<br />
grass from his hair, rests a protective arm across<br />
his shoulders. Her best friend. Terri’s eyes<br />
linger on her children. She sees the past and<br />
the present. She sees the future of<br />
conservation in Australia. And she can’t help<br />
thinking something’s missing.<br />
ULYSSES IS WAITING. ThE SmELL of dEATh<br />
drifts downriver from a bend in the Wenlock<br />
they call “Chicane”. Franklin eases the throttle<br />
on the outboard motor. “That’s about as close as<br />
you’ll come to what a dead body smells like,” he<br />
says. It’s a crocodile bait: half a wild pig, what<br />
local bushmen call research “volunteers”.<br />
Rampant pigs are one of the greatest threats<br />
to ecological stability in the reserve. The greatest<br />
threat is mining. Cape Alumina has proposed to<br />
strip-mine 12,300ha of the reserve in a project<br />
Cape Alumina chief executive Paul Messenger<br />
says would generate $4 billion and 1700 jobs for<br />
locals, many of them indigenous. The reserve,<br />
or “Steve’s Place”, as Terri calls it, is Aboriginal<br />
land. She faces the daunting task of convincing<br />
Cape York traditional owners, representing some<br />
of the most disadvantaged people in Australia,<br />
to resist the economic benefits bauxite mining<br />
might represent and help her fight for legislation<br />
that guarantees the reserve’s protection “in<br />
perpetuity”. In June, Natural Resources Mines<br />
and Energy Minister Stephen Robertson<br />
declared the Wenlock the tenth river protected<br />
under the Bligh Government’s Wild Rivers<br />
conservation scheme. But he added that<br />
“mining, tourism and other developments can<br />
still occur where they do not threaten the river”.<br />
Queensland Senator Mark Furner was at<br />
our campsite last night. He’d brought his<br />
daughter, Sally, to see what he considers the<br />
most precious and untapped wildlife reserve<br />
in Queensland. Over camp burritos, he called<br />
the mining project “absurd”. “Absolutely<br />
disgraceful,” he said.<br />
This morning, wildlife ranger Cecil Arthur,<br />
a traditional owner from the local Taepathiggi<br />
people, said he was offered $3.5 million to sign<br />
over his claim on the land. “My heritage isn’t<br />
worth that,” he said. “My stories, my ancestors<br />
aren’t worth that. I can’t act soft. If I act soft<br />
they will steamroll me. What structure do they<br />
have for developing my people? Where’s the<br />
daycare centres? Where’s the cultural centres?<br />
This runs out in 15 years with the mining. Then<br />
we’ll be left with another Napranum.” That<br />
community, in what is known as Weipa South,<br />
was a ghetto, he said, a place where children<br />
Bindi’s age were having abortions. “Forty years<br />
we’ve had people mining our land. We should<br />
have golden pathways for our kids to walk on.”<br />
conservation<br />
I fill my water bottle straight from the river.<br />
I can’t see a single impurity through the plastic.<br />
“There are more fish species in these river<br />
systems than anywhere else in Australia,”<br />
Franklin says. So far his team has discovered<br />
157 bird species on the reserve, 43 reptile<br />
species, 19 amphibian species, a growing list<br />
of rare and threatened native species. And the<br />
research is in its infancy. “We don’t even know<br />
yet what we stand to lose,” the professor says.<br />
Terri has started a petition called “Save<br />
Steve’s Place”, to which she has attracted<br />
300,000 signatures from around the world. When<br />
someone asks for an autograph, she asks for<br />
a signature. Terri versus the power men in suits.<br />
There’s a story in the Bindi Wildlife Adventures<br />
book series in which a team of bauxite miners<br />
visit the reserve and fall so in love with the<br />
place that they reverse their mining plans. The<br />
real world doesn’t work like that. If Terri wins<br />
today, the miners will wait till tomorrow.<br />
Four boats tie off at a river bank near<br />
a weighted rope-bag trap. The air is hot and<br />
sticky. Hundreds of flies buzz around the pig<br />
bait. Inside the trap is a 4m crocodile behemoth<br />
named Ulysses, a huffing and puffing “apex”<br />
predator who, one can only presume, won’t<br />
take kindly to scientists fixing a satellite<br />
tracking system behind his head. He’s<br />
dangerously rested. He will emerge scoring for<br />
a scrap, desperate to return to the river. Terri<br />
enters the trapping area, singing: “Take me to the<br />
river, drop me in the water.” She stops suddenly:<br />
“Oh my god! Look at the size of that thing.”<br />
The core crocodile team of eight men, led by<br />
a rugged protégé of Steve’s called Briano, feed<br />
a looped rope around the croc’s upper jaw.<br />
Briano has a swag full of riveting campfire tales<br />
about Steve, like the time they went to<br />
Indonesia and saw a croc eating human remains<br />
in the wake of the 2004 tsunami; like the time<br />
Steve went to wartorn East Timor to fish a maneating<br />
crocodile out of a toxic water tank.<br />
The team includes Chris Hanna, whose<br />
Scottish family donated $12,000 to wildlife<br />
conservation and in turn got to accompany the<br />
researchers upriver. His parents, Gordon and<br />
Iris, watch from behind a fallen tree trunk.<br />
Gordon recently recovered from a massive brain<br />
haemorrhage that doctors said would kill him or,<br />
at best, leave him in a vegetative state. “He<br />
walked out of the hospital six days later,” Iris<br />
says. When Chris told his father he wanted to<br />
go to Australia to rescue animals, Gordon<br />
didn’t hesitate to say, “Do it. Life’s short and<br />
frighteningly random. Live your dream.”<br />
“Pull!” says Briano. It takes the full strength<br />
of eight men to drag Ulysses out of the trap. He<br />
growls – a deep, guttural, prehistoric rumble.<br />
They need to jump the crocodile to tape his<br />
▲<br />
| 13
conservation<br />
deadly mouth shut. But the setting is not ideal.<br />
The area is tight, too many trees for ropes to get<br />
caught in; too many roots to trip on. A silent<br />
tension fills the scene. Ulysses could crush<br />
a boar’s head in one bite. “His head’s like<br />
concrete,” whispers Franklin. “Don’t go<br />
anywhere near the head. If he got a chance to<br />
swipe at you he could snap your legs.” Crocs<br />
can whiplash, leveraging from the tail. Snap.<br />
Briano assembles the jump team. “Terri will<br />
go first,” he says. “And then the rest of the<br />
jump team. You will go like a stack of<br />
dominoes. Bang, bang, bang, bang. You’ve got<br />
to get in there and get those back legs off the<br />
ground so he can’t push off.” The team lines<br />
up behind Terri. It will take six people, maybe<br />
more, to keep Ulysses at bay.<br />
Standing nervously at the back of the jump<br />
team are two teenage surfers from Los Angeles,<br />
Zeke and his best mate Dylan. Zeke is the son<br />
of actor Beau Bridges, but he never mentions<br />
it. Beau stars alongside Bindi in this year’s Free<br />
Willy 4: Escape From Pirate’s Cove, her first lead<br />
role in a feature film. “She’s a natural,” said<br />
Beau, a passionate conservationist who leapt at<br />
Terri’s offer to take his son crocodile hunting in<br />
the deepest wilderness of Cape York. Not that<br />
long ago Zeke’s uncle, Jeff, was in the Kodak<br />
Theatre accepting an Oscar for Best Actor.<br />
Nobody says it out loud in camp, but it’s widely<br />
acknowledged how cool it is to share a cup of<br />
Bushells with the nephew of The Dude from<br />
The Big Lebowski. And here’s Zeke now,<br />
sharpened bowie knife strapped to his belt,<br />
about to leap onto a giant croc.<br />
Ulysses is furious. He begins to death roll in<br />
the air, making great twisting leaps, arching,<br />
heaving, every muscle pulling the ropewielding<br />
scientists closer to his snapping jaws.<br />
Short, sharp directions are given. “Too much<br />
rope.” “Coming round, coming round.” “Back,<br />
back, back.” The ground thunders when<br />
Ulysses lands. Dr Hamish Campbell, working<br />
alongside Franklin, will later study the video<br />
footage of the scene and count the number of<br />
death rolls at an incredible 32, unheard of for<br />
a scientific catch. Bindi taps my shoulder. “Just<br />
remember where you need to run if you have<br />
to run,” she says, pointing behind us. “Stick<br />
to a path. You don’t want to fall over yourself.”<br />
Ulysses rolls again, whipping his body in<br />
mid-air, pulling a rope from Hanna’s hands<br />
and bringing the young Scot’s rear end<br />
frighteningly close to his teeth. A stray rope<br />
catches briefly on a tree. Panic ripples through<br />
the team, but Briano remains calm. His relaxed<br />
voice steadies the situation. If he berates<br />
someone at this point, the whole operation<br />
falls apart. People freeze when screamed at.<br />
The split second it takes for someone to digest<br />
Like father, like … Robert and Bindi jump their first crocodile<br />
in the Cape York wildlife reserve named after their dad.<br />
embarrassment or regret is the split second that<br />
Ulysses drives the back of his head into theirs.<br />
The beast lands flat on the ground and<br />
Briano spots his moment. “Okay, jump team,<br />
wait for my call. On this death roll … ” Terri<br />
breathes deep, hunches down. “Terri, go!”<br />
And the 46-year-old widowed mother of<br />
two dives face-first onto the head of the 4m<br />
crocodile. She says she goes into a dreamlike<br />
state during a jump. Slow motion. Tunnel vision<br />
on the crocodile’s eyes. Her elbow pushes down<br />
on its mouth as the rest of the team secures its<br />
long, thick body. Its mouth is secured by tape.<br />
A calming wet blindfold is placed over its eyes<br />
and a shade canopy is erected above it. And<br />
Briano takes a breath.<br />
“Oh my god!” shrieks Terri. “This is one<br />
seriously Olympic crocodile!”<br />
Wrangler Stuart Gudgeon, Head of<br />
Crocodiles at Australia Zoo, smiles. “He’s<br />
pound for pound the toughest fighter I’ve ever<br />
caught,” he says later.<br />
Terri nods me closer: “Put your hand on him.”<br />
I place a gentle hand on Ulysses’ head. For<br />
reasons I don’t know, maybe something about<br />
age and wisdom, I’m immediately struck by an<br />
image of my late grandfather. The crocodile’s<br />
skin – soft and warm and alive – has got me<br />
thinking about loss and time and meaning.<br />
The beautiful killer has saddened me. “You’re<br />
in the presence of a dinosaur,” whispers Terri.<br />
Some families picnic …<br />
the Irwins wrestle crocs.<br />
The croc breathes deep and his breath lifts<br />
my hair. It’s fresh, like a sea breeze. “We still<br />
know so little about them,” Terri says. “You<br />
get up close and they’re soft and chubby like<br />
a baby’s skin and then you learn that they’re<br />
great mothers and fathers, extremely protective<br />
and intelligent parents and they’re affectionate<br />
lovers and all the myths just fall away.”<br />
Franklin and Campbell quickly and<br />
painlessly fix the satellite tracking unit to the<br />
back of Ulysses’ head. More than a hundred<br />
crocodiles will be tracked in this river system<br />
using world-leading technology developed<br />
uniquely by this team. Franklin then makes<br />
a small incision in the croc’s side and inserts<br />
an acoustic tag that will allow the team to track<br />
his movements underwater for about ten years.
It was this team that discovered crocodiles can<br />
stay underwater for seven hours. This team<br />
that tracked a crocodile as it made a 900km<br />
overland odyssey to return to its home. They<br />
take blood samples, temperatures and body<br />
measurements from Ulysses. They want to<br />
know: where do the crocodiles go? Why have<br />
their numbers stabilised? What more can they<br />
tell us about life?<br />
Robert lifts the crocodile’s tail. He counts<br />
the number of scutes, or bony plates, running<br />
down it. He speaks like a scientist giving<br />
a tutorial. “There’s some unusual scute<br />
patterns here. Double scutes, single scutes.<br />
They’re hard-ish. Soft-ish.” He flexes the tail<br />
as if it were moving through water. “The<br />
individual bits of the tail are fitted together<br />
like armour.”<br />
A thought strikes him like lightning and he<br />
bounces on his backside. “I remember this<br />
one crocodile, he was so big he sank the boat!<br />
His name was Stevo. Not, like, my dad, but<br />
another crocodile named Stevo.” Everybody<br />
remembers Stevo, a monstrous crocodilian<br />
wonder caught a year after Steve Irwin died<br />
and named in his honour.<br />
Terri turns to her boy: “You know, Robert,<br />
your dad used to do this all by himself?”<br />
Robert looks up, awestruck. “Yeah?”<br />
“Yeah.”<br />
Bindi looks over to her mum. Then<br />
she drops her head, waving a long blade<br />
of grass around like a conductor’s baton.<br />
TERRI IRWIN IS WEARING EllEN DEGENERES’S<br />
underwear. She tells us this. It’s what she does.<br />
She makes jokes. Edgy, risqué jokes. The<br />
underwear was given to her by DeGeneres after<br />
Terri appeared on her TV talk show. She also<br />
has gifts from Letterman, Leno, Larry King.<br />
The jokes are a coping mechanism, she says.<br />
“I’ve been thinking about Steve on this trip. It<br />
feels like he’s still here. It’s been really, really<br />
hard. And I tend to diffuse that with humour.<br />
The more emotional it becomes, the sillier<br />
I get. Rather than just sit there and cry, I go,<br />
‘Let me tell you where Bindi was conceived.’<br />
It diffuses it for me.”<br />
She was 27 when she met Steve. Before<br />
then she had all but given up on finding her<br />
soulmate. She doubts she’ll ever find another.<br />
“People always ask me, ‘Have you started<br />
dating?’ And I don’t know what to say. I mean,<br />
‘for as long as we both shall live’, you know?<br />
And, I’m still here. My heart is still with him.”<br />
Two months before losing Steve, she says,<br />
the family completed a ten-year business plan.<br />
That plan was prolonged by Steve’s death. But<br />
big plans remain: Australia Zoo Las Vegas;<br />
and a resort at Australia Zoo, their home near<br />
Beerwah on the Sunshine Coast. The purses of<br />
cashed-up American holidaymakers just might<br />
help their campaign to protect the Australian<br />
wilderness forever. “Once this land is<br />
protected,” says Terri, “I don’t think we<br />
should look at it 50 years from now and go,<br />
‘Now, let’s mine it’. There’s protection in<br />
perpetuity. That’s how I feel.”<br />
She turns to her children, who are lost in<br />
a game. Bindi is pretending to be a news<br />
cameraman and Robert is a star gracing the world<br />
with an interview. “The challenge for me is that<br />
I’ve always enjoyed being the sidekick while<br />
Steve was the front man. I do find it awkward<br />
getting out there and saying, ‘Look at me,<br />
I have a message’. Steve did that so naturally.<br />
If I can bring that message to the masses, then<br />
I will have left the world a better place when<br />
I die. And then Robert and Bindi will be stuck<br />
with it. They’re gonna have to continue.”<br />
Robert bounces around the team scientists<br />
pretending he can’t talk. He mouths long<br />
sentences, but no sound comes out.<br />
“Initially, after losing Steve, I didn’t want to<br />
eat or sleep,” says Terri. “I could care less. But<br />
Bindi and Robert … ” She pauses for a long<br />
moment. “It’s a daily journey. It really is. A lot<br />
of people are awkward about approaching me,<br />
‘Do I mention Steve, do I not mention Steve?’<br />
I just say ‘carry on as if he was still here’.<br />
“With Robert and Bindi we watch Steve’s<br />
DVDs. We talk freely about him. They want to<br />
keep his work going. It’s about nurturing that.<br />
That’s why this trip is so important. For a lot of<br />
kids who have lost their dads, if they’d been<br />
fishing with their dad or they’d been surfing,<br />
if they can keep doing that, it feels good.”<br />
Some families picnic, others play board<br />
games. The Irwins wrestle crocodiles. Deep<br />
into the Wenlock River, the research team drags<br />
a 2m crocodile onto an oval sandbar of the<br />
finest, softest yellow sand. The setting is<br />
surreal, dreamlike. It feels like we’ve crossed<br />
some invisible line between civilisation and<br />
a remote and fantastical land of the crocodiles,<br />
something straight out of Robert’s imagination.<br />
Grey clouds shift over exotic trees that grow<br />
for 60 years, flower once and die. The tide is<br />
coming in, threatening to submerge the entire<br />
sandbar and leave us all wading in a river full<br />
of crocodiles. The team must work quickly.<br />
“Robert, you will be jumping the head,” says<br />
Terri. The boy hustles into position. “Bindi,<br />
you will come in behind him.” It’s Robert and<br />
Bindi’s first jump together, a big occasion for the<br />
family, a crocodile hunter’s holy communion.<br />
“I’ve got butterflies flying around inside me,”<br />
Robert says. “Excited butterflies.” He hunches<br />
down, adopting that famous stance of his<br />
father’s, hands out in front, knees bent in<br />
readiness, equally propped to attack or defend.<br />
“Patience, Robert,” his mum says. “Focus.”<br />
The croc lays eyes on the boy, turns, raises<br />
its head. The team leader makes the call:<br />
“Robert … go!” And Steve Irwin’s six-year-old<br />
son dives on the crocodile, his teeth gritted,<br />
elbow in front, head to the side. He’s in there<br />
with every fibre of his being. He puts his full<br />
weight on the croc’s head as Bindi follows in<br />
hard, tackling the crocodile with her right<br />
shoulder. A perfect jump. Briano and his team<br />
stand stunned, passing looks between<br />
themselves, each acknowledging the moment<br />
that somehow brings them that little bit closer<br />
to their old friend Steve. The boy beams.<br />
The crocodile is secured and the team takes<br />
a breather. Terri and Bindi pass their hands<br />
along the creature’s back. “One day he’ll be<br />
14 foot long and owning this river,” Terri says.<br />
“Yeah,” says Bindi. “The next generation<br />
will step forward.”<br />
Terri nods knowingly. “Robert,” she says.<br />
“I think you should name him.”<br />
Robert thinks hard for a long while, turning<br />
his head to the grey sky, to the river, to the<br />
trees, to the water rapidly shrinking the sandbar.<br />
“It’s the weirdest name ever,” he says. “But<br />
I think I want to call him Tide.”<br />
“Tide!” says Terri.<br />
“Yeah, Tide,” the boy says.<br />
His mother smiles: “Perfect.” n<br />
To view a gallery and track Ulysses and other crocs of<br />
the Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve, visit couriermail.com.au<br />
Follow team research at www.australiazoo.com.au<br />
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