Bindi Irwin is determined to carry her father’s legacy forward

“Step back a bit, Robert,” whispers Bindi Irwin, her left arm drawing her nine-year-old brother two steps backwards into a patch of dry, straw-coloured grass lining the bank of the Wenlock River, Cape York Peninsula, giving him enough space to escape the jaws of an unrestrained 4.7m crocodile named Juergen. “You know your exit?” she asks.

Her grandfather, Clarence Raines, died when she was 10 years old while she was visiting him in her mother’s hometown of Eugene, Oregon. Raines, a World War II veteran, was a man of some renown. He’d served his country, served his community in the local police force and, upon retirement, served his mind by reading every book in the Eugene Public Library. Bindi sometimes flips through the journal her grandfather kept documenting that remarkable feat, running her tanned forefinger along the endless names of authors and their works, listed A-to-Z. The journal makes her think anything can be achieved in a lifetime with the assistance of time and desire.

When Juergen moves, the earth vibrates. The 900kg croc has been on this Earth for 60 years, spending a good portion of that time swimming the food-rich, pristine waterways of the Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve – a 135,000ha Cape York floral and faunal sanctuary created by the Howard government in 2007. It’s run by the Irwin family as a living memorial to the irrepressible conservationist who was fatally pierced in the chest by a stingray barb while filming an underwater documentary on September 4, 2006.

Robert points to a loose path running between two stringybark trees. “I’ll run away along here,” he says. Bindi nods, satisfied.

Her parents named her “Bindi” from the Aboriginal term for “young girl”. During the 10-hour labour that brought her into this world 15 years ago, a documentary film cameraman was recording the event from the head of her mother’s hospital bed. Terri Irwin has come to the conclusion that her daughter possesses the soul of an 86-year-old. She looks at her now and sees a young woman in bloom, a girl finding her place in the world, in private wonder and in the public eye. She sees a lover of science, books and films; the girl who wrote a 1000-word essay on the environment for US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s global e-journal and then publicly slammed the editors when they deleted the essay’s edgier passages about the perils of overpopulation and “too many people using too many resources”. She sees a 15-year-old already studying a Certificate 3 in business and tourism at Sunshine Coast University. She sees a writer of poetry and handwritten letters to friends, a reader of Shakespeare and German poets Terri wouldn’t have dreamed of exploring in her teens. She sees the girl who wakes up every morning and plays DVDs of her father’s wildlife documentaries. She sees the future.

The first thing Bindi does in a crocodile capture is to establish a clear exit path should the crocodile – an archosaurian monster built some 200 million years ago as much for survival as for killing – decide to turn about-face and attack his well-intentioned if physically pathetic human captors. She scans the capture site, at a shady point along the Wenlock known as “Jutout”. The bait – a fly-blown feral pig carcass – is raised into the air by two sandbag weights. It smells like death, drips thick burgundy blood into a puddle two feet from Juergen’s swinging sawtooth tail. It’s warm and humid. High tide. There was no moon last night, no wind blowing on campsite tents – the sort of conditions in which Juergen felt comfortable enough to explore that tempting aroma of pig gut wafting across his 65cm head.

Bindi kneels down to study his skin. His marvellous structure. She sees bite marks atop Juergen’s head shields. His webbing is split in his left foot. Juergen’s getting on. He lived through the Vietnam War, through The Beatles. He’s getting slower. He’s been getting bullied by younger, quicker crocodiles in the Wenlock. Juergen can withstand anything except the march of time. “We humans always want to overpower things, don’t we?” she whispers. “We could never overpower these animals.”

There’s a quiet tension at the capture site. Silence and fear. “There’s always that spark of electricity,” she says. “No matter how many times you see them.”

For 10 years Bindi has watched University of Queensland zoologist Professor Craig Franklin trap and track 110 crocodiles through these waters with a team of researchers and animal wranglers from the Irwins’ 40ha Australia Zoo, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. She’s been a fixture in the longest-running zoological research project in the world, making groundbreaking discoveries into the behaviour and physiology of crocodiles in the wild. They’ve developed world-leading technologies, painlessly fixing satellite tracking units to the concrete-like backs of crocodiles’ heads. It was this team that discovered crocodiles can stay underwater for seven hours; that crocodiles can travel 60km in a single day; that they are affectionate lovers; protective parents; judicious thinkers. It was this team that revealed the crocodile’s remarkable homing abilities; watched a crocodile that was airlifted from the west coast of Cape York Peninsula to the east coast navigate its way back around the cape, swimming 400km in 20 days to return home, at one point shifting direction from north to south. “How?” Franklin ponders. “I don’t know.”

Bindi has assisted the professor in so many insertions of acoustic underwater movement tags that she could conduct the operation herself. “I love the science side of it,” she says.

Juergen is the biggest crocodile the team has ever trapped, an armoured behemoth with a sinister prehistoric growl – a bubbling and gassy lava pit in the depths of hell – that suggests self-awareness of its untouchable status as Earth’s largest terrestrial predator.

Juergen’s blood has been tested. The telemetric “ping” tracker that was placed inside his thick skin this time last year has been registered and Franklin is a little closer to finding out where these mysterious creatures go at night, what they eat, what they need to survive, how vital they are to the ecosystem, what they can tell us about our long-distant past and our precarious present.

Juergen’s free to go. Catching is easy; releasing is hard, and terrifying for the uninitiated. It’s a heart-racing nerve test as a predator the size of a large sofa creeps freely and slowly out of an open rope trap. Two of the team’s lead crocodile handlers, Toby Millyard and Stuart Gudgeon, cautiously circle the hulking beast like gladiators armed only with long bamboo sticks to gently direct Juergen towards the river. There’s a distinct tremor in Millyard’s voice as he hollers a warning to his support crew of six zoo workers: “OK, everybody back up, this is when he could go absolutely anywhere. Nobody turn their back on it.”

The crocodile pauses. “He’s building up energy,” Bindi whispers. “He’s getting ready to thrash. So the guys have to be careful because he can headshake and his head is like one big chunk of steel. Dad caught a crocodile years and years ago. It came back on us. He came our way. We were running through tall grass, no idea where it went, running and running. It just turned.”

She remembers her dad in this world. She remembers carrying his knife belt. She remembers him holding her little brother in his arms. She sometimes stares at Robert and marvels at how much he resembles her dad. His mannerisms, his speech, his recklessness, his courage, his tenderness. She loves Robert more than life itself. But they sometimes butt heads, like any brother and sister. Last night her mum told her that if she can get along with her brother she will be well prepared for marriage because the key to a happy marriage is learning not to torture the one you love the most.

She looks at Terri. White denim jeans, khaki shirt, long brown hair with a fringe; she stands five metres from the crocodile’s head, her legs weighted for quick movement, one eye on the beast, one eye on her children. When Bindi was eight, nine, 10 years old she’d wander into her mum’s room at night, curl up in her arms and ask her to tell a story about her dad. Adults tell her time heals all wounds but she doesn’t believe that; or at least thinks those adults are referring to time frames longer than seven years.

“Dad was the strong one in the family,” she says. “It was hard to process that. The strongest one died. Wait, how does that work?

“You know, to lose someone like that, it’s kind of like losing a part of your heart,” she says. “You’re never going to get that back. That’s just a fact of life.”

Not long ago a young girl – a fan of Bindi’s globally syndicated kids’ wildlife TV shows and her big-budget Hollywood movies like Free Willy: Escape from Pirate’s Cove andReturn to Nim’s Island – approached her with a soft-voiced question: “How did you cope?” She copes through a single thought: that everybody says goodbye in their own way. “We spent a month catching crocodiles with Dad,” she says. “That was our goodbye, that whole month we spent with him before he died. We’d go out in the afternoon and sit in the dinghy and watch fruit bats go over us as the sun was setting.”

Her mum often has dreams about her dad. The dreams always take place in mundane domestic settings. Steve’s still alive and they’re talking like everyday parents about their children, their day. The dreams feel so real, so normal, that when she wakes she is hit once more with the gut-punch of loss.

Her mum doesn’t date. She hasn’t tried to fall in love again. Terri puts it like this: “I kind of feel like I already had my ‘happily ever after’ and I’m almost living another life.” Her life is devoted to her children and her business, Australia Zoo. When she shakes your hand she says: “I’m sorry if I smell like snake wee.”

She calls this disappearing. There are days when she has to take her children away from it all, from the zoo, from business, from TV, from make-up, from praise, from criticism. She knows what’s out there. Public life has positives and negatives. She never has to explain to strangers why her children don’t have a dad but she does have to filter abusive messages on her daughter’s Twitter account. She knows she divides opinion. She knows there are people out there who criticise the way she’s chosen to raise her kids but nobody questions her more than she questions herself. “Everyone can have an opinion,” she says. “I’m not gonna get bogged down in whether or not someone thinks what we’re doing is right or wrong. We all think we’re screw-ups to a certain degree as parents. We’re all trying our best. That’s what I’m doing. But I reckon it’s about just loving your kids.”

She turns 50 next year. She’s been asking herself lately: “How many more years, really, can I fly through the air and land on a croc?” These trips to Cape York are as much about science as they are about legacy, about knowledge transfer. It’s a pilgrimage. Bindi’s dad is here, in the gentle river, in the sounds of the brolgas flying above their heads, in their stories.

“Steve lived his whole life for this kind of research,” Terri says. “It’s not going to stop. As long as my legs work I won’t stop. There’s no research project that has funding in perpetuity. I want to be that research project.” Over 10 years she estimates she’s poured $3 million into this research. She will go broke to ensure it continues. She will lose everything to keep it going because, she says, the whole surreal “crikey” Crocodile Hunter dream was only ever about spreading a better understanding of animals. “It’s always been about the science,” she says. “But formal science makes boring television.”

Juergen sticks his head out of the trap net. “Let’s be real careful not to upset him guys,” Terri says. He turns his head left and spots the water. Then, unexpectedly, he arcs his neck right, towards his audience, causing a ripple of disquiet through the team. Bindi silently pulls Robert two more steps back into the scrub lining the riverbank. Heartbeats. Thumping heartbeats. Then the crocodile shifts left and shuffles into the river. Deep inhale. Long exhale. “Well done,” Terri hollers.

The research team busily resets the crocodile trap, dropping sandbag weights and rebuilding a makeshift natural entry out of found logs.

Robert runs off towards the team’s tin boats tied to trees at the riverbank. He swings on tree limbs, leaps over rocks, sings a few random lines of Gangnam Style. Bindi and Terri watch him fall and crash and dance in dust. “Dad would have loved this,” Bindi says.

A sign is stuck to the unisex toilet saying “Neanderthal wees” are encouraged for men to save on camp water. Campsite cooks prepare Wenlock River barramundi pancakes. Kettles boil on the campsite stove. Team members make toasted jaffle sandwiches from last night’s chicken curry. A heavy branch drops from a towering tree and lands near the communal campfire square. A found snake sleeps in a green drawstring bag on the dinner table. At the ping-pong table, Robert attempts to better his record of 18 consecutive backhand returns.

Franklin quietly approaches Terri, who is resting in an armchair and checking messages on her phone. He bears bad news. He’s just been informed Queensland’s Newman government intends to remove crocodiles, regardless of size, from the northern bank of Trinity Inlet in Cairns to Ellis Beach, about 50km north, taking in the Barron River where, six days from now, on September 3, a 2.5m crocodile will be trapped by government rangers.

State environment minister Andrew Powell will put a public call out to “private contractors” to commit to the 12-month crocodile removal trial as part of the state’s crocodile management plan. “While this is crocodile habitat, it is also an area where 160,000 people live and tourists come to visit,” Powell says. Under the plan, crocodiles will be “captured, trapped or harpooned” depending on the animal’s size and behaviour: “All crocodiles removed from the wild are placed in a zoo or crocodile farm or, in some cases, humanely euthanised”.

The Cairns Post will run a headline: “Calling all croc wranglers to Cairns”. The Queensland government has declared open season on Cairns crocodiles. “There’s plenty of room for crocodiles in North Queensland but not in or near waters frequented by numbers of people, especially children and tourists who are not crocodile savvy,” says the Member for Barron River, Michael Trout. “The ever-present threat of crocodiles has been a constant source of concern for the parents of surf lifesaving nippers. This will be a big task, which is why we are asking private operators to help us make our waterways safer.”

Franklin walks into the campsite’s makeshift IT room, a mess of power boards, camera chargers and laptops. He immediately sends an email to Powell. Last year he brought Powell to the Steve Irwin Wildlife Reserve to give him a first-hand insight into crocodile behaviour and their critical role in stabilising the ecosystems of North Queensland. He wants no association with this decision. “With your course of action,” he writes, “my belief is that, regrettably, an attack will happen at some time in the future given that the general public and tourists will be led to the false belief that you can swim in crocodile habitat.”

Franklin is as dumbfounded as he is gutted. “It will probably be some unfortunate tourist who heard about ‘Proactive Removal Zones’ in Cairns and who believes it is safe to swim in the Daintree River,” he says. “It’s a mixed message. Education is everything.

“I went through this with him last year. I sat him down. I went through all our discoveries. I showed him why you will never be able to guarantee that you will exclude crocodiles from a crocodile habitat. It’s very difficult to patrol 60km of water and that’s the area of water you need to cover to ensure an animal doesn’t swim in there. You won’t pick up every animal. They can spend 70 per cent of their day underwater. You will never know how many crocodiles are actually there.”

Terri rubs her temples. “It makes my head hurt,” she says. “There you go. The writing is on the wall. It will be the next community, the next river, the next town and then … ” She shakes her head, not wanting to voice her next thought.

Her daughter voices it for her. “There goes the species,” Bindi says.

“There’s always been crocs there and there will always be crocs there,” Terri says. “Only now you’re completely disrupting the balance. You’re making things truly dangerous. And it’s ultimately not going to change anything except people won’t see the crocodiles as much. Which is phenomenally dangerous. How gut-wrenchingly sad will it be if some kid gets taken because someone decided we had a croc-free zone?”

Bindi rests a hand on her mum’s shoulder. For the past seven years she has watched her mother fulfilling her dad’s dream on this wildlife reserve. Each year she’s watched that dream grow more endangered. She has learnt the hard way that nothing lasts forever. The Irwins can withstand anything except the march of time.

There are 154 native birds on this reserve, 43 reptile species, 18 amphibious species, 15 mammals and 43 freshwater fish species. There’s a rare palm on the edge of the Wenlock River that takes 60 years to grow out of its surrounding tropical tree canopy and find the sun. It flowers briefly, only once in its life, and dies.

In October last year, the Queensland government declared bauxite mining company Cape Alumina’s long-planned Pisolite Hills mine and port project – located between 2.8km and 15km from the Wenlock – a “significant project for which an environmental impact statement is required”. The company expects the project to boost Queensland’s economic activity by $1.2 billion, $600 million in Far North Queensland alone. It expects to create 1700 jobs over the course of the mine’s 15-year life, a boon for local indigenous communities. Subject to permits, Cape Alumina expects to be in production by 2015. Terri believes the project will threaten vital natural springs on the reserve and in turn the reserve’s unique biodiversity: “Removing any bauxite from this plateau would destroy the springs, rainforest, a previously undescribed ecosystem, and affect countless species right through the Wenlock River.”

Cape Alumina’s managing director, Graeme Sherlock, says he “agrees with Mrs Irwin that the small, perennial springs on western Cape York have environmental values that should be protected”. The company has identified more than 150 of these springs on western Cape York, of which fewer than 10 per cent occur within the project area. It says it will maintain “extensive buffer zones” around them.

It’s cold comfort for Terri. When they first arrived at Stone’s Crossing this year, pulled up at the glorious river crossing that provides access to the reserve local bushies call “Steve’s Place”, Terri turned to Bindi with a grim smile: “Well, another year the place is safe”.

They drive to Stone’s Crossing now. Bindi sits in the middle seat of a road-rocking LandCruiser. Robert bounces in the rear seats behind her. They drive through the reserve’s colourful acres of plant life, through rare floral wonders from which Griffith University scientists have been collecting samples for experiments in natural compounds to combat everything from cancer to malaria to TB. The reserve is a global research go-to zone. There are scientists from around the world conducting research here on bird-eating tarantulas, rare ground lillies, palm cockatoos, speartooth sharks.

Bindi looks out her window. “If there was one thing losing Dad taught me it’s that life is fragile,” she says. “You might be here one day and the next you might be gone. I felt that with Dad. It was like Dad was a hurricane. He really had this sense of urgency about him. Because he knew, I think.”

She nods, slowly forming the words in her head. “At some level, he knew he wasn’t going to be here long. So he’d always try and do everything he could right now. And looking back, I can see why. I mean, he didn’t have that long. I don’t know how long I have. I might have 80 years. I might have 20 years. I want to carry on in Dad’s footsteps. As I get older, I’d love to start tackling bigger issues. I’m going to take that time I’m given and use it wisely and use it all.”

The Irwins pile out of the LandCruiser at Stone’s Crossing, where clear water rushes over river boulders so smooth and round they look like ten-pin bowling balls. Robert spots a sloping sand dune along the riverbank. “Mum, can I jump off that?” he asks. She nods her head, reluctantly. The boy doesn’t stop moving. His interest in the world is insatiable. He wants to touch it, hold it, bury himself in it. “Hey Mum,” he says, two fists clenched at his chest in enthusiasm. “I’ve created a new word. It’s a mix between ‘awesome’ and ‘great’: ‘Awe-reat’.”

He launches himself off the dune. He shows his mum a tree-climbing caterpillar rash running up the insides of his forearms, doesn’t give it a second thought. “Hey Mum,” he says. “I think I want to buy a Canon camera.” He’s saving up to buy a professional camera for wildlife photography. “I have to save up $365.”

Bindi and Robert walk along a sandbank where they spot a slide mark indicating the presence of a croc roughly two metres long. Terri watches her children exploring the waters for signs. It’s a quiet moment; just the sound of the river. “I miss Steve every day,” she says. “I’m lonely. But I’m not afraid of being alone because I’m with Bindi and Robert. Before I met Steve, I’d always figured my lot in life was being the crazy spinster woman up on the block doing wildlife work.” Her children wrestle and hug on the sandbank. “What we had was very special,” she says. “I’m very grateful for it. Even if I’d known how it would end, I’d do it all again.”

Terri walks up to her children and they explore the crocodile slide-marks together. “I reckon that’s a 10-footer,” Robert says. Terri nods. “Looks recent,” Bindi says.

“Oh, that’s recent,” says her mum.