The Irwins

The Irwin family invites The Weekly to spend three sun-soaked days with them on Lady Elliot Island. There, in a rare and revealing interview, they tell Michael Sheather how the tragic loss of husband and father Steve still inspires their passions.

Robert Irwin, teenage son of the original wildlife warrior Steve Irwin, stands outside the entrance to a magnificent century-old timber Queenslander. One moment he is joking with his older sister Bindi’s boyfriend Chandler Powell – a good-natured rough-and-tumble, push-and-shove mateship – and the next he is running through leaf-scattered undergrowth, bending to pick up a tiny ball of fluff that has fallen from a nearby tree.

“It was the sweetest thing,” recalls his sister Bindi, later. “Robert spotted a baby bird falling from its nest in the upper branches of the tree. It was struggling on the ground and the father bird was frantic and distressed. The baby bird couldn’t fly yet, so there was no way that the mother could get it back into the nest, and if it stayed on the ground then some other bird would come along and kill it. There was no way Robert would let that happen.

“He jumped up on Chandler’s shoulders and they tried to put the little chick back but even together they weren’t tall enough. So Chandler got into the golf buggy and repositioned it under the tree and Robert climbed up on top of its canopy and finally managed to put the chick back into the nest. That’s not the only fallen chick they helped. They must have rescued at least four while we were on Lady Elliot Island.”

It would be hard to find a better example of how the Irwin family rolls than this heart-warming story about rescue and responsibility. All of them – Terri, Bindi and Robert – have inherited a clear and unshakable dedication to doing whatever they can to help the animal kingdom survive and prosper in a world overrun with pollution, development, environmental disaster and the increasingly obvious threat of global warming.