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It’s hard to comprehend it’s been 20 years since the world lost the great Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin.
It was Monday September 4, 2006, and Australia’s favourite knockabout bloke was gone – fatally pierced in the chest by a stingray’s barb while filming an underwater documentary off Port Douglas in Far North Queensland.
Heartbreakingly, fellow Queenslander John Stainton – Steve’s long-time close friend, manager and producer – was by his side when his mate took his last breath. Two decades on, the memories haunt him.
It’s been 20 years since the iconic Steve Irwin’s tragic death. (Credit: Getty)
“It’s tough to talk about without choking up and weeping like a baby – it’s still surreal all these years on. It was awful, horrific, horrible and just so incredibly sad, and even today I struggle to accept that he really is gone,” John, 73, reveals exclusively to Woman’s Day in the lead-up to the 20th anniversary of Steve Irwin’s tragic passing.
THAT FATEFUL DAY
“It was the sheer suddenness of it all that was so difficult to accept – Steve was supposed to outlive the lot of us.”
A TV industry legend, John produced and directed more than 350 television programs with Steve in the Crocodile Hunter franchise, the pair living their best lives travelling the globe in search of the next big wildlife adventure.
“Steve had a million ideas, but he’d come up with a winner for a new series – Ocean’s Deadliest – featuring underwater creatures you don’t want to mess with. We were filming that day at Batt Reef off Port Douglas,” John pauses, taking a deep breath before recalling what happened next.
“I was with our small crew on the main support boat – Steve went out with our experienced underwater cameraman Justin [Lyons]. As it happened, Steve spotted a massive stingray flat out on the ocean floor – he indicated it would be a great shot to swim over the top of it to show how big it was.
“It must’ve thought he was a shark because it suddenly threw its tail up a few times and struck Steve in the chest.
Steve’s best mate John Stainton comforts Terri and the children at Steve’s funeral in 2006. (Credit: Getty)
“Justin dropped everything to grab Steve, including the camera that kept rolling, and called another boat in the area and radioed us to say Steve had been hit by a stingray – nothing could prepare us for what happened next.”
According to the Courier Mail’s report at the time, as they raced back for help, Justin reportedly told Steve to think of his children, Bindi, then eight, and Robert, two, while fighting for his life. Steve looked up and said his final words, “I’m dying.”
“I can never unsee what came next – my invincible mate, my protector, the bloke who constantly reassured me over the years he’d take the bullet for me, was gone.
“To this day, I’ve not watched that underwater footage – I recall seeing part of it at the police station in the hours after, but I was in such a state of shock, I decided I don’t want that to be my lasting memory of Steve – I owed him more than that,” he says proudly of his friend.
EARLY DAYS & MATESHIP
John chuckles remembering the first time he ever met his Wildlife Warrior mate.
“I was doing a TV commercial here in Brisbane circa 1988 for Pizza Hut – it was a studio set around a picnic rug. For some reason I had to find a real frilly lizard to run across the blanket, and someone suggested calling the Beerwah Reptile Park [now Australia Zoo] and I got Bob Irwin Snr on the blower,” explains John.
“Next minute, Steve was on the line – ‘No worries, Johnny, I can bring it down to you.’ He looked after that lizard like it was his own baby!
“A year or two later Power’s Brewery wanted me to make a TV ad about their new canned beer with a couple of fellas fishing on a creek bed, and it required a live croc. I went to see Steve, ‘Not a problem mate and we’ll use my hand, not some poor bugger.’ After he saw the storyboard, he took me to meet the croc, and we ended up shooting it at one of the zoo’s ponds that he’d re-created. Safe to say the ad was a raging success!”
Steve was proud of his childhood home in Beerwah where his family’s legacy, Australia Zoo, which his mother Lyn (left) and father Bob started, remains a tourist attraction.
That was Steve, according to John – he never lost his cheeky boyish charm. A proud adopted Queenslander, having moved from Victoria as a young boy, Steve was even more proud of his childhood home in Beerwah where his family’s legacy, Australia Zoo, remains a tourist attraction.
“Nothing was a problem because he was the real deal – the complete package. Over the years, we’ve been dubbed ‘The Odd Couple’ but we just clicked – and in the end what I realised is we shared a deep passion for all creatures great and small.”
A STAR IS BORN
It was early days, but John knew a star when he saw one. “In around 1992 I was managing my good friend Jacki MacDonald and I suggested to her to get this guy Steve onto one of her segments on Ten’s original series of Healthy, Wealthy & Wise. No surprise, they were terrific together!”
But it was a chance look at some of Steve’s hundreds of hours of croc wrangling he’d videoed up at his property in remote Far North Queensland that finally convinced John that Steve was special.
“He filmed all this raw footage off this clunky old Panasonic camera he had. He would send the tapes down to show his dad Bob the work he was doing up there with the crocs.
“I had boxes of these tapes given to me, and I’m ashamed to say they sat unwatched on top of my TV for months,” he says. “One night I got home around midnight and put on the first tape. Three hours later, at 3am, I pressed rewind and watched the same tape again until 6am. At 6.30 I called my mate, the late Mike Lattin, at [Ten] and said, ‘You have to see this bloke Steve Irwin – he’s a freak!’
“He said he wasn’t putting secondhand stuff up on his network and somehow found the money for me to make a pilot – and the rest, as they say, is history!
“We made the very first Crocodile Hunter pilot in 1992, and Ten ran it up against ratings juggernaut Fast Forward on a Thursday night – and I’m pretty sure it won the slot!” he says with a smile.
John recalls it was around the same time Steve announced he’d got married and had been to Oregon in the US to tie the knot with new wife Terri. He soon learned she was an American who Steve had met the year before in 1991 after she visited the Beerwah Reptile Park, where he was giving a wildlife demonstration.
Steve was a natural in front of the camera and soon the entire world wanted a piece of the Crocodile Hunter. (Credit: Getty)
“It all happened very quickly – six weeks I recall, and on return from the US he asked if Terri could come into the mix for filming, which of course she did, and from there on playing a major role in his life.”
Steve was a chip off the old block – dad Bob Snr, his hero, and mum Lyn were the epicentre of his universe, John says. “His dad was his ultimate role model who taught him so much – he only ever wanted to be just like him. When his mother Lyn was tragically killed in a single motor vehicle accident in 2000, he called me – he was inconsolable and he never really recovered.”
While John is open to discuss anything around his mate Steve, he is adamant he won’t comment on the longstanding family rift between Terri and Bob Snr over alleged conflicting ideas around Australia Zoo.
FAMILY RIFT
According to reports, their supposed fallout led to Bob’s sudden departure in 2008 from the original reptile and fauna park and family home he’d lovingly built with Lyn back in the 1970s for Steve and his two sisters Mandy and Joy, and where Steve spent his childhood caring for native animals and wrestling crocodiles.
It’s now believed Steve’s grown children, Bindi, 28, and Robert, 22, are all but estranged from their grandfather Bob, 87.
“I’ve always been very fond of Bob Snr, who by the way is the ‘full bob’. I speak to him regularly and he is as driven about conservation and our planet as ever.”
John admits all families have dynamics and hopes for everyone’s sake they find “peace”, adding that while he hasn’t kept in touch with Terri over the years, it was only because there wasn’t really a need to.
Steve worshipped his father Bob Irwin Snr. (Credit: Getty)
“I do know Steve would be so proud of his kids. To see Robert’s star on the rise is remarkable – his saving grace is he’s become his own person and clearly loves doing his own thing,” he says.
“The best thing that happened to Robert, who is so much like his dad, is that he very smartly didn’t try to be a next-generation crocodile hunter. That would’ve been disastrous – there’s only one Steve Irwin. And Bindi appears to have found her place out of the limelight, and by all reports is loving motherhood. Like her dad, family is everything.”
For John, it’s now about honouring his special mate who not only saved his life twice, but who in his final days sent one last message highlighting their special bond.
John says he believes Steve would be so proud of his family, who continue to carry on his legacy of wildlife conservation at Australia Zoo. (Credit: Instagram)
“In the days before his death we were filming at his research property in remote North Queensland, and he delivered a piece to camera that was so powerful, an eerie “finale” style tribute, thanking me for all I’d done for him, and paid homage to his crew, which I thought at the time was so unusual,” he says.
“Turns out he was delivering his final farewell to us… days later he was gone.
“Steve was fearless, loyal, brave and courageous – and so curious. I’m going to remember him when I sit down and finally write my book as the man who not just changed my life, but millions of others. We did pretty good for a bloke from Brisbane and a kid from Beerwah – what a ride mate, what an amazing ride.”
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