Steve Irwin
If ever there was a figure to whom the cliché “larger than life” applies, it has to be Steve Irwin, the khaki-clad, reptile-wrangling, celebrity naturalist whose Herculean feats—wrestling pythons and riding man-eating crocs—transfixed a generation of fans and made him, for a time, one of Australia’s best-known and most bankable exports. At the height of its popularity, his documentary series The Crocodile Hunter attracted half a billion viewers, almost a tenth of the population of the entire planet. The image of him standing, one arm at full stretch, as a crocodile arcs upward out of the mud in front of him is one of those images that seems to evoke a whole era. He was charming, full of boyish, larrikin humour, preternaturally energetic, and possessed of an infectious love for wildlife that inspired many to take up the conservation cause.
His death in 2006 shocked us the way the death of a circus performer does. The spectacle
