Irwins decline offer on funeral
Kevin Meade
September 07, 2006
STEVE Irwin will be buried in private after his family declined offers of a state funeral, with his father Bob yesterday saying the international celebrity should be remembered as an ordinary bloke.
The laconic, slightly built retired reptile farmer was obviously grief-stricken but he faced the public because it was what his "mate" Steve would have wanted.
Similarly, he declined offers by Prime Minister John Howard and Queensland Premier Peter Beattie for a state funeral.
"He's just an ordinary bloke and he wanted to be remembered as an ordinary bloke," said the 66-year-old Mr Irwin, whose two-year-old grandson Bob was named after him.
As Queensland police yesterday locked footage of Irwin's death by stingray in a safe, his manager John Stainton said the film was so harrowing it should be destroyed to prevent it ever being made public.
In an emotional interview on CNN's Larry King Live, Mr Stainton said he had watched the tape of Irwin, 44, suffering the fatal stingray wound and vowed "it will never see the light of day".
And legendary French ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau's grandson Philippe, who was with Mr Irwin and Mr Stainton at the time of the tragedy, vowed to complete the marine documentary Irwin died making.
Irwin's widow, Terri, is understood to have seen her husband's body at the Caloundra funeral parlour where he was taken on Tuesday night, after a post-mortem examination in Cairns confirmed he was killed by the barb of a stingray.
Yesterday, two four-wheel-drive vehicles - presumably carrying Irwin's family - arrived with a two-car police escort at the parlour to make further arrangements.
The mourners were shielded from the media by police and security guards during their visit.
While there has been speculation that Irwin would have wanted to be buried at Australia Zoo, the Sunshine Coast wildlife park established by his father, no such application has been made to Caloundra City Council.
Mr Irwin said Terri - who spoke to Australia Zoo staff in a two-way radio broadcast on Tuesday night - was "holding up very well".
"She's extremely concerned for her children, Bindi and Robert, obviously," he said.
Most of the crew who were with Irwin at the time of his death have left Port Douglas, where they had been filming, to travel home. Irwin's boat, Croc One, left the north Queensland tourist town yesterday afternoon.
Mr Irwin said he would help Terri carry on his son's conservation work.
"I retired from the zoo many years ago. I still do conservation work on the property and I'm going to help Terri wherever I can to carry on his conservation work."
In front of about 100 media representatives, and hundreds of onlookers at the Sunshine Coast tourist attraction, Mr Irwin lamented the loss of his "best mate".
"Steve and I weren't like father and son," he said. "We never were. We were good mates. I'll remember Steve as my best mate."
Mr Irwin fondly recalled the times when Steve would visit him at his farm at Blackbutt, northwest of Brisbane.
"He'd come up to the property and we'd wander off, maybe have a barbecue. Maybe we'd just wander off into the scrub, light a fire, might have a couple of smokes ... and we might sit around the fire talking for hours on end."
Mr Irwin was working on the farm when he heard the tragic news of his son's death.
"This may sound really, really weird but at the moment I heard the news, I was about to bury a cow that died calving."
Many of his son's fans may have regarded him as a superhero, but Mr Irwin said he never believed Steve was invincible.
"Over the years, Steve and I have had a lot of adventures together and there's been many occasions when anything could have gone wrong," he said. "And Steve knew the risks involved in the type of work he was doing and he wouldn't have wanted it any other way."
Mr Irwin said he and his son coped with dangerous scrapes by laughing at them. "Both of us over the years have had some very close shaves, I suppose you would say," he said. "And we both approached it the same way, in that we made jokes of it."
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