When Bindi Irwin arrived in Los Angeles last August to compete on Dancing with the Stars, she had never even worn high heels. The first time she tried on a pair, she fell over – and then she had to perform in them. Her dance partner was patient, but Bindi was awful. She had never taken any kind of dance class. “It was terrifying,” says the 17-year-old. “I’m just this girl from Australia who works in khakis and wears boots and kisses rhinos. I had no idea what I was doing.”
Even worse, Bindi could tell the show’s producers were quietly horrified. Yet they underestimated her. This is a girl whose one-word description of herself is “determined”.
Bindi kicked off the series with a cute Crocodile Rock routine in green sequins – and went on to wow the judges with a string of knockout performances, many of them touching tributes to her dad, Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, who died nine years ago. Along the way she gathered gruesome blisters and bruises, snapped tendons in her foot and lost three toenails. Yet she kept smiling, rehearsing all day and then coming home to study dance videos until her mother told her to go to bed.
Viewers all over the world fell in love with Bindi’s inspiring, can-do attitude, and she ended up taking out the mirrorball trophy – after nabbing the highest number of perfect scores in the show’s 21-season history. As she was hoisted onto shoulders, she cried, “Thank you for changing my life!” Suddenly the world saw Bindi anew – as not only the precocious daughter of Steve, but as a driven, talented young woman in her own right, destined for bigger things. It seemed like a coming out, a debutante ball – just on a televised, international scale.
Her mum uses a wildlife analogy. “It felt like a little bird that was fledging,” says Terri Irwin. “She’s been standing on the edge of the nest for a while now, and she certainly got to try her own wings, so I was very proud of her. Just watching her, I thought, there’s something her father and I could never have done.” Yes, the show upped Bindi’s profile – she now has more than a million Instagram followers – but that’s not why it was transformative. More than that, the experience gave her license to deal with the grief she has suppressed for the past decade.
“I kind of just went, this is a moment where I need to let go and sort through how I feel,” she says now. “It changed my life because I was able to close those chapters that I’d never really been able to close before. They’re kind of left open and you shove those parts of your life aside and try not to dwell on them, but it really gave me an opportunity to say, ‘Okay, I can be at peace with it, and I’m okay.'”
When her father died at the age of 44 in September 2006, after being pierced in the chest by a stingray barb, “it was like this bomb went off and nothing was ever the same,” says Bindi. “But you can still be happy.”
Spreading that message, she says, was the number one reason she went on the show. Bindi preaches happiness as a conscious choice, with all the hard-won wisdom of someone three times her age. “Sometimes the happiest people have had the hardest lives, but they choose to be happy because they want to make a good life,” she says. “It takes a strong person to be joyful and to be kind.”
Back home at Australia Zoo, in the lush Sunshine Coast hinterland, Bindi is in her khakis and sneakers on a steamy 30-degree day, thrilled to be free of spray tans and skimpy costumes. “I don’t think I’ll ever wear things like that again,” she says, “but it pushes you to accept who you are.”
After flying into Australia less than two days earlier, Bindi is so jetlagged she feels like she’s underwater, but she’s back in the make-up chair for The Weekly’s photo shoot. Ever the professional, she appears unfazed as she sits in the green room of the Crocoseum, fielding questions as three people do her face, hair and nails at the same time.
Over the next three hours, wild water dragons scuttle across our path as we cross the zoo’s 260 hectares in a golf buggy. Throughout it all, she punctuates the conversation with multiple thank yous, shout-outs to zoo staff, and offers to carry equipment. Bindi makes a point of hugging everyone she meets – it’s her way of leaving an imprint on the people around her. “I worry so much because you don’t know how long you have on this earth,” she says, “and I don’t want a day to go by where I feel like I’ve missed an opportunity or not spread that little bit of love in some way.”
She wants to inspire people – an ambition that would probably sound arrogant coming from any other 17-year-old. Bindi, however, was recently named one of Time magazine’s 30 Most Influential Teens of 2015.
A keen reader whose favourite book is The Alchemist, Bindi spends a lot of time thinking about life. She loves quotes and pop psychology slogans, and sprinkles them liberally through her Twitter and Instagram accounts: “We must find the light in every day”, “Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire” and “Grief does not change you. It reveals you.”
Beside a picture of herself with Terri and 12-year-old brother Robert, she writes, “Grateful beyond words for my little family.” Bindi champions positivity and gratitude, and fans call her an inspiration. She talks a lot about being blessed. From the outside, it can all seem a bit saccharine and sophomoric, even affected. Then you meet her – and it’s hard not to fall under her spell. She
is just lovely. Warm, accommodating, and completely devoid of cynicism.
Her mum says she was born that way. “She’s always been an easy child,” says Terri. “We started travelling with Bindi when she was six days old. She’s just always been a wake-up-happy baby and an optimistic person. She’s got a lot of her dad’s qualities – she’s very strong and determined and she still has a very soft and empathetic heart.”
When Bindi finds out I’ve just lost my father, she seems genuinely concerned and steps into counsellor mode – a role she has obviously played countless times before. Since the death of her dad, strangers have felt compelled to tell her their own tales of tragedy. “It’s not really until you’re in that club that you see how many ghosts walk among us,” says Bindi. “After you lose someone close to you, you go, oh my goodness, I had no idea how many people live with these horrendous scars – they look completely happy on the outside, but on the inside they’ve been through their own personal wars.”
Being upbeat and optimistic, she says, “just makes things less depressing” – but is her relentless positivity always authentic? Bindi takes a moment to think, not defensive at all. “I always try to find the best in life because I want to be happy,” she says. “That feels real. It feels like who I am. It is who I am.”
After Steve died, Terri started asking her children every night to name their favourite part of the day. “On really hard days it would just be how good the shower felt,” says Bindi, “but you could always find something.”
Time hasn’t healed the pain of losing her dad, but it has changed it. Bindi can focus now on the happy times with him: swimming with dolphins, catching lizards and rescuing penguins. “It turns into a happy-sad,” she says. “You may not cry every day, but you still miss them with everything you’ve got. It’s just like this ache that stays.”
At Steve’s memorial, Bindi was just eight, but she remembers insisting that she speak. “I was who I am today, even back then,” she says, “and I was already trying to affect people.” With her dad gone, she tried to stay strong, but she developed a deep fear of losing her mother and brother – an anxiety that lingers more than nine years later. “The strongest person has been taken away, so what about everybody else?” she says. “When your superhero dies, that’s really scary. It was really bad when I was younger, and now I just have this sense that I want to protect them, so it’s always, ‘Be safe’ and ‘I love you’.”
Bindi and her boyfriend, Chandler Powell.
Since she was a little girl, Bindi has used the same strategy to calm herself down: she draws two circles and writes in them what she can and can’t control. From what she says, Bindi apparently worries quite a bit – about not wasting a minute, letting people down, wanting to make her family proud. “Every day of my life,” she says, “I try to be the best person I can be.” That’s a lot of pressure, even if she’s the one exerting it. And criticism doesn’t help – which is why she tries not to read it. “It just makes you so sad because I try so hard to do the best I can and to make other people happy,” she says, “and then when you hear people don’t like what you’re doing or saying or how you’re approaching life, it’s like, I’m giving everything I’ve got. What else can I do? You kind of want to go, ‘Well, you try it!'”
People have long warned Terri that the tricky years are coming, but teenage rebellion seems to have bypassed Bindi. She says alcohol – and the attendant lack of control – has never appealed;
in fact, she has never even tried Coke or Fanta. To some, that might seem freakishly innocent; many a mother, though, would probably like to clone her. As a role model for kids, she’s the anti-Kardashian.
She does, however, have a boyfriend: 19-year-old professional wakeboarder and Florida college student Chandler Powell. The pair met more than two years ago, when she led him and his family on a tour around the zoo. Afterwards, he asked Terri if he could correspond with Bindi, and the couple fell in love. Chandler gets the thumbs-up from Terri and has bonded with Robert over their mutual love of fossils and palaeontology.
“My mum always describes him as an old-fashioned gentleman,” says Bindi. “He’s always there to keep me going. He’s a sweet, sweet person.” They see each other every two to three months and stay in touch every day via Skype and FaceTime.
Now back at Australia Zoo, Bindi is very aware that the future of the park and her father’s legacy rest squarely on her shoulders, but she is more than ready to take on the challenge.
“He’s the first person I’ve met who understands my life – the travel and the work and that real dedication and determination,” she says. “I think that’s why I love him so much – because he gets my world.”
At Australia Zoo, there’s a poster of Bindi with an echidna at the entrance and a bronzed statue of her whole family just inside the gate. Head for the freshwater crocs and you’ll hear her singing piped through the speakers. Here it’s all about the Irwins, but mostly it’s about Bindi. The future of the family business (and its 400 employees) seems to rest on her 17-year-old shoulders.
Asked whether that’s a burden, Bindi says, “There’s a difference between pressure and responsibility. I can feel that responsibility on my shoulders and I’m ready to carry it.” If she sounds 17 going on 35, it’s because she has already packed so much into her short life. She has hosted her own TV show, won an Emmy, starred in a Hollywood movie, had her own clothing line and action figure. She has just completed her schooling, all by correspondence. Yet that, she points out, doesn’t make her abnormal. “There’s a difference between normal and common,” she says. “People often confuse them. My life is definitely not common, but for me it’s my normal.”
Semantics are important to Bindi. Common or normal, responsibility or pressure: Bindi chooses the more positive option – and, by extension, outlook. Bindi was filmed being born and has been on the showbiz conservation path ever since. Has she ever stopped to ponder whether it’s really what she wants? “It’s in my blood,” she says. “I’m not going to wake up one day and say, ‘Well, I’m done saving the world. I’m now going to become a banker.’ It’s why I was put on this planet. I feel like it’s my destiny.”
In 2006, just after Steve Irwin died, his close friend and film producer, John Stainton, recounted a conversation he had had with Steve only a few weeks earlier. The two men were chatting and John told Steve he believed that Bindi would eventually eclipse the fame of her father. Steve replied, “That would be my only wish.”
Bindi, it seems, is determined to make her dad’s dream come true.
Despite a shaky start, Bindi and her dance partner, Derek Hough, went on to win the 21st season of Dancing with the Stars in the US, with the highest number of perfect scores in the show’s history.
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
