Early Life

In Queensland, Australia, the Irwin name had been synonymous with wildlife rescue since before Steve was born. His parents, Robert “Bob” Eric Irwin and Lynette “Lyn” Hakainsson, were both avidly involved with the cause. While they were very good at their jobs,  a plumber and maternity nurse respectively, Bob and Lyn shared a passion for rescuing, studying and caring for wild animals. Between Lyn’s injured and orphaned mammals and Bob’s lizards and snakes, the Irwins had a regular menagerie at their Essendon home.

“My parents and my environment molded me to be who I am,” Steve told the Worcester Telegram and Gazette in 2002, “and then they helped me to blossom, go past that, because they knew I had instinct.”

Steven Robert Irwin, was born on February 22, 1962, two decades to the day after Lyn’s own birth. He was the second child, with an older sister, Joy, and a younger sister Mandy.

irwin family

 From left : Steve, Joy, Lyn, Bob and Mandy

Source: Simon & Schuster

When he turned six, he was given a 12-foot-long (3.6-meter-long) scrub python, which he named Fred. Steve inherited his father’s love for herpetolotgy and his mother’s love for mammals. Growing up he helped house, feed, cuddle and cure injured and orphaned animals of all shapes and sizes.

“ My mum would set up chairs like this with fake pouches – you know, marsupials, marsupial pouches- and she had to become their mum, well actually we did, you know so I was bottle-feeding joey kangaroos like every night of my life and that was normal. It was completely normal. We had possums running through the roof, you know Mum raised up sugar gliders and, you know, wombats and koalas running through the house, yeah it wasn’t just all snakes and things that can kill you. It really wasn’t, Steve told Reader’s Digest Australia.

lyn

Source: australiazoo.com.au

The year Steve turned eight, Bob, Lyn and their kids, and their creatures moved to a 4-acre (1.6- hectare) plot of land in Queensland, the Australian state that occupies the continent’s north-eastern corner. Located largely in a tropical zone, coastal Queensland. In April 1973, the Irwins opened the Beerwah Reptile Park, the humble attraction that would, over two decades, evolve into the world-famous Australia Zoo. It had taken a full three years of hard work to make the place ready for the public. Growing up in a zoo would no doubt have influenced Steve’s sense of self over time.

bob irwinSource: Chelsea House Pub

 He jumped his first crocodile when he was just nine. The animal was 2-3 feet (0.6m to 0.9m) longer than the Irwins had estimated from their limited, spotlit view into the murky water. “It was,” Steve told Reader’s Digest magazine, “one of my greatest, if not my greatest childhood memory, [because] all I wanted to be was my dad.”

younger steve

Source: www.internationalcrocodilerescue.com.au

With passionate and nurturing role models in the form of his parents, his affiliation with nature only strengthened with time. Efforts to rescue “problem” crocodiles began essentially as a father-son operation in the early 1970s, when Steve was just a child himself. Saving these widely feared creatures eventually became so important to the Irwins that they founded International Crocodile Rescue (ICR).