[Marxism] Steve Irwin

[John Tognolini <j_tognolini@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Steve Irwin

I was killing time, waiting for a Blue Mountains train
in Penrith, the last link with Sydney?s Western
suburbs before the mountains. I was feeling some what
gloomy that I could not attend the funeral of
John/Cummo Cummins, my old BLF Comrade, president of
the Victorian Construction Division of the
Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union, in my
hometown Melbourne, due to family commitments. 

And the news came over the radio on my phone, about
Steve Irwin death. I was in a record shop and asked
the man behind the counter what he thought of Steve
Irwin, he replied,? Not much.? I told him the Irwin
had been killed by a stingray of Port Douglas. ?What??
he said in amazement. What? Is a probably a good term
to say on Friday four days after Irwin?s death. The
way the media has treated Irwin?s death. The fact that
his death was reported internationally before his wife
was informed, she was bushwalking in Tasmania and
within an hour, his autographed t-shirts were selling
on E-bay for $500 says much about the society we live
in.

Don?t get me wrong, every life is precious and no one
deserves a death like that, there have been only four
deaths by sting rays in Australia, seventeen all up
over the world.

But where did the media start and finish with Irwin?
He had appeared on the Simpsons and South Park In fact
I didn?t know about the Crocodile Man till I saw him
on South Park, with his cartoon image grabbing a big
crocodile and saying,? I?ve got my thumb stuck up this
crocodile?s butt and its really pissed off.? US TV
talk show host Jay Leno said of Irwin, ??that he was
the best ambassador Australia ever had.? A few media
commentators said he was the real Crocodile Dundee. 
One was Germaine Greer, she wrote in Britain?s
Guardian

?Irwin was the real Crocodile Dundee, a great
Australian, an ambassador for wildlife, a global
phenomenon, a superhuman generator of merchandise,
books, interactive video-games and action figures. The
only creatures he couldn't dominate were parrots. A
parrot once did its best to rip his nose off his face.
Parrots are a lot smarter than crocodiles.?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1865125,00.html#article_continue

On Friday I finally got round to reading her whole
article. I?ve no doubt she was chasing a headline and
she certainly got that.

Germaine has been vilified by many media ?experts? for
comparing Irwin to a modern day lion tamer. And
honestly most people I?ve spoken to have been put off
and bored witless by the saturation media coverage
over his life and death. Yes, little kids have been
affected by the man in khaki that danced with the
Wiggles. And he was far more popular in the United
States and Europe than he was in Australia. He even
admitted this and put it down to our cultural cringe. 

Going to work on Wednesday, I rung up Sydney?s Radio
Vega Breakfast show and defended Germaine?s right to
say what she said, but also made the point that it was
wrong to speak ill of the dead. Saying that though, I
also expressed my cringe about Irwin?s opposition to
hazard reduction burns by Bushfire agencies to reduce
the fuel load before the bushfire season starts. And
his praise of John Howard as a ?great world leader?
after Green senators Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle
protest against George W. Bush in the Australian
parliament.

There?s also an e-mail doing the rounds with a
stingray superimposed on a picture of last years
November 15 Melbourne rally against Howard?s attacks
on workers rights. Irwin was viscously anti-union and
supported the new IR laws. I haven?t seen it but I
think it?s in bad taste. But it doesn?t compare with
the experience we?ve had to endure with brain dead
outpourings about him in the media.

John/Togs Tognolini







Support for A

'That sort of self-delusion is what it takes to be a
real Aussie larrikin' 


Germaine Greer
Tuesday September 5, 2006
The Guardian

The world mourns. World-famous wildlife warrior Steve
Irwin has died a hero, doing the thing he loved,
filming a sequence for a new TV series. He was
supposed to have been making a new documentary to have
been called Ocean's Deadliest, but, when filming was
held up by bad weather, he decided to "go off and
shoot a few segments" for his eight-year-old
daughter's upcoming TV series, "just stuff on the reef
and little animals". His manager John Stainton "just
said fine, anything that would keep him moving and
keep his adrenaline going". Evidently it's Stainton's
job to keep Irwin pumped larger than life, shouting
"Crikey!" and punching the air.

Irwin was the real Crocodile Dundee, a great
Australian, an ambassador for wildlife, a global
phenomenon, a superhuman generator of merchandise,
books, interactive video-games and action figures. The
only creatures he couldn't dominate were parrots. A
parrot once did its best to rip his nose off his face.
Parrots are a lot smarter than crocodiles.

What seems to have happened on Batt Reef is that Irwin
and a cameraman went off in a little dinghy to see
what they could find. What they found were stingrays.
You can just imagine Irwin yelling: "Just look at
these beauties! Crikey! With those barbs a stingray
can kill a horse!" (Yes, Steve, but a stingray doesn't
want to kill a horse. It eats crustaceans, for God's
sake.) All Australian children know about stingrays.
We are now being told that only three people have ever
been killed by Australian stingrays. One of them must
have been the chap who bought it 60 years ago in
Brighton Baths where my school used to go on swimming
days. Port Philip Bay was famous for stingrays, which
are fine as long as you can see them, but they do what
most Dasyatidae do, which is bury themselves in the
sand or mud with only their eyes sticking out. What
you don't want to do with a stingray is stand on it.
The lashing response of the tail is automatic; the
barb is coated with a bacterial slime as deadly as
rotten oyster toxin. 

As a Melbourne boy, Irwin should have had a healthy
respect for stingrays, which are actually commoner,
and bigger, in southern waters than they are near Port
Douglas, where he was killed. The film-makers maintain
that the ray that took Irwin out was a "bull ray", or
Dasyatis brevicaudata, but this is not usually found
as far north as Port Douglas. Marine biologist Dr
Meredith Peach has been quoted as saying, "It's really
quite unusual for divers to be stung unless they are
grappling with the animal and, knowing Steve Irwin,
perhaps that may have been the case." Not much
sympathy there then.

The only time Irwin ever seemed less than entirely
lovable to his fans (as distinct from zoologists) was
when he went into the Australia Zoo crocodile
enclosure with his month-old baby son in one hand and
a dead chicken in the other. For a second you didn't
know which one he meant to feed to the crocodile. If
the crocodile had been less depressed it might have
made the decision for him. As the catatonic beast
obediently downed its tiny snack, Irwin walked his
baby on the grass, not something that paediatricians
recommend for rubbery baby legs even when there isn't
a stir-crazy carnivore a few feet away. The adoring
world was momentarily appalled. They called it child
abuse. The whole spectacle was revolting. The
crocodile would rather have been anywhere else and the
chicken had had a grim life too, but that's
entertainment at Australia Zoo.

Irwin's response to the sudden outburst of criticism
was bizarre. He believed that he had the crocodile
under control. But he could have fallen over,
suggested an interviewer. He admitted that was
possible, but only if a meteor had hit the earth and
caused an earthquake of 6.6 on the Richter scale. That
sort of self-delusion is what it takes to be a "real
Aussie larrikin".

What Irwin never seemed to understand was that animals
need space. The one lesson any conservationist must
labour to drive home is that habitat loss is the
principal cause of species loss. There was no habitat,
no matter how fragile or finely balanced, that Irwin
hesitated to barge into, trumpeting his wonder and
amazement to the skies. There was not an animal he was
not prepared to manhandle. Every creature he
brandished at the camera was in distress. Every snake
badgered by Irwin was at a huge disadvantage, with
only a single possible reaction to its terrifying
situation, which was to strike. Easy enough to avoid,
if you know what's coming. Even my cat knew that much.
Those of us who live with snakes, as I do with no
fewer than 12 front-fanged venomous snake species in
my bit of Queensland rainforest, know that they will
get out of our way if we leave them a choice. Some
snakes are described as aggressive, but, if you're a
snake, unprovoked aggression doesn't make sense.
Snakes on a plane only want to get off. But Irwin was
an entertainer, a 21st-century version of a
lion-tamer, with crocodiles instead of lions.

In 2004, Irwin was accused of illegally encroaching on
the space of penguins, seals and humpback whales in
Antarctica, where he was filming a documentary called
Ice Breaker. An investigation by the Australian
Environmental Department resulted in no action being
taken, which is not surprising seeing that John
Howard, the prime minister, made sure that Irwin was
one of the guests invited to a "gala barbecue" for
George Bush a few months before. Howard is now Irwin's
chief mourner, which is only fair, seeing that Irwin
announced that Howard is the greatest leader the world
has ever seen.

The animal world has finally taken its revenge on
Irwin, but probably not before a whole generation of
kids in shorts seven sizes too small has learned to
shout in the ears of animals with hearing 10 times
more acute than theirs, determined to become
millionaire animal-loving zoo-owners in their turn.



                
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