Celebrity crocodile hunter Steve Irwin fled from the Australian media yesterday after supporters deserted him over last week's stunt in which he dangled his month-old son Bob before the snapping jaws of a four-metre crocodile.
Irwin held a news conference Saturday to vehemently deny placing his son in danger, and then went underground. He's declining to answer any of the calls streaming in from around the world, said spokesman John Harrison, publicist for the film company that makes The Crocodile Hunter, a television series that draws around 30 million viewers around the world.
The bizarre incident drew calls for Irwin's name to be taken off the locomotive that next month will haul the first Adelaide to Darwin passenger train.
There were also moves to deny the madcap millionaire a chance to be Australian of the Year.
"He is very upset at what has happened. He told us he was going on holiday to have a think about it all," Harrison said.
Putting his own newborn at risk for a televised publicity stunt has drawn condemnation from across the globe.
Dave Tollner, who represents Prime Minister John Howard's ruling Conservatives in Australia's federal parliament, urged Great Southern Rail to take Irwin's moniker off the soon-to-be-launched transcontinental luxury train service.
"It would be most unwise if Great Southern Rail continues with the Steve Irwin train after what has happened," Tollner said.
Meanwhile the Sunday Telegraph reported that after the crocodile feeding, Irwin and his American wife, Terri, told their 5-year-old daughter Bindi to splash around in a pool near a crocodile pen to encourage the reptiles to swim out.
"Now flail around and look helpless, that's the girl, good girl," Terri Irwin was quoted as saying. "That's my girl, Bindi Irwin, the other white meat."
A zoo official was quoted by the paper as saying a gate connecting the pool to the crocodile pen was shut at the time.
The Irwins would not comment on the report, Harrison said.
In a further example of locals putting distance between themselves and a man who once claimed to be the most famous Australian, a member of the eight-member judging panel for Australian of the Year said that Irwin's nomination for the award should be rescinded.
National Australia Day Council director Marjorie Turbayne described Irwin's behaviour as strange and "quite worrying."
Ordinary Australians, in letters to newspapers and in comments on talkback radio, were universal in their condemnation of Irwin.
"What was Steve thinking?" Australian paper The Sun Herald asked on Sunday. The newspaper on Saturday called it "a bizarre act at his Sunshine Coast zoo that mirrored Michael Jackson's dangling of his newborn over a balcony."
Irwin angrily rejected any comparisons to Jackson.
"I would never, ever put him in any danger, not in a million years," Irwin said in Australia's Sunday Telegraph.
"To hear people say that it was a publicity stunt, that I'm just like Michael Jackson, well, it just tears me up. It makes me sick to my stomach to be compared in that way," he was quoted as saying.
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