I have a confession to make...

Hi. I’m Stella, and I don’t really give a stuff that Steve Irwin is dead.

It’s a personal tragedy for his family, for sure. It’s very sad that a husband and a father has been lost, but no sadder than if it were anyone else’s husband or father. There’s a massive difference between personal tragedy and national tragedy.

I’m absolutely gob smacked at how people have reacted. I always assumed the guy was looked upon as a bit of a joke. I never dreamed that the Australian public respected him even a little bit. He provoked and tormented animals for fun. And he wasn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed.

The fact that Stingrays have only killed three Australians ever, and all marine experts say they only sting when provoked, is surely testament to the fact that he was probably provoking it when it stung him. If he wasn’t, well then it would be the first animal he would have ever NOT publicly tormented and humiliated in order to make television.

Two years ago when he paraded his one-month-old baby in front of a hungry crocodile, we all thought he was the worst in the world. Personally, I was disturbed that he was touching raw meat at the same time as touching a child. Ewww.

My friend Rob tells me that we’re in the mere 2% of the population that don’t think he was a national hero. According to the Herald Sun poll, mind you, which might tell us more about the intelligence of the people who read the Herald Sun than anything else.

I wholeheartedly agree with Germaine Greer, who said, among other things that “the animal world has taken its revenge.” Her controversial article in the Guardian is the most sensible thing I’ve read on the matter.

Personally, I hope that when people from overseas think of Australia, they don’t think of Steve Irwin. If all these people making such a spectacle are right, and he was an Australian icon, I hope he’s a quickly forgotten one.

For Australians to be portrayed as unintelligent, unthinking, nit-wits would be more of a national tragedy than anything else.