‘The Australian We All Aspire to Be’: Commemorative Journalism and the Death of the Crocodile Hunter

Abstract

This article examines the news coverage generated in Australia by the death of Steve Irwin, widely known as the Crocodile Hunter. In line with past research on commemorative journalism, the study demonstrates the dominant discourses employed in the reporting of Irwin's death. It is argued that Australia's newspapers invoked a number of national myths, such as mateship, larrikinism and anti-elitism, in order to reassert notions of Australian identity and social values and to deal with the widespread grief over his loss. Most importantly, the study sheds new light on how news media deal with challenges to the dominant memorialising discourse. Past studies had not been able to investigate alternative discourses in much detail, but in examining Irwin's death we are able to see how the media deal with such an unwanted interruption. It is argued that newspapers appropriated the alternative perspective within the mythical terms of their memorialising discourse, thereby not allowing it to disrupt the memorialisation itself and in fact further strengthening the process of mythologising the Crocodile Hunter.