SPECIAL ARTICLE ON STEVE IRWIN
Steve Irwin dead The naturalist and television star Steve Irwin has died. He was 44.
Police say he was stung through the heart by a stingray while diving off Port Douglas.
He was filming a documentary when the accident occurred around midday AEST near the Low Isles.
A helicopter arrived with paramedics on board to try to resuscitate him, but it was too late.
Cruise operator Steve Edmondson and his passengers watched on as paramedics tried to revive the television star.
"We are obviously very saddened by the news. It's a very unusual incident. We're all big fans of Steve Irwin," he said.
Irwin's body is being taken to the morgue in Cairns.
His family are believed to be flying from Brisbane to Cairns this afternoon.
Irwin, who was was born in Victoria in 1962, inherited his love of reptiles from his father.
His father Bob was a keen reptile enthusiast and moved the family to Queensland in 1970 to open a small reptile park on the Sunshine Coast.
Irwin took over the family business in 1991 and grew it into Australia Zoo.
In 1992 he ventured into television, making the first series of the Crocodile Hunter.
When the program aired in the United States, he shot to international fame.
Irwin is survived by his wife Terri and two children.
SYDNEY, Australia (Reuters) -- In death as in life, iconic TV naturalist Steve Irwin captivated millions worldwide and clogged the Internet as fans from Guam to Glasgow reacted with disbelief to news "The Crocodile Hunter" was dead.Some Web sites groaned to a halt within hours of the first reports Monday that Irwin had been killed by a stingray's barb through his chest in a freak diving accident off Australia's northeast coast.
Web measurement company Hitwise said Irwin's death was the biggest news event read by Australians on the Internet since two Australian miners were trapped by a mine collapse in southern Tasmania state in late April.
"We noticed that the Web site www.crocodilehunter.com increased in popularity quite substantially. It became the number one entertainment personality Web site in Australia yesterday and in the United States it also became the third most popular," Hitwise Asia-Pacific marketing director James Borg told Reuters.
Australian news Web sites struggled to keep up with demand.
The Australian Broadcasting Corp.'s site (www.abc.com.au) had to temporarily shut down, posting a notice Monday that it was experiencing higher than normal traffic.
It resumed soon after in a low-bandwidth format to cope with hundreds of thousands of hits.
Newspaper Web sites also wobbled but kept up with demand.
A spokesman for The Sydney Morning Herald's site, www.smh.com.au, said it had experienced a "huge" 40 percent spike in page impressions compared with the previous week's average weekday number of about 500,000.
There was also a 70 percent jump in visitors to its pages, the spokesman said.
That pattern was mirrored around the world, with Irwin's death leading major news Web sites such as CNN.com and U.S. and British newspaper Web sites, as well as swamping their most viewed and most emailed categories.
Web logs and Internet feedback pages were also awash with postings from shocked readers from around the world, many of them from Americans charmed by Irwin's quirky style and his typically Australian catchphrase of "crikey."
Irwin first found fame in the United States before his "Crocodile Hunter" documentaries on U.S.-based television company Discovery Communications' Animal Planet attracted a global audience of 200 million -- 10 times Australia's population.
"Crikey!, I miss him so much," Tina Treece from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, posted on CNN.com's feedback page CNN Exchange.
The site had contributions from readers in Guam, Romania, Thailand, France, Scotland, India, New Zealand, Canada, Brunei, Britain, Malaysia, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Many faced the problem of explaining to their children how one of their favorite TV characters had died.
"Why did it have to be Steve Irwin?" 11-year-old Daniel told Australian Associated Press.
WELCOME TO MY HOMEPAGE OF AUSTRALIA
Perth
Melbourne
Click here for the AUSSIE SITE
Click here for the Waltzing Matilda lyrics.
I have a few penpals from Australia and here are some of the things they sent to me. Some things I collected myself by requesting them over the internet and also going to Winterlude 2001 in Ottawa. The Australian Flag is from a friend.
Australian Flag
Australian Ruler
Postcard from Sydney
Postcard from Victoria
Olympic Book
Koala
