LOS ANGELES -- I have long been in awe of the late Steve Irwin, perhaps in part because I never personally met him.

Many of my Australian friends actually didn't like him much, thought him a national embarrassment and wished he'd go away before all Americans believed that Aussie dress consisted solely of khakis, a Saturday-night social life devoted to crocodile-wrestling, and a national vocabulary dominated by quaint exclamations like "barbie" and "crikey!"

But a more generous view of this international media celebrity from Australia's outback, who became widely know as "The Crocodile Hunter," was there for the taking. Indeed, for many Americans, he seemed a delightfully unself-reflective human bridge to that part of our souls that gets steam-cleaned out of our lives by the daily press of urbanization.