Filling Big Hiking Boots at an Early Age

A year and a half ago, Bindi Irwin was an 8-year-old growing up in the Australian outback, home-schooled so she could travel with her father, Steve Irwin, to film popular nature shows like “The Crocodile Hunter.” She sometimes appeared on camera, happily petting the occasional wallaby.

Bindi Irwin and her mother Terri pose during the promotional launch of her show "Bindi The Jungle Girl" at Australia Zoo.
Mr. Irwin was killed by a stingray’s barb while shooting his show. Rather than retreating into the background, though, Bindi has moved to center stage, in a spotlight just as bright, and sometimes harsher, than the one trained on her father.

She has her own show, “Bindi the Jungle Girl,” on the Discovery Kids channel, an offshoot of Discovery Communications. She also stars in a fitness video with her own back-up dancers, and tours the world making public appearances. Last year, she delivered a speech at the National Press Club in Washington about wildlife conservation; a few months later, she was a presenter at the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards.

Because Discovery Kids is a smaller channel, specific hourly numbers are not released, but executives there have high hopes for Bindi, believing she can do for the network what “High School Musical” did for the Disney Channel. “We think Bindi will be a big, big star,” said David Zaslav, chief executive of Discovery Communications.

In the late 1990s, as Mr. Irwin’s star rose, so did the popularity of his United States television partner, Discovery Communications’ Animal Planet channel. Bindi could conceivably advance Discovery Kids in a similar way. The 10-year-old channel, available in 60 million homes and intended for children ages 2 to 14, lacks the visibility of Nickelodeon or Disney.

“It doesn’t have a ‘SpongeBob,’ it doesn’t have a ‘High School Musical,’ yet,” said Marjorie Kaplan, the general manager of Animal Planet and Discovery Kids Media, both part of Discovery Communications, which is jointly owned by Discovery Holding and Advance Publications.

With her crimped blond pigtails and broad grin, Bindi has already become a brand, supported by merchandise like backpacks, a clothing line and party plates. She has appearances on “Larry King Live” under her belt, as well as David Letterman, Ellen DeGeneres and the “Today” show, where she was interviewed in November before riding a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

No one, of course, expected Bindi to take over the family business so soon, or under such circumstances. Her own show was already in the works, but production was halted when her father died.

“After we lost Steve, Bindi started to ask, ‘When are we going to get back to filming?’” her mother, Terri Irwin, said in an interview. “I think for Bindi it was normal and fun and what life is all about.”

Television executives see dollar signs in Bindi’s ability to speak cutely and earnestly about the plight of endangered animals. Mr. Irwin reaped millions of dollars a year from his “Crocodile Hunter” persona, and Discovery, which owns Animal Planet and other channels, continues to pay talent fees to the Irwins.

But the first season of “Bindi the Jungle Girl” was not lucrative, said John Stainton, the Irwin family’s longtime manager, adding that his company subsidized the series because the fees paid by Discovery did not cover the production costs.

The Irwin family does not rely on television for its income, but rather on the profit from the Australia Zoo, which Mrs. Irwin owns, Mr. Stainton said. He added that he had turned down many job offers for Bindi, from endorsement deals to voice-over work.

“We’re still finding the parameters for what we’re going to do next,” he said. Whatever it is, Bindi is widely expected to have an even more pronounced role. She is “the perfect embodiment of what Discovery Kids stands for,” said Ms. Kaplan.

Better still, she is not a limited franchise: her brother Robert, who just turned 4, appears (among many places) on the cover of Crikey! Magazine, a publication of the Australia Zoo (named after Steve Irwin’s trademark expression).

Outside of Bindi’s immediate circle, however, people have registered second opinions on whether her newfound celebrity is eclipsing her childhood.

“Not one person is standing up and saying, ‘Is this appropriate?’” wrote Daniel Donahoo, a writer and research fellow at an Australian public policy think tank, on his blog, referring to Bindi’s neat segue into her father’s hiking boots.

Other bloggers, as well as newspaper columnists in the United States and other countries, have drawn inevitable comparisons to the problems of other child stars, and pointed to off-note elements of the Bindi juggernaut.

“Bindi the Jungle Girl,” alternates between fresh footage of Bindi and older clips of her father; perhaps because the show is aimed at children, there is no hint whatsoever that Mr. Irwin is anything other than alive and well.

Television critics and bloggers have called the show creepy in this regard. Diane Werts, a television critic for Newsday, said she was “seriously weirded out” by Bindi’s show and that other adults might be too, “because her dead dad Steve is everywhere.”

Bindi’s mother, who recently published a book, “Steve and Me,” dismisses the criticism that her daughter is being robbed of her childhood. Filming wildlife footage is a way of life for her family, she says, and continuing her husband’s work is what sustains them.

“I’m not creating a Hollywood movie star, I’m creating a little person,” Mrs. Irwin said in an interview in her New York hotel room last month, in the midst of a media tour for her book. She said the trip had included a trip to Toys “R” Us and playing in Central Park.

Bindi wore pink sweat pants and a T-shirt with a pony on it, ate a breakfast of bananas and strawberries, and acted embarrassed by her mother’s jokes, cutely covering her ears with her hands. Bindi tried to steer the conversation to wildlife, recalling the first time she captured a saltwater crocodile: “It was like, that big,” she said, holding her hands a foot apart and grinning.

Bindi spoke comfortably while the subject was animals, but seemed flustered by other questions. Asked how old she felt, Bindi smiled, but paused with uncertainty. “People always say, ‘You sound older,’” she said. “I’m happy just being me.”

After breakfast, a stylist prepared Bindi (an Aboriginal word meaning “young girl”) for a photo shoot with her back-up dancers, the Crocmen. An hour later, wearing a yellow polo shirt sporting her name, she danced and smiled at a Midtown Manhattan photo studio.

Although the family spends more time on the road than at home in Beerwah, Australia, Mrs. Irwin said that Bindi’s childhood in the outback has helped shelter her from celebrity life.

“Certainly, if tomorrow she says, ‘I’m not enjoying this anymore,’ then we wouldn’t do it anymore,” Mrs. Irwin said. “This is the joy of her life. Eat your veggies and brush your teeth and go to bed is not the fun part — this is the fun part.”