Doing Charisma Differently: How a Charismatic Halo Effect Shapes Perceptions of Negatively Charismatic Animals

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This post is part of a series about “uncharismatic” species in environmental history, emerging from a workshop at Universität Augsburg in September 2026.

 As an environmental historian and a cultural geographer whose collaborations began with a study of an Australian reptile park, we were intrigued by the emergence of the new term “uncharismatic” and considered whether it would be useful for the snakes, spiders and crocodiles upon whom we focussed.1 We had seen that animals labeled as dangerous commanded the attention of visitors in the park who stared at them in their enclosures and flocked to feeding and venom milking demonstrations. As we walked around the park, we heard people say “I can’t look” but we observed that they usually couldn’t look away. 

We wrote about the mechanisms behind this intense engagement, drawing upon an extensive body of research on negative emotions, including fear and disgust.2 Far from having the insipid and undistinguished nature associated with the uncharismatic, these animals consistently draw attention from the public, scientists, creative practitioners, and governments. They are charismatic, but in a negative register. As British geographer Jamie Lorimer wrote in 2016, charismatic organisms can equally be “awe-some” or “awe-full.”3 There is a charismatic spectrum, from positively charismatic animals like pandas and koalas, through the ambiguity of the beautiful but dangerous tigers and polar bears, to the negative pole occupied by cockroaches and rats. Regardless of their position, none of the animals along the spectrum is uncharismatic.

The venomous snakes, spiders and estuarine crocodiles we have studied possess negative charisma. They consistently attract attention, are often assumed to have personalities, and regularly feature in activities promoted to tourists, government conservation policies and the creative arts, high and low. These are not new developments. Recognition of their charisma is embedded in the Law stories told by the continent’s First Peoples, as well as being reflected in dances and portrayals of these animals in ancient images on stone.

Reference to First Nations’ knowledge raises an important aspect of the charismatic spectrum:positions on it are not fixed. It is evident that across time, space, culture, and even between individuals, particular animals may be considered more or less charismatic and charismatic in a more negative or positive way. Taking this into account, we propose a new concept: the “charismatic halo effect.” A person such as a television naturalist who themselves is considered to have a high level of charisma can apply it to shift the position of an animal on the charismatic spectrum. Staying with our focus on Australia, Steve Irwin (1962 – 2006) provides an exemplary case study of how this operates.

Steve Irwin in his trademark khaki shirt and shorts dangling meat over the open jaws of a large saltwater crocodile during a show at Australia Zoo in April 2004.  Credit: “Steve Irwin feeding Crocodile” by Sheba Also 18 Million Views, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Irwin grew up in and around his father Bob’s wildlife park on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast which has since been renamed Australia Zoo.4 Steve seems to have had a natural affinity for other animals and eagerly embraced opportunities to work with crocodiles in particular. He was a showman, introducing a crocodile handfeeding demonstration at the park that Bob described as “outrageously dangerous” as well as highly engaging.5 When self-made videos of Steve’s crocodile catching adventures came to the attention of producer John Stainton, the result was the Crocodile Hunter television series launched in 1992 and taken up by United States pay TV channel Animal Planet in 1997.6 Irwin’s knowledge of animals came from first-hand experience rather than formal study and he expressed it with his own genuine over-the-top enthusiasm. 

For Australians, Irwin’s speech and dress placed him in the tradition of the rough and tumble men of the bush (although he lacked their laconic quality) and for an international audience, his self-presentation played into stereotypes of Australians as simple, good hearted folk. For both, he was a highly charismatic individual. Irwin quickly became an international celebrity naturalist, sustained through five seasons of the Crocodile Hunter, a feature film, guest appearances on television chat shows and mutual admiration of and from Australia’s conservative prime minister John Howard who called him “one of Australia’s great conservation icons.”7

One segment from a 1999 episode of the Crocodile Hunter can be used to show how Irwin used his positive charisma to shift the position of the generally negatively perceived saltwater (estuarine) crocodile.8 Applying his usual approach of engaging physically with his subject animals, he launches himself from a small boat into the sea where a three-metre female crocodile has been sighted. In a voiceover accompanying footage of him swimming alongside her, Irwin draws attention to her actions including diving down to avoid him, looking out through her transparent eyelid, and propelling herself using her legs and powerful tail. Irwin ensures there is a continuing sense of risk by discussing how the crocodile opens her mouth and arches her back to warn him off, but keeps up a monologue about her being calm, just plodding along and being beautiful. This tension between normalizing the crocodile and ensuring viewers still see her as dangerous and Irwin as brave is carefully managed. The action is entrancing because he openly discusses the danger posed by these animals. His emotions are infectious. 

After a lunge at the camera by the crocodile, Irwin uses one of his catchphrases: “That’s too close!” He decides it is time to get out of the water. The viewer is left with a lesson: the crocodile had every opportunity to attack Irwin but did not. Irwin’s charisma operated through an in-your-face effusiveness that came across as both genuine and possibly naïve. The latter perception was reinforced when he was killed in 2006 while engaging with a stingray, which feminist scholar Germaine Greer has characterised as the natural world having its revenge on Irwin.9 But Irwin left a valuable legacy with regard to how Australia’s negatively charismatic animals are perceived. Even a slight change in thinking – that not every crocodile is out to make a meal of each human they encounter and that they can regulate their responses rather than just having an irrepressible instinct to bite – is important for more-than-human relations. Through the strength of their personalities, Irwin and others guided their audiences to respond to generally unpopular animals with fascination and wonder rather than fear and disgust, encouraging respect, understanding and even admiration. They did this, as Jamie Lorimer argued more broadly, by deploying their own distinctive charisma not to make animals seem more human-like or domesticated but to encourage an interest in their radical alterity.10 It is attention to what they can do that we cannot; on operations of bodies unlike our own; and the alternative logics of their existence that feeds curiosity and can nudge animals toward the positive section of the charismatic spectrum. 

A close up view of a highly negatively charismatic large black Sydney funnel web spider in a Melbourne laboratory in 1956. A slender glass pipette is being used to collect some of its venom. Credit: Gordon F. De Lisle for PIX Magazine, Funnel web spider, Melbourne, September 1956, held by Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, ON 388/Box 051/Item 111.

Like other categories into which other animals are placed by humans, negative and positive charisma are malleable. Positive feelings towards a human advocate such as Irwin can radiate out to their negatively charismatic animal subjects via a sort of “halo effect.” While they may not inspire feelings of affection, being viewed as awe-full can inspire tolerance and efforts to protect and preserve negatively perceived animals and their habitats.

What does this insight have to offer the uncharismatic animals who are not currently accorded a place on the charismatic spectrum? Is there a possibility that the charismatic halo effect could not only achieve lateral repositionings but also enable a species to reverse a binary positioning, from outsider to insider, overlooked to observed, unnoticed to notable? If these “uncharismatic species” start to be the subject of scholarly papers and popular blog posts, would this new attention to them and understanding of them as agential beings also rob them of their uncharismatic qualities? And what would the repercussions be? We look forward to the ongoing theorisation of uncharismatic animals and the new insights that flow from it.

  1. Kevin Markwell and Nancy Cushing, Snake-bitten: Eric Worrell and the Australian Reptile Park (UNSW Press, 2010). ↩︎
  2. N. Cushing and K. Markwell, “I can’t look: Disgust as a factor in the zoo experience” in W. Frost (ed.) Zoos and Tourism: Conservation, Education, Entertainment? (Channel View Publications, 2014), 167-178.
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  3. Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 46, 48. ↩︎
  4. Bob Irwin with Amanda French, The Last Crocodile Hunter: A Father and Son Legacy (Allen and Unwin, 2016).
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  5. Irwin and French, The Last Crocodile Hunter, 111-112. ↩︎
  6. Irwin and French, The Last Crocodile Hunter, 130. ↩︎
  7. “That’s a croc and he’s the greatest”, Sydney Morning Herald, 3 October 2003. ↩︎
  8. The Crocodile Hunter: Reptiles of the Deep: Saurians. 1999. Directed by John Stainton, Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPOKwO_WWKg. ↩︎
  9. Germaine Greer, “That sort of self-delusion is what it takes to be a real Aussie larrikin”, The Guardian, 5 September 2006. For an analysis, see Anthea Taylor, “’Steve is twice the Aussie icon you will ever be’: Germain Greer, the Crocodile Hunter’s death, and nationalistic misogyny”, European Journal of Cultural Studies 22, 5 – 6 (2019): 630 – 45. ↩︎
  10. Lorimer, Wildlife in the Anthropocene, 49. ↩︎
Feature Image: A crowd of visitors to the Australian Reptile Park in Gosford watch intently as naturalist Eric Worrell holds a large snake’s mouth to a glass beaker to extract its venom in February 1965. Credit: R. Donaldson for PIX Magazine, held by Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, ON 388/Box 101/Item 045.

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Nancy Cushing and Kevin Markwell

Nancy Cushing is Associate Professor in History at the University of Newcastle, Australia where she works on unceded Awabakal land. An environmental historian whose interests range from coal mining to human-other animal relations, she was co-editor of Animals Count: How Population Size Matters in Animal-Human Relations (Routledge 2018), author of A History of Crime in Australia (Routledge 2023) and A New History of Australia in 15 Animals (Bloomsbury forthcoming 2026). Her next project is a study of university campuses as ecological spaces. Kevin Markwell is an adjunct professor at Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW, Australia. His research into human-other animal relations has drawn largely from social constructionism and cultural analysis to explore the ways by which certain animals and animal groups have been understood and experienced by humans. His research includes studies on reptiles generally and specifically the coastal taipan and estuarine crocodile as well as the koala and the Tasmanian devil.

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