By MIA FREEDMAN
I think Bindi Irwin is exceptional. Have done forever. As far as young role models go, she ticks every box for me.
She’s articulate, passionate, a great communicator and what she does has nothing to do with the way she looks.
I know. For a famous girl in 2013 this is nothing short of miraculous.
Bindi has always been wonderfully, endearingly age-appropriate and I can’t think of a single other celebrity teen or young woman about whom I’d say the same.
When she released her nature documentary series Bindi: The Jungle Girl in 2008, I couldn’t buy her DVDs fast enough to show my kids – her messages about conservation, education about wildlife and her passion for continuing the work of her father is inspiring in the true sense of the word.
And she delivered them in non-descript khaki shorts and a t-shirt with no make-up and her hair in a ponytail.
Compared to the rest of the highly commercialised, sexualised, glossily packaged crap coming at young girls? Bindi is golden.
And now, aged 15, she’s gone and done something else fabulous: made some challenging, insightful, interesting statements about poverty and over-population. Controversial? Yes. But what a refreshing change from the kind of controversial Miley Cyrus trades in by taking off her clothes and humping the floor.