Bindi Irwin to become face of Australian tourism

CANBERRA, Jan 12 (Reuters) Bindi Irwin, the 8-year-old daughter of late Australian ''Crocodile Hunter'' Steve Irwin, is to help market her country to the world, becoming a new face for Australian tourism, local media said today.

Bindi, currently in the United States to kick off her American show business career, will be named a tourism ambassador by Australian Tourism Minister Fran Bailey, who has travelled there to make the announcement.

Bailey said Bindi would not replace bikini model Lara Bingle as Australia's official face in overseas television advertising.

''There is no role for Bindi in any advertising campaign.

Bindi and her mother Terri are here in the United States helping to promote Australia as part of the ''G'Day USA'' campaign,'' Bailey told journalists.

However, the controversial ''Where the bloody hell are you?'' campaign featuring Bingle, 19, has failed to lure more visitors to Australia. Tourism figures, particularly from Asia, generally fell last year, with numbers from the important Japanese market down 10 percent in the fiscal year to July.

Bingle has also sparked lurid headlines at home following a string of alleged relationships with leading sportsmen, and is to be edged aside in overseas advertising by more ''ordinary Australians''.

Bindi Irwin told the ''The Ellen DeGeneres Show'' in Los Angeles that she wanted to ''try and be'' her 44-year-old father, who died on September 4 after a stingray's serrated barb pierced his heart while he was filming off Australia's coast.

''I feel like I'm him. I want him to be proud of me,'' she said, appearing with her US-born mother Terri and holding a lizard face-to-face.

Bindi will star in the 26-part ''Bindi, the Jungle Girl'' series on Discovery Kids network later this year, and is also performing her Bindi and the Crocmen stage show in the United States.

Critics in Australia and elsewhere have accused Terri Irwin and her advisers of trying to rush Bindi into the show business limelight, saying that she is too young to cope.

But the family this week said Bindi was not being pressured to do anything she did not want to.

Bindi's US tour coincides with the airing of the ''Ocean's Deadliest'' documentary her exuberant, khaki-clad naturalist father was working on when he died.

REUTERS PDM DS1147