Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy co-founder Tony Parkes leaves enduring conservation legacy

CONSERVATIONIST Tony Parkes was remembered as an inspirational man who left the world a better place than he found it during a celebration of his life at Bangalow A&I Hall on Friday.

ABC broadcaster Mick O’Regan emceed the service, welcoming Parkes’s family and friends with the words “Good afternoon treehuggers”.

The stage was decorated with potted trees which, O’Regan said, reflected the lifelong environmental and scientific work that defined Parkes’s legacy.

O’Regan described the father of three as a man who lived a full and passionate life, reflecting on his tireless advocacy for rainforest conservation. Parkes was also a keen sailor who competed in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race, and his brother, Anton Lucas, read the poem Crossing the Bar during the service.

Born in Hobart, Tasmania, where he roamed freely through the bush as a child, Parkes earned a PhD in organic chemistry in 1953. Awarded a scholarship by energy company Shell, he later completed business management studies at the London School of Economics and post-doctoral research at Imperial College London.

He spent 25 years in investment banking, specialising in corporate finance, mergers and acquisitions, and held managing director and chairman positions with major financial institutions, including Lloyds Bank in Australia.

Parkes retired from corporate life in his mid-50s. After travelling around Australia with his late wife, Rowena, the couple fell in love with the Northern Rivers and, in 1984, bought a degraded dairy property at Binna Burra in the Byron Bay hinterland which had small rainforest remnants. They named it Tara and began restoring the land, ultimately planting more than 40,000 rainforest trees.

Parkes co-founded the Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy alongside local ecologist Mark Dunphy and other regional landholders and scientists in 1993 and conceived the Science Saving Rainforests program, which analyses tree genomes using DNA sequencing to restore genetic diversity and improve the resilience of subtropical rainforests to inbreeding and climate change.

Parkes also co-founded Rainforest Rescue in 1999, serving as chairman for eight years, and led the Big Scrub Rainforest Foundation as chairperson for 30 years until the final weeks of his life.

Big Scrub Rainforest Foundation director Shannon Greenfields said Parkes was captivated by the beauty, fragility, history and extraordinary diversity of the Big Scrub, once Australia’s largest expanse of subtropical lowland rainforest. Covering about 75,000 hectares between Byron Bay, Lismore and Ballina, much of the rainforest was cleared during the 19th century for Australian Red Cedar logging and conversion to dairy and agricultural land.

“The rainforest seemed to speak to something at his very core,” Greenfields said.

She recalled Parkes’s fascination with the rainforest’s ancient origins, saying he liked to imagine dinosaurs walking up to trees and rubbing their bodies against the bark.

“He loved the rainforest because it embodied hope – he saw not only what was lost but what could be restored,” she said.

Parkes’s contribution to conservation was recognised with the NSW Landcarer of the Year award in 2001 and 2015, the National Banksia Award for Community Environmental Leadership in 2016, and appointment as an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2019 for distinguished service to conservation and the environment through the restoration of critically endangered subtropical rainforests in northern NSW.

Greenfields said Parkes’s legacy was the people and landscapes he inspired.

“May his spirit live on in every leaf, seedling, bird call and future generation that walks in the rainforest canopy that he helped bring back from the brink,” she said.