Tony Parkes left investment banking at 56 to restore a rainforest that was almost gone—and spent thirty years making it matter again. He and his wife Rowena bought land in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, planted tens of thousands of trees on their own property, and turned a private restoration into a movement that transformed how an entire region thought about its damaged landscape.
The Big Scrub had once been vast. Before clearing and cattle farming stripped it away, the subtropical rainforest stretched across 75,000 hectares of rich basalt country—a lowland forest of figs, vines, palms and fruit doves. By the time modern conservationists took stock, less than one percent remained, broken into small patches scattered among farms, roadsides and reserves. Weeds pressed in from the edges. The remnants needed legal protection, science, money, and something harder to measure: someone who could make conservation work not as inspiration but as infrastructure.
That was Parkes. He brought the habits of business to a landscape that needed both volunteers and strategy. In 1993, he co-founded the Big Scrub Landcare Group, later renamed the Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy. The organization did more than organize occasional working bees. It gave landholders the information, confidence and practical examples they needed to restore remnants and plant native rainforest on their own land. It produced manuals, held field days, and built a large annual Rainforest Day. Scattered local concern became an institution that endured.
Under his leadership, the conservancy helped care for dozens of rainforest remnants and supported the planting of millions of trees. Lowland subtropical rainforest was recognized under federal law as critically endangered. Parkes co-founded two other organizations—Rainforest Rescue and EnviTE—and helped create permanent funding mechanisms for Big Scrub work. The awards followed: Landcare honors, a Banksia Award, and the Order of Australia. But the real measure was visible on the ground: a damaged landscape acquired defenders with tools, funds and a plan.
On his own property, the proof was unmistakable. Over time, the canopy closed. The understory thickened. Birds returned. The Wompoo Fruit Dove—beautiful and functionally essential, carrying fruit seeds across the landscape—became not decoration but evidence that the old machinery of the rainforest was working again. For Parkes, this mattered because it showed that restoration was not sentiment. It was recovery.
Even in his 90s, he was still interested in the next problem. The conservancy moved into genetics, seed sourcing and mycorrhizal fungi, asking how restored forests could withstand inbreeding, disease, insects and a warmer climate. Planting trees was not enough if the forest could not persist. He knew that seedlings were uncertain things. He knew that conservation depended on landholders returning again and again to weeds, fences, grants, nurseries and weather—the unglamorous repetition that makes change real.
In the Big Scrub, the record of his life is unusually visible. Where there had been fragments, there are now larger patches. Where resignation had settled in, there is now a method. A banker's discipline, applied to rainforest, helped return one of Australia's most damaged ecosystems to civic life.