The man who made Rainforest Rescue happen: A tribute to Dr Tony Parkes AO (1930–2026)
Tony, centre right, with Branden Barber, Marine Deliens and Mark Dunphy at the Firewheel Nursery.
It is with deep sadness — and gratitude and affection — that we share the news that Dr Tony Parkes AO, founder of Rainforest Rescue, has passed away.
Just weeks ago, he was photographed placing the very first “genetically optimal” sapling in the ground as part of Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy’s world-leading Science Saving Rainforests program; a program he had helped conceptualise long before the science caught up with his vision. That image is going to stay with me for a long time.
Tony Parkes founded Rainforest Rescue in 1999. Most of our supporters don’t know that. Before Rainforest Rescue was protecting the Daintree, before we had a global community of Rainforest Guardians, there was a former investment banker from Sydney who had fallen completely in love with a stretch of cleared, weedy, busted-up dairy country in the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, and decided to bring it back.
Tony and his wife Rowena had purchased their first property in the region in the 1980s: old ex-dairy farmland at Binna Burra, once part of the Big Scrub. The Big Scrub had been the largest area of lowland subtropical rainforest in Australia, stretching from Grafton to Gympie, one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the continent, and more than 99% of it had been cleared. What remained was being overrun by weeds. Almost nobody was doing anything about it.
Tony had retired early from a long career in corporate finance, including roles as Chairman of the then Lloyds Bank NZ, and a Director of Lloyds Merchant Bank in the UK. He had the skills, the energy, and now he had a rainforest to restore.
Tony, centre right, with members of Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy, Rainforest Rescue and NSW Environment and Heritage.
Big Scrub Landcare, the Rainforest Rescue blueprint
In 1993, he co-founded Big Scrub Landcare after a gathering of over 100 landowners and conservationists in Clunes, NSW. He applied everything he knew from the business world — rallying philanthropists, government agencies, scientists, nursery workers, bush regenerators, and community volunteers — and built one of Australia’s most effective conservation organisations from scratch, on a volunteer basis, over the last 30 years.
On his own property, he and Rowena planted 40,000 trees. They restored 14 hectares of rainforest, a patch now home to over 180 native species, outperforming even the naturally occurring remnants nearby. They named it TARRA: an acronym made from the names of Rowena and their children. A rainforest with family written into its name. Rowena passed away some years before Tony, and he missed her deeply. The forest they built together was, among other things, a place she never left.
Across the wider Big Scrub region, under Tony’s leadership, over 2.5 million trees were planted, restoring more than 700 hectares, effectively doubling the area of remaining Big Scrub. He was instrumental in getting Lowland Subtropical Rainforest listed as critically endangered under the Commonwealth EPBC Act in 2011. He co-founded the Big Scrub Rainforest Day, now Australia’s largest annual Landcare community engagement event. He co-founded Envite, a leading ecological restoration services group. He established the Big Scrub Foundation for permanent long-term funding. He published a restoration manual that shaped practice up and down the east coast.
And in 1999, he founded Rainforest Rescue originally as a fundraising vehicle for Big Scrub, though the story took an unexpected turn.
Tony told the story himself, in a webinar we held to celebrate Rainforest Rescue’s 25th anniversary just two years ago. He was characteristically direct about it:
“My motivation in setting up Rainforest Rescue was really to try and raise money for the Big Scrub restoration, because we were struggling to attract the necessary funds. But we discovered very quickly that it was easier to raise money for the Daintree — we had lots of little catchy phrases, you know, ‘a dollar buys a square metre of rainforest in perpetuity’. We couldn’t match that in terms of the salability of what we were doing to restore the Big Scrub. So, the emphasis went to Queensland.”
It says something about Tony that he retold that story with a grin and not a flicker of resentment. He’d helped build something that grew beyond its origins into something he hadn’t imagined. And he was glad.
Tony (centre) with Branden Barber, CEO of Rainforest Rescue (left) and the late John Rumney, coral reef conservationist (right).
Nurturing the roots of Rainforest Rescue
Tony served as Chair of Rainforest Rescue for eight years. The organisation he helped establish has since expanded to protect rainforests across Australia and internationally and now counts many thousands of supporters worldwide. When I sat alongside him for our 25th anniversary webinar and ran through the numbers — 45 protected properties, 200 hectares of protected rainforest, 353,000 trees planted — he said simply:
“We could never envisage that Rainforest Rescue would be so successful. It’s a great tribute to you and your predecessors in getting it to where it’s got to now. I think you’ve done a wonderful job.”
That was Tony: generous to the end and understated in a way that only made the words land harder.
His long-time friend and co-founder Mark Dunphy once admitted that when he first met Tony and learned he was an investment banker from Mosman, his instinct was: how is this going to work? The answer was: extraordinarily well.
Tony devoted more than 30 full-time years, unpaid, to the restoration of a rainforest he simply and deeply loved.
He received the NSW Landcarer of the Year award in 2001 and again in 2015. The Banksia Award for Community Environmental Leadership in 2016. The Order of Australia in 2019, for distinguished service to conservation and the environment. Near the end of that memborable webinar, talking about what gives him hope for the future of rainforest conservation, Tony reached for Margaret Mead’s famous line: “never doubt what a small group of committed people can do” — and then said simply:
“We are living evidence of that.”
Indeed we are. And we are because of him.
A legacy for conservation and restoration
I think about the kind of person it takes to walk away from a successful career and spend the next four decades restoring a forest. Not because it was easy, or well-funded, or guaranteed to work. But because he stood in a remnant patch of Big Scrub one day and was, as he put it, “gobsmacked by its beauty and its incredible biodiversity” — and decided that was enough of a reason.
His favourite bird was the Wompoo Fruit Dove. When Wompoos returned to a restored patch, you knew you were on the path to recovery. You were doing something right.
Rainforest Rescue exists because of Tony Parkes. The forests we protect, the guardians we’ve gathered, the work we carry forward in the Daintree and beyond…it all traces back to a man who refused to accept that extraordinary things had to disappear.
We are deeply grateful for his life. We send our love to his family — including his son Richard, who continues as Chair of the Big Scrub Rainforest Foundation, carrying the work forward — and to everyone at Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy who built something remarkable alongside him.
The Wompoos are still coming back.
For the rainforests,
Branden Barber
CEO, Rainforest Rescue
Dr Tony Parkes AO — BSc (Hons), PhD — founded Rainforest Rescue in 1999 and served as Chair for eight years. He was co-founder and President Emeritus of Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy, founder of the Big Scrub Rainforest Foundation, co-founder of Envite, and recipient of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to conservation. He is survived by his family.
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