After moving to Australia’s Northern Rivers region with his wife Rowena three decades ago, retired banker Tony Parkes was blown away when someone took him into a remnant of rainforest. 

Then he learned that only about 1% of it was left in Australia’s Big Scrub, which had once flourished across 185,000 acres (75,000 hectares) of eastern Australia. Over the centuries, human encroachment and wildfires have shrunk it to just 1% of that original expanse by 1900.

Now, rising temperatures and drought threaten the remaining fragments. These smaller patches contain fewer trees and dwindling diversity, which leaves species vulnerable to changing weather, warming, and disease.

So Tony set out to do something about it. He started out by working on the degraded land in the backyard of his new home. He and Rowena planted tens of thousands of trees on their own land. Over time the canopy closed, the understory thickened and birds returned. It was proof that some of the old machinery of the rainforest was working again.

Then, bringing to the task all the skills he had learned as an investment banker in Sydney, he co-founded the Big Scrub Landcare Group (now the Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy) in 1993, uniting landholders, scientists, bush regenerators, donors and volunteers around a disciplined model of rainforest recovery.

The group gave landholders the information, confidence and examples needed to restore remnants and plant native rainforest on their own land. It produced manuals, held field days, built a large annual Rainforest Day and turned scattered local concern into an institution that endured.

For over 30 years, the group has facilitated the planting of more than 3 million trees to re-establish rainforest on almost 700ha in the Big Scrub region, almost doubling the total area of remnant vegetation. These plantings have substantially increased the area of rainforest habitat for fauna and are facilitating landscape connectivity and species movement.

Unfortunately many of the key structural species lacked the genetic diversity to survive in the long term because the seeds were collected from just a few trees in the Big Scrub.

In 2017, Tony conceived a big and complex genome project – one that has never been done anywhere in the world. One goal is to avoid the extinction of ancient trees whose ancestry traces back to Gondwana, the supercontinent that existed before Earth’s continents separated hundreds millions of years ago.

The Science Saving Rainforests Program aims to produce planting stock from seeds of 30 key structural and 30 threatened species that have the optimal genetic diversity to provide the greatest possible resilience to climate change, new insects and new diseases.

The Science Saving Rainforests program applies genetic rescue science to improve rainforest restoration outcomes in the Big Scrub and beyond, building a “living seed bank” to protect the continent’s last-remaining fragments of rainforest from climate change. 

Statistics shared in the 2024 report:

• 12,500 leaf samples for 56 of the 60 species have been collected to date, mostly by Dr Robert Kooyman 
• Genetic results and analysis for 27 species (i.e. 23 key structural species and 4 threatened species) received to date
• 236 propagule collections (mostly cuttings, but some seed and wildlings) which amounts to around 7,000 cuttings of the 80,000 needed over the 60 species
• Some cuttings have been potted on, and seed collected is germinating with some seedlings already potted on 
• We expect some plants to be ready for planting in less than a year.  

On a warm April day in 2025, the conservancy planted the first trees at its new home in McLeans Ridges. With the help of 45 community volunteers, around 500 plants were planted to mark the next step in development of the site, which will become home to Science Saving Rainforests’ (SSR) living seedbank plantation.

Sources:

Tony Parkes, the banker who replanted a rainforest. Mongabay, Jun. 14, 2026

Science Saving Rainforests. Big Scrub Rainforest.