“ I was born in 1960 in Sydney. My parents got together in university. Dad got a scholarship to go to Harvard University so from the age of one I was in student accommodation for families in America. It was wonderful as the street had all nationalities, black, white, yellow and green. So many kids to play with for six years while Dad was at Uni.
We came back and bought a house in Oatley in Sydney’s south where my grandparents lived. I grew up there with heaps of bush and heaps of kids to play with.
My Grandfather Myles Dunphy was an early bushwalker. He started the very first bushwalking club in Australia and was known as the father of conservation in Australia. There are books written about him. He has an OBE. He did a lot of maps, he proposed the Greater Blue Mountains National Park. He walked, named and mapped most of the places in the Blue Mountains. His maps are still used by bushwalkers. We’re talking about the late 1800s and early 1900s. He was an explorer as such and an early conservationist.
My father’s brother Milo Dunphy followed on and became a very active Conservationist. He started the Total Environment Centre. He did a lot of work in the wet tropics, Lake Pedder, the Franklin and many more campaigns. Milo died early from cancer. Dad was an academic but we did conservation work trying to save local parks.
Dad and Mum used to take the family to Barrington Guest House for annual holidays and that’s where I was introduced to rainforests. There were birds landing on your arms, horses to ride and all this beautiful rainforest to walk through.
I moved to the Northern Rivers in 1980 after finishing school, working a bit, chasing girls, taking drugs and surfing. The whole Terania thing was happening here. Everyone was trying to save the rainforest. I moved up here to go to College which is now Southern Cross Uni. The whole activist thing wasn’t really my thing. I did 2 years of a Diploma of Applied Science which was fantastic. It was a brilliant course. I still run into Lecturers who say how great this course was and they’ve been in universities their whole lives. I met lots of fabulous people I’m still friends with.
Over the years I’ve travelled overseas, lived in WA, Sydney and everywhere. I ended up coming back and discovering bush regeneration. Bush regeneration started in Sydney by the Bradley sisters who developed the initial structure in the mid 70’s. I got involved in the mid 80’s when rainforest regeneration had just begun. There was a remnant down at Wingham Brush and they were doing great work down there. We were doing work up here. You had to have a disability, be a woman or an Aboriginal to get a job on one of those employment schemes. I said I was colour blind so I got on the team. We did this fabulous project through The Big Scrub Environment Centre at Currie Park near the racecourse in Lismore. We planted thousands of trees there and tried to regenerate but no-one really knew what to do back then like we do now.
I started volunteering at Rotary Park then the Bicentennial happened so we got some funding to do the park. I worked with all the early bush regenerators who are still around. Discovering rainforest regeneration was like a big green light for me. I knew this was what I wanted to do. To me it had everything. You could save the bush without chaining yourself to bulldozers which didn’t work for me. My problem was I would feel sorry for the loggers or feel sorry for the bulldozer drivers. I mean, it’s important to protest. I just wasn’t very good at that. It also incorporated rainforest ecology which I was really into. You were actually doing stuff, getting in there, removing weed, manipulating the ecosystem to help make it recover from its degraded state.
I worked for various Councils and National Parks then the money dried up. I was running some courses through Skillshare so we started restoring this remnant which was a private job. Through that we started The Big Scrub Landcare group. Tony Parkes came along and ran with it. We are now restoring and maintaining 65 remnants. We have planted hundreds of thousands of trees and attracted millions of dollars in funding to run the whole thing. I’m the Vice President of the Landcare group.
In the 90’s I started working with Rob Kooyman, an Ecologist who was a great mentor for me. His mentor was Len Webb who was one of the Ecologists involved in the Terania debate and an amazing Philosopher as well. I’m very grateful to have had Rob as my mentor. We thought we were restoring remnants but they weren’t getting any bigger so we had to plant trees. In the early days we had failures so it was exciting in the early 90’s working out how to do this. We had lots of field days and lots of successes. Now we are planting thousands of trees and we’re refining it even further. Some of the plantings are 30 years old and some trees almost a metre wide.
We needed nurseries. There were a few around, Terania Creek, Nicholsons, Burringbar and a few smaller ones. I’d bought a property by then in Dunoon so I started a backyard nursery mainly for our own use. It started to grow, then people were wanting to buy trees from us so we started selling. We ran out of water, space and trees so we moved to this new nursery..Firewheel Nursery here in Dorroughby in the early 2000s. We have better water and better use of the land. Now we produce 150,000 trees and shrubs a year which all go out to the big scrub area.
This year we published a book called Rainforest Seeds of Australia. We used to do workshops and people wanted a book. We were writing notes on how to collect, propagate and process the seeds. Over the decades I kept saying I would write this book. Along came Steve McAlpin who is a much more diligent Scientist and then along came Michelle Chapman who was a student at the Uni. She had all the fabulous organising skills and she was an environmental educator. So together with Paul Nelson who’d worked with me for 20 years, Steve and Michelle, we wrote the book and CSIRO became the publisher. Hugh Nicholson had all the photos we needed. We had the launch before Covid at The Eltham Hotel. I took along 150 books thinking I was over doing it. 400 people turned up for the launch. The books sold out in half an hour and now we’ve sold over 1,000 books. The nurseries have all been falling by the wayside. We are really it as far as trees. This year we sold every tree we could grow. We bought every tree from every nursery including Brisbane but the demand is high. Hopefully this book will inspire people to open nurseries.
In my personal life, I met Lucy in 1985 in a venue in Byron through a mutual friend. We ended up getting married and having two children who are now 21 and 23. They were off in far flung places then Covid hit so they came home for 4 months. They’ve just gone to Melbourne so bad timing unfortunately. The kids grew up here and then Lucy got cancer in about 2010. She died 5 years ago. She battled that disease for nearly 5 years which was an amazing feat. She had secondaries in the Liver but the smallest primary they’ve ever seen in the Colon. She did everything conventional, alternative, diet, meditation, etc. She went to Europe for different treatments which all worked to some degree, Through hard work she was fortunate to survive for another 4 1/2 years so the kids got to see their Mum till Mia was 18 and Pascoe was about 16. That was very sad. She just got through all the kid stuff, out the other side looking forward to that fabulous life you have when the kids are older. Mia in particular misses her a lot. She is lucky to have lovely friends of Lucy’s who are great aunties to her.
Years later I met Georgie who lives at Goolmanger and works for Envite so she’s in the industry. We are having a lovely time together.”