Keynote Speakers

Keynote Speakers

Steve Parish

Darryl Jones
Wildlife photographer Associate Professor, School of Environment, Griffith University, Qld
 Steve Parish is an internationally acclaimed nature photographer and publisher who is motivated by his lifelong passion for the natural world. He is deeply interested in the relationship between humans and the environment and has been photographing Australian social and natural history, both on land and under water, for 45 years. Steve lives in Brisbane, where he operates his award-winning company — Steve Parish Publishing. Steve works creatively from his home studio, orchestrating the development of numerous children’s nature education books, natural history guides, calendars, souvenir guides and pictorial books, for which Steve Parish Publishing is renowned. Steve’s range of products are nationally recognised by retailers as a ‘must-have’ line and can be tailored to suit any retailers’ product needs.In 2008, Steve was honoured with the Order of Australia for his contribution to the Australian publishing industry through nature photography. Steve travels and photographs this vast continent, turning his spectacular photographs into equally absorbing publications. Darryl Jones is an Associate Professor in the Griffith School of Environment, Griffith University and Deputy Director of the Environmental Futures Centre. He holds a Master in Natural Resources in wildlife management and a PhD in behavioural ecology. These two strands of his academic training – the applied and the pure – continue to inform his research. While maintaining his life-long interest in mound-building birds, he now concentrates on urban ecology – especially the management and conservation of the wild species that live with us in the suburban environment. In this context he has been researching a range of important wildlife-human interactions in an urban context, including attacks by magpies and other birds, and the global phenomenon of wildlife feeding, a remarkably little understood but profoundly important form of interaction between nature and urban humans. He is the author of six books including The Megapodes, Magpie Alert: Learning to Live with a Wild Neighbour and Mound-builders and over 100 scientific papers. As well as formal science publishing, he is deeply committed to communicating to the public and writes many popular articles as well as a column on urban wildlife in the magazine Wildlife Australia.

David Newsome

Clement Tisdell
Associate Professor, School of Environment and Life Science, Murdoch University, WA Emeritus Professor, School of Economics, University of Queensland, Qld
Dr David Newsome is an Associate Professor in the School of Environmental Science at Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia. His interests include wildlife tourism, biophysical impacts of recreation in protected areas, evaluation of ecotourism operations, sustainable trail management and geotourism. He has coordinated research projects for the Australian Government funded Sustainable Tourism Cooperative Research Centre including understanding wildlife icons, investigating impact creep and developing a wildlife tourism auditing framework. Publications include Natural Area Tourism: ecology, impacts and management and Wildlife Tourism . He has co-edited Geotourism, and recently co-edited Geotourism: the tourism of geology and landscape and Global Geotourism Perspectives. David is on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Ecotourism and Tourism in Marine Environments.David is a member of the Conservation Commission of Western Australia, the Shark Bay Advisory Committee, Coral Coast Advisory Committee and sits on the Qld Government Horse Trails Scientific Advisory Committee. He also a member of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas and has experience of ecotourism development in Southeast Asia. Clement Tisdell, Professor Emeritus in Economics at The University of Queensland, has focused on the study of the relationship between tourism and nature conservation. He began research on tourism economics in the early 1970s when he was still at The Australian National University as part of an ASEAN-Australia joint research project. He extended this research interest while he was at the University of Newcastle, NSW (1972-1989), and strengthened it after joining The University of Queensland in 1989. He has published widely on tourism economics. His books include Tourism Economics, the Environment and Development and (with J. Wen) Tourism and China’s Development. He has edited two, two volume books, The Economics of Tourism and The Economics of
eisure in Edward Elgar’s Critical Writings in Economics Series. Currently he is preparing (with C. Wilson) the manuscript for a book, Nature-based Tourism and Conservation, to be published by Edward Elgar.

Nick Mooney

Shane O’Reilly
2006 Australian of the Year Recipient and Wildlife Conservationist, Tas O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat and Spa, Qld
For 35 years Nick Mooney has been a government wildlife biologist specialising in the management of human wildlife interactions. Amongst other hats, he pioneered Tasmanian raptor rehabilitation and conservation of eagles in forestry, monitored reports of Thylacines, helped develop responses to newly discovered diseases, whale strandings and oil spills and developed practical conservation of Tasmanian devils and innovative wildlife tourism.He was key to initiating responses to both Devil Facial Tumour Disease and recent evidence of foxes in Tasmania; perhaps the most serious combination of issues Tasmanian wildlife has faced since the last Ice Age. Nick sees increasing people’s appreciation of native wildlife’s ecological roles as an ‘end’ with sophisticated wildlife tourism a key ‘means’. He has now left the government to get more time for being directly involved in innovations, mainly as a volunteer. Shane is a third generation Managing Director of the O’Reilly Family group of companies that own and operate O’Reilly’s Rainforest Retreat, Mountain Villas, Lost World Spa and Canungra Valley Vineyards.
Shane has extensively studied the theory and principles behind successful family owned businesses, and over the last decade he has led O’Reilly’s through significant growth. Shane served as a director of Gold Coast Tourism from 2002-2006, and most recently was appointed to the Board of Tourism Queensland. Following the strong environmental ethos of his forebears, Shane is also the Commercial Tourism Representative on the federally appointed GRRA committee that governs the World Heritage area known as the Gondwana Rainforest Reserves Australia.