Irvine, Anthony Kyle (Tony)   (1937 - 2008)

Born 8 October 1937 in Melbourne, Vict. died 28 October 2008 in Atherton, Qld.

He was born in Melbourne in 1937 and shortly thereafter his father went off to Europe to fight in WW2 leaving Tony's mum, Sheila, to raise him, and later his brother Vivian, alone.

His father was killed in the war.

Tony's mother never forgave his father for going off to war and felt it was the "easy way out" for him to avoid bringing up his children. She told him repeatedly in letters that she hated him for it.

Sheila resented having the children, and often told both brothers just that.
Several times she fobbed them off to agencies in foster care or sent them off to boarding school.

Tony had an innate interest in plants and eventually gravitated towards a career in Canberra at CSIRO.
As a young man he was an accomplished Australian Rules player with the Ainslie (ACT) football team.

Tony and his wife Helen moved to Atherton in 1971 to work at the Forest Research Institute. He fell in love with the local flora and could not understand why local trees were not planted in streets and gardens.

He purchased 2.86 ha of a subdivided dairy farm, 'Timber-Lea', at Mountain View close to Atherton in 1973 and began to plant rainforest trees to see how they would behave in the open when they didn't have to compete for light.
"After all", Tony argued, "Poincianas, Cassias and Jacarandas are just rainforest trees from a different country."

Over the next three decades he and Helen converted a tangle of guinea grass, para grass, glycine and lantana into a garden of lawn and predominently north Queensland native trees.
It felt like 'Paradise Lost' when Cyclone Larry worked its destruction in 2006, but their garden slowly regained some of its former beauty.

Along with the biologists Geoff Stocker and Bernie Hyland he helped establish the 3.64-hectare tree garden known as 'Atherton Arboretum' in 1971. This was a CSIRO-owned haven for vouchered rare species from the nearby wet tropics, Cape York, the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Northern Territory. It became an important adjunct to the Australian National Herbarium and later the Australian Tropical Herbarium in Cairns, Queensland.

Tony developed a phenomenal knowledge of native trees and became evangelical about passing on his knowledge in talks, and articles, and field days.

Mr Anthony Kyle IRVINE was awarded an Order of Australia in 2005:

"For service to conservation and the environment, particularly rainforest ecology, and to the recording and preserving of Indigenous knowledge of flora and fauna."

Source: Extracted from:
Helen Irvine, 'Not Any Sheila: A Woman At War', Pub: Strictly Literary, (2010)
The Ryerson Index - IRVINE Anthony Kyle
Government House CANBERRA, 26 January 2005, MEMBER (AM) IN THE GENERAL DIVISION
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/dec/03/locals-alarmed-as-queensland-haven-to-rare-tree-species-to-be-sold-off-by-csiro
Portrait Photo: https://www.wettropics.gov.au/fromtheheart/contributors.html

Collecting localities for 'Irvine, A.K.' from AVH (2026)

Data from 8,273 specimens