We've recorded 199 episodes of this podcast at this point, and we've never had a conversation quite like the one we had with Steve Parish OAM, our 200th episode!
Steve turned 81 the day before we sat down with him, and if you're picturing someone easing into retirement, you’d be sorely mistaken. Steve is in the process of building a natural history education platform for kids, teaching himself generative AI tools at an age when most people have given up on new software, and he still gets genuinely emotional talking about fish.
What struck us most wasn't the scale of what he built. It was how calmly he talks about losing it. Twice. And what he did with the wreckage both times.
A boy who left school in primary school
Steve grew up in Adelaide in the 1950s, raised by a mother he describes as a Pentecostal preacher running a household of rigid dogma. He left school before high school, worked briefly as an apprentice gunsmith in a shop staffed by former German soldiers and Polish Jewish tradesmen, and got sacked after a scuffle. He joined the Navy as a young diver not long after.
The discovery of photography arrived when Steve was 16, almost by accident. He'd been spearfishing off South Australia when sharks with strange black eyes kept pinching his catch. He didn't know they were great whites, and he didn't know great whites had started attacking people in that stretch of water, until Rodney Fox became the first recorded victim two years later. Curious about the sharks, Steve started asking questions at the South Australian Museum and subsequently was invited on a fish-collecting trip. A pioneering underwater photographer named Ego Oak handed him a camera, and he took his first picture, a silver fish, and thought nothing of it. He wanted to be seen as a hunter, not a photographer.
"The pivotal moment in my entire life was when I was introduced, via the South Australian Museum, at the age of 16."
A second meeting sealed it. In Sydney, diving with the Underwater Research Group, Steve found three rare deep-water fish in the harbour and delivered them to John Paxton, the Australian Museum's curator of fishes for 46 years. That gift bought him a lifelong friendship and an introduction to ichthyological taxonomy, the science of classifying fish. Science, plus creativity, plus authenticity, he told us, is the formula that's carried his entire career. He puts a number on it too, half joking: roughly $600 million in career turnover, from a boy who once got applause for a photo of a silver fish.
The handshake that built a publishing empire
Steve's first attempt at a career in books nearly ended it before it began. Contracted by Rigby Publishers in the 1980s to produce coffee-table books, he was mid-project in the Kimberley when the publisher went bankrupt, and payments stopped. Rather than find another publisher, he decided, while camping in the Kimberley with no plan and no capital, that he'd become his own.
That decision produced the creative life purpose he still recites word for word, unchanged since he wrote it in 1984: to inspire others to connect to nature for their mental, physical and spiritual wellbeing.
"Totally and utterly and absolutely naive. Naivety is a blessing."
A chance meeting with a millionaire named Cloud Benfield, on Steve's birthday in 1987, turned into a handshake loan of $500,000, interest-free, repayable whenever Steve could manage it. Months later, the global stock market crashed, and Benfield lost everything. Steve agreed, on another handshake, to repay the $300,000 already spent within twelve months. He did it, and the following year, at Brisbane's World Expo 88, his cards and posters were the only Australiana product on the ground. Australia Post came calling soon after, and Steve Parish Publishing grew to 125 staff, 3,000 retail accounts and $15 million a year in revenue, all built on a business he'd started with nothing more than nerve and a book about wombats he didn't even want to photograph.
Flooded, or "inundated"?
The end came from a single word. When Brisbane flooded in January 2011, Steve's warehouse and photo library went under, along with a third of his life's work. When he lodged the claim, the insurer responded that the property hadn't been flooded; it had been inundated, and the policy only covered one of those terms. It's now been fought and argued over in court more than once. Steve's advice to anyone listening is blunt: check your policy for both terms.
"Because of a word."
By January 2012, Steve had signed one piece of paper and lost seven million dollars in personal wealth: a two-million-dollar house, the entire publishing company, every photograph he'd ever taken, cars, cameras. What was left was three thousand dollars, an old television, and a hard drive full of digital files that, at the time, the bankruptcy process didn't quite know how to treat. "They're in the ether," as Steve put it.
What followed was a period he describes plainly as manic depression. The recovery came, in part, from Eckhart Tolle's teaching on facing adversity.
"You can lose something you have, but you can't lose something you are."
A talk he gave on recovery, at a photography conference in Newcastle, was heard by a Griffith University staff member dealing with a wave of anxiety and depression among students and teachers. That connection turned into an invitation to build an online course, which became the Steve Parish Masterclass: six modules focused on defining a creative life purpose, identifying the roadblocks that stop people from acting on it, and working through them.
An 81-year-old learning generative AI
The most unexpected part of the conversation was how comfortable Steve is with artificial intelligence, and how specific his thinking is about where it belongs. He uses ChatGPT and Gemini daily while building a natural history education series for children, feeding them his own field-craft writing and having them help simplify decades of technical material for young readers. He's candid that plenty of his peers in publishing are, in his words, paranoid about it.
"Rather than seeing AI as an enemy, how can I use AI? Find the thing that it can't do, and do that, and use it as a tool to help every other part of your business."
He's also quick to point out where the tools genuinely fall short. Anatomy, particularly. An echidna's rear feet point backwards with an extended claw for scratching between its spines, and Steve says AI consistently gets it wrong.
"You cannot replicate feet. If you want a gliding possum with an opposable thumb on its rear feet, dream on. You can't prompt it."
For his own fine art, Steve draws a personal, disclosed line. He won't ask AI to generate an image outright, but he'll use it to build a watercolour-style background effect behind an animal he's photographed himself, provided the animal's anatomy, colour, and texture are untouched, and it's labelled honestly. He applies the same standard to a piece built around his late friend and collaborator, the bat scientist Les Hall, captioning the image plainly as an AI recreation. The principle, as he explained it to a room of camera club members in Brisbane recently, comes down to one question: does this deceive anyone about what actually happened?
Still shooting, still teaching
At 81, Steve shoots with a Canon R5 Mark II and a 200-800mm zoom, having ditched the heavy prime lenses he carried for most of his career. He backs up 383,000 catalogued images across two mirrored Synology systems and maintains a relationship with a local Mac technician he trusts more than anyone cheaper. He still teaches half-day wildlife workshops with fellow photographer Dean Holland (check out Dean’s interview on The Camera Life), still updates his masterclass annually, and recently spent forty-five minutes teaching his sixteen-year-old grandson back-button focus on a pond full of birds.
He's also stopped chasing the people who steal his photographs. Early in his career, he once tried to pursue a well-known artist who'd torn up and collaged his images without credit. The legal advice, in the end, was that the case would cost thirty thousand dollars over four hundred dollars' worth of stolen pictures. These days his approach is simpler.
"I don't spend one second of any given period being concerned. If you're prolific out there and people nick your stuff, look at your creative life purpose and what it is."
The same philosophy shapes how he posts to social media. He showed us two identical photos of peeling bark, one captioned with hashtags, gear specs and outbound links, the other with nothing but an honest note about what the moment meant to him. The plain post pulled 14,000 interactions. The marketing-speak version pulled 278.
"Don't put these on Facebook and say my Nikon at F8 took this picture. Put a note about how excited you were. Leave off all the hashtags, and they will triple, they will quadruple."
Almost three and a half hours after we started, Steve was still going, still generous, still curious about what we were building. As he put it near the end, camera life should be creative love. We think that's a fair way to sum up a conversation, and a career, that ran from a spearfishing teenager on the South Australian coast to a man in his 80s teaching a computer to draw an echidna's feet correctly.
A huge thank you to Steve for the time and the honesty, and to Lucky Straps for supporting every episode of this show, including our 200th. If you want to hear the whole conversation, including the parts about Metallica, Procreate, and why he sleeps with a hard drive next to his laptop, the full episode is up now.
You can watch or listen to the whole conversation on YouTube, Apple Podcast, Spotify. The show is backed by Lucky Straps, who make handmade leather camera straps in Bendigo. You will find them at luckystraps.com.
