Most visitors to Australia in recent years have probably handed over a few dollars to Steve Parish; nearly every tourist destination in this country has at least a postcard rack, if not a whole bookshelf, featuring his stunning photographs of Australian landscapes and wildlife.

Steve spends up to six months a year travelling to some of Australia’s most remote and beautiful locations, photographing a gob-smacking 30,000 images a year for a seemingly insatiable audience.

This year’s Australia Day honours listed Steve Parish as the recipient of a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM); partly in recognition of his contribution to raising awareness of Australia’s unique wildlife and their habitats on a very broad audience.

He has just completed a major book about travelling Australia – one that he hopes will have a fundamental impact on the tourism mind-set; he wants to get people out of the car and into the bush.

“I wanted to do something that shifted the paradigm, so that people don’t get in the car in Brisbane and drive to Kakadu and think there’s nothing but boredom in between. There’s actually plenty of adventure in between,” he says.

 “I want people to think – ‘What is this habitat? What lives here?  What fun can you have here?’ – it’s a travelling book with a book with a twist of lemon that has taken five years and a fortune to put together,” he adds.

“But I've always had faith. I believe that we're all connected to nature and it doesn’t take a lot to sort of start a fire in someone's spirit, to trigger an emotion or a change in someone's way of seeing or thinking or being, you know?”

The former navy diver has come a long way; at a time when many of Australia’s top photographers struggle to get their images in front of an audience, Steve has created a multi-million dollar publishing empire starring his own nature photography, as well as the work of other Australian photographers who meet his rigid standards.

Steve Parish Publishing is a phenomenal success story. The company employs 55 people and currently has around sixty books in production, with thousands of books, posters, guides, calendars and other items available for sale.

Steve says that in recent years, the company has moved its focus from postcards and souvenirs towards mass market children’s educational books.

“We're now developing serious natural history books, too,” Steve says. “We’re talking to very experienced professors of zoology, interpreting their knowledge into everyman's language.”

As a child, Steve had been disinterested in school; now, he is keen to pass on his own love of wildlife and wild environments to as broad an audience as possible; it’s that mass-market appeal, he thinks, that is the key to preserving these wild places.

In a way, his mission is a magnification of the gift that another photographer gave him more than half a century ago.

Raised in a strict Pentecostal Christian family, Steve says that from a young age, he was desperate to leave his hometown of Adelaide and was a troubled teenager with a passion for guns.

He started snorkelling at the age of nine and loved to hunt fish with a spear gun. This brought Steve into contact with Igo Oak, Australia's first underwater photographer, who gave Steve the chance to photograph a fish underwater when he was sixteen.

“I soon learned that, while I could get close enough to spear fish, getting close enough to get them full-frame in sharp focus was a totally different matter,” he says.

Suddenly, Steve had found an alternative to hunting and shooting wildlife.The thrill of capturing a rare creature in a photograph inspired him to swap his gun for a camera – and a lifetime fascination with conservation was born.

He joined the Navy and moved to Sydney, where he photographed local marine life for the Australian Museum.

During his eleven years in the Navy, he published his first book, Ocean of Life, which depicted marine creatures and left the Navy to work as the photographer for Queensland National Parks where he photographed rainforest wildlife, including possums and gliders.

“That was my first introduction to the idea of using sequential images to tell stories with people and vehicles and nets and science and close-ups of animals and misty forests rather than seeing something in isolation and taking a picture of it.”

Five years later, a trip around Australia shooting wildlife was funded by Adelaide publisher Rigby, just making forays into the lucrative coffee-table book craze of the 1980’s, when sales of 15,000 to 20,000 books in 12 months were common.

“That phase taught me how publishing companies think and operate; these were ordinary people making risky business decisions based on gut feeling.”

Rigby went out of business in 1984 and on January 1st 1985, Steve Parish Publishing began. Twenty three years later, the Brisbane-based company turns over more than $20 million a year at retail.

“My challenge in life is getting everything sorted so it all rolls along and you're calm and happy and heading in the right direction. It’s not just about figuring out how to photograph bats in flight, it’s all of the other things as well.”