WiseTech Billionaires Mike and Sue Gregg establish Great Southern Land Conservancy with $10m land purchase in Eaglehawk-Misty Mountains
A billionaire tech investor who became wealthy through WiseTech Global has donated $10 million to buy 7,000 hectares of cattle and logging land in the Great Dividing Range and turn it into a nature reserve.
In one of Australia’s largest ever charitable donations to land conservation, Mike and Sue Gregg of Sydney’s northern beaches have funded the purchase of six adjacent properties in the mountains south-west of Port Macquarie by the private land conservation charity they co-founded last year.
The charity Great Southern Land Conservancy is headed by Atticus Fleming, former head of the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. Gregg’s Shearwater Capital office in Edgecliff is a short walk from Trumper Oval, where the two men met while playing cricket in the late 1980s, when Fleming was 19 and Gregg was 39.
“Generally, if we’re doing something important, we want to know the CEO of the organization or the senior people of that organization,” Gregg told this imprint in a rare media interview. “It’s a bit like my day job as an investor; you’re basically investing in people.”
With the latest purchase completed last week, Fleming said the now combined Eaglehawk-Misty Mountains landscape includes tall moist forests, steep rainforest-covered gorges, wild rivers and rich grassy woodlands, and is a haven for koalas, greater gliders and other threatened species.
7000 hectares, or 70 square kilometers, is equivalent to the size of the entire eastern suburbs plus part of the City of Sydney, or twice the area of the Inner West Council. It extends from Cottan-Bimbang National Park between Walcha and Wauchope in the north to the foothills adjacent to the Bugan Nature Reserve in the south.
Gregg was an early investor in ASX-listed software company WiseTech and AFR Rich List After the buoy in 2017. He ranked 150th with an estimated fortune of $1.1 billion in 2025.
Gregg said his wife, Sue, was the driving force behind the conservancy and that she came up with the name. He said they found it “really exciting” to work together on an ambitious project after being “involved” in charity work separately.
“We found that we were making a little more money than we thought, and that brought responsibility on us; we had to think about how we were going to do something with it, and it wasn’t buying a big yacht,” Gregg said.
“We’ve traveled a lot and been to some far-flung places; we’ve been to the Galapagos, we’ve been to Easter Island, we’ve been to Macquarie Island, we’ve been to Africa. You see commonalities everywhere. Problems arise when people cut down trees; the savages follow them, the weeds follow them, and suddenly you’re left with a terrible environment. And once it’s broken, it’s very hard to fix it.”
A pivotal moment came about 10 years ago when the couple visited an Australian Wildlife Reserve property in the Gulf of Carpentaria, flew in by helicopter and then walked on a remote beach. Gregg said he ranked the experience with seeing turtle tracks on the beach in the Galapagos.
The environment is underserved philanthropically compared to other causes such as medical research and the arts, Gregg said. Only 4 per cent of charitable donations in Australia go to environmental causes, according to industry figures.
In her first public appearance, Sue Gregg said in a handwritten statement: “We found ourselves in a very fortunate position to do good. We love nature and wildlife. So we thought the best thing we could do with our money was to protect and restore land. There are so many wonderful causes in the world. We chose to protect the Great Southland – Australia.”
Jody Gunn, president of peak body Australian Land Conservation Alliance, said private conservation organizations such as Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Bush Heritage Australia and Nature Conservancy Australia played an important role in protecting nature in Australia.
The largest charitable donation to land conservation in Australia is thought to be the $21 million anonymous donation for The Nature Conservancy’s purchase of the 350,000 hectare Vergemont Station in western Queensland. Gunn said the $10 million was probably the largest donation in NSW.
“A gift of this scale, when delivered, has the potential to make significant contributions to biodiversity and regional communities,” Gunn said.
Great Southern Land Conservancy’s other acquisitions include the 1300ha Morven Creek property west of Yamba and the 745ha Lands End property between Grafton and Glen Innes.
The Perth-based Wright-Burt Foundation co-funded the purchase of Morven Creek, which is located adjacent to Washpool National Park and contains internationally important rainforest and ancient plant remnants.
Lands End, next to Guy Fawkes National Park, is a stronghold of greater gliders and other threatened species, Fleming said. This involved a permanent lease on an area of state forest that provided the opportunity to argue that logging would be illegal.
“What we’re trying to do as an organization is preserve really important pieces of land for conservation purposes, but also use management strategically so that we can use each of those features as a catalyst for broader impact,” Fleming said.
The Eaglehawk-Misty Mountains territory includes koalas, greater gliders, long-nosed potoroos, parma wallabies, spotted-tailed quolls, stuttering frogs, Davies treefrogs, shiny black cockatoos, brown treecreepers, Stephens banded snakes and Manning River helmeted turtles. Wildlife will be monitored with 280 camera traps at 70 sites, and Fleming expects an intensive koala survey at the drone base in mid-2026 to show the reserve protects the largest population of koalas on private land in NSW.
The land will be managed for conservation purposes, including fire, wildlife and weed management, while previously cleared areas will be restored. Part of the Eaglehawk-Misty Mountains was used for private native forestry until recently.
“Even on the last property we acquired, the last piece of the puzzle, when we were studying this property with ecologists, logging trucks were hauling away giant black logs,” Fleming said.
He said the charity would consider a conservation agreement with the NSW government for permanent protection.
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Caitlin Fitzsimmons is the environment and climate correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously a social affairs reporter and Money editor.Connect via email.
