Reclusive heiress richest Australian By Damien Murphy American-born heiress Blair Parry- Okeden, who lives at Scone in NSW's Hunter Valley, has topped Forbes Australia's rich list. 
She ended the West Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart's five-year run as the magazine's richest Australian.
Forbes put Ms Parry-Okeden's net worth at $12.4billion.
Ms Rinehart's fortune fell $4.54billion to $12.1billion courtesy of falling iron ore prices and a legal fight with her children that impacted her shareholding in Hancock Prospecting.
Ms Parry-Okedon, 65, inherited a 25per cent stake in the family's media empire, Cox Enterprises, after her mother's death in Hawaii in 2007. Her grandfather was a three-time governor of Ohio. She remains the lowest- profiled of the Australian rich and has never spoken to the media.
She came to Australia from Hawaii in the late 1970s after marrying into remnants of the NSW squattocracy, Simon Parry-Okeden, the son of prominent agriculturalist William Nugent Parry-Okeden, a former executive director of the Royal Agricultural Society of NSW.
The couple, now divorced, raised two sons, Andrew, 35, and Henry, 33, both living in Australia.
Ms Parry-Okedon lives at Rockview Station in Scone and has no role at the media company, America's third- biggest cable TV company. Forbes ranked Ms Parry-Okeden as the 16th- richest woman in the world. Her grandfather, James M. Cox, founded Cox Enterprise in Dayton, Ohio after purchasing the Dayton Daily News in 1898.
Forbes also reported Ms Parry- Okedon had taken out Australian citizenship.
She is known as a reclusive philanthropist.
Among her other donations, she gifted a sum of $2million to the University of Hawaii to endow a professorship at the university's Centre on Ageing Ms Rinehart's fellow WA iron ore miner Andrew Forrest's wealth took the biggest percentage hit: down 41per cent, sending him down 12 spots on the rich list to No.22.
Property baron Harry Triguboff ranks number three on this year's list, with a net worth of $9.7billion.
James Packer fell two spots to sixth rank.