This article was originally published on   March 13, 2009
The richest person in Australia is a 58-year-old children's book author living in Scone - heiress to $7 billion of the Cox Enterprises fortune. 
Blair Parry-Okeden is a quiet billionaire - an American who inherited a 25 per cent stake in the family's media empire after her mother's death in Hawaii in 2007, whose grandfather was a three-time governor of Ohio, and who married into this country's landed gentry.
Her place on the Forbes rich list has been raised 44 places - to 110 - by the decline in the wealth of Australia's previous richest person, the mining entrepreneur Andrew Forrest.
In Australia her family's most conspicuous spending is made by her two sons, Andrew and Henry. Their names appear on an honour roll at Taronga Zoo, recording the $500 in sponsorship they give to the institution's ring-tailed possums each year.
Friends described Ms Parry-Okeden as a private woman - "but she is interesting," was all one would say.
Neighbours knew even less. Most did not realise she was on their street. To meet her, one friend said, you would not realise her wealth. "She's quiet and reserved," said an associate. "She operates behind the scenes quite effectively but is approachable."
"She is a bit like Kerry Packer in the fact that he did a lot for the area too but didn't make a fuss about it," said Peter Hodges, a former shire councillor.
She sits on Scone Grammar School council and is a director of the non-profit aged-care centre Strathearn Village. Ms Parry-Okeden trained as a teacher after graduating from the La Pietra - Hawaii School for Girls, which her mother had helped found.
By 1989 she had written a children's book, Down By The Gate about an advertisement Mother Goose places in a newspaper. It is the writer's most public outing.
She was married to Simon Parry-Okeden - the son of the Royal Agricultural Society of NSW director Lieutenant Colonel William Nugent Parry-Okeden.
Only 10 Australians appeared on the Forbes list, four fewer than last year.
with Martin Dinneen