Tony Forrest operates a farm in Ripplebrook, located in Victoria's Gippsland region, where he keeps over 200 vintage tractors alongside his dairy cows. His fascination with machinery began in childhood. "As a kid, I gravitated towards everything from tractors, stationary engines, cars, trucks, petrol bowsers," he recalled. This passion was shared with his late father, Tony Sr., who worked primarily with bulldozers. "My dad mainly worked on bulldozers, so he'd buy a bunch of them, use them for a few months and then flog them off," Forrest said. By the 1980s, his father had accumulated around 150 bulldozers on their property.

For more than 40 years, the father-son duo traveled across Australia to collect tractors from various states. "Dad and I used to travel all over Australia, buying and selling machines from John Deere, Massey Ferguson, Ford, etc., so I caught the collecting bug pretty quickly," Forrest explained. As his interest grew, he began importing tractors from countries like America, England, Belgium, Germany, and Holland. He noted a strong international demand for his vintage vehicles. "I'm sending three tractors — a Lanz Bulldog, a Fordson P5 crawler, and a Mercedes-Benz 800 — to someone in the Netherlands, and they send other machines back to me in containers," he said.

Forrest prefers older tractors for their simplicity. "For starters, the antique models don't have computers, so you don't have to be a tech whiz to fix the darn things, and they tend to be more reliable too," he stated. However, he acknowledged the challenge of balancing collecting with accumulating. "I've lost count of how many I have. I've sold a dozen in this first auction and only plan to keep about 50," he said. Among his prized possessions is a rare 1954 Ferrari tractor, of which only 13 were made, and a 1937 Vierzon, a French replica of a Lanz Bulldog.

After the death of his father in 2018, Forrest shifted his focus from collecting to managing the family dairy farm. "After he passed away, life changed a whole lot," he said. With only 226 acres available, he realized he could not maintain both the farm and the extensive tractor collection. "There's no point them rusting away when someone else could repair, restore, and actually enjoy them," he added.

Forrest plans to hold a larger auction in May 2026 but anticipates that the process of selling his collection will take several years. "Dad loved his tractors, so it's definitely difficult to let them go. The ones I'm most sentimental about are still tucked away in the shed under covers because I haven't even thought of getting rid of them — but you just can't keep them all," he said. The emotional journey of parting with these machines continues as he navigates the legacy left by his father.