Bush care legend of Stanwell Park awarded OAM

What do you call an environmental activist who leaves 3D graffiti in the rainforest?

Banksia, naturally. 

That secret is well and truly out now, with 81-year-old artist and Banksia Bush Care legend Kieran Tapsell today awarded one of Australia’s top honours, a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for service to conservation and the environment.

For 54 years, ever since moving into his home on Stanwell Avenue as a young lawyer, Kieran has been quietly weeding, planting and bringing back Stanwell Park’s endangered littoral rainforest. In 2017, he captured the community’s imagination with a creative solution for the big piles of weeds he’d pulled out (and that council insisted he dispose of on site). 

“I made giant nests with the lantana, senna and ochna sticks,” Kieran says. “I filled the nests with leaf litter, and as a joke, put white porcelain eggs in them (I am a potter). I wrote on the bottom of each egg, “Art in the Park,” and signed it ‘Banksia’.” 

Like British street artist Banksy, his identity was a mystery, but not for long.

The giant nests along the track to Stanwell Park kiosk became a popular outing for children, who asked their mothers when dinosaurs would emerge. This led to Kieran’s hatchlings series, including velociraptor, triceratops and ankylosaurus eggs. When Covid came in 2020, the outdoors officially became a public art gallery. 

“I invited locals to paint old masters on the eggs. About 100 locals volunteered. We ended up with two MATE Exhibitions, (Modern Art Tributes on Eggs), an international section which runs from a track from Stanwell Avenue to the Kiosk and an Australian section along the track to the beach next to Doran House. The international exhibition has Picassos, Modiglianis, Dalis, Van Goghs etc, and the Australian has Nolans, Whiteleys and several Aboriginal artists.

"Art, like most things in life, should never be taken too seriously.”

Revival of the rainforest

Perhaps less well known than Art in the Park is the huge scale and achievement of Kieran’s regeneration work, which stretches over 4.5 hectares in and around the Stanwell Avenue Reserve on the middle headland behind the beach. 

The littoral rainforest here was cut down in the 1920s for a housing subdivision then resumed by the state government in the 60s. When Kieran started weeding, it was a tangled mess of lantana, asparagus fern and other invaders. Five decades on, 3000 rainforest trees, mostly Illawarra natives, are thriving, including about 52 species that regenerated naturally – a rare event. 

The nests – which now number more than 200 – each take about five hours and five wheelbarrows of sticks to build. They act as compost heaps, feeding trees downhill. Kieran has planted 60 saplings of his favourite, the Illawarra Flame Tree, and the added nutrients are his best guess as to why they’re flowering years earlier than expected. 

Over the years Kieran has had help from about a dozen locals, as well as 70 backpackers from Europe and South America, who swapped bush care for board and lodging as part of the international Workaway program. 

The Commonwealth government lists the littoral rainforest and coastal vine thickets of Eastern Australia as critically endangered. 

“It represents only 1% of all rainforests,” Kieran says. 

“I really started getting stuck into it the last 20 years, once I retired from my partnership. But I also realised I couldn't do it by myself. I'm 81 now, and I haven't got the sort of energy I used to have, and so I got these young people coming in. They’ve had a wonderful time here, because it's a real cultural thing for them, [being] out in the bush.

“Some of them who live in forested areas of Europe have told me that they will adopt the nest compost method of dealing with forest fuel.”

Kieran is among 949 Australians recognised in the 2026 King’s Birthday honours list.

“I must admit I had to swallow some republican sentiments,” he says. 

“But what is really nice about it is that quite a few people seem to appreciate what I've done here, fixing up this forest.”

The Illawarra Flame featured Kieran on the cover of July 2021's magazine. In November 2022, he appeared on an episode of Gardening Australia and in 2024 he received a Fostering Community Spirit Award from Wollongong City Council. His OAM coincides with the release of the second edition of A Guide to the Banksia Bushcare Site in the Stanwell Avenue Reserve, a community resource that's free to download. 

The retired lawyer is also the author of Tales Old and New from Stanwell Park: Reminiscences of a Local, about the area’s history and his own adventures as a writer (including for this magazine), hang-glider pilot, potter, traveller, and translator of Spanish, which he started learning in his 50s thanks to a Venezuelan hang-glider friend.

Kieran’s first book, Potiphar’s Wife: The Vatican's Secret and Child Sexual Abuse, dates from his legal career, during which he presented on a canon law panel before the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in 2017.

“I made recommendations for changes to canon law, and the Royal Commission accepted most of them, and then there were changes afterwards,” he says.

It remains the professional achievement he's most proud of.

Nature inspires more art 

Over the June long weekend, Kieran was planning to fire up his kiln to make mugs, in readiness for the Northern Illawarra Art Trail’s open studios weekend on June 20 and 21. Painted on the mugs are several species, such as the blue fairy wren, that have flocked to find food and shelter in his extended bushland backyard.

Birdwatchers have spotted about 180 species in Stanwell Park, Kieran says. “The bird life in here has just increased enormously since the forest has been restored. There’s lots of bower birds… particularly little birds, because they really need the undergrowth. Blue wrens and eastern robins, even quails.”

His work makes people smile and is widely loved.

“It's something which I am really proud of, because people tell me every time they come through, which is really nice of them, and particularly their kids like it, with the dinosaur hatchlings and things.”

Generations of local preschoolers have contributed to the Banksia Bush Care gallery, painting blank eggs that Kieran provides, then later exhibits.

It's become a project involving the whole community.

“I think that's why I got very little vandalism.”