Isolation might be a curse for humanity, but for the biological diversity of Australian flora and fauna it’s often a blessing. This is the case with Bruny Island off the southeastern tip of Tasmania. Separated from Tassie by the D’Entrecasteaux Channel on one side and the Southern Ocean on the other, Bruny Island is one of sixteen biodiversity hotspots nationwide, and one of six priority Australian islands, considered a living ‘ark’ – a stronghold for the preservation of rare and endangered native species. And within Bruny Island there is what you could describe as an ‘ark within an ark’ – the biodiversity hotspot called Fairyland.

Owned by the Davis family, Fairyland is a 330- acre oasis of wetlands, forests and rookeries. It’s home to an abundance of near-extinct fauna, such as swift parrots, forty-spotted pardalotes, Australasian bitterns, mutton birds, eastern quolls, and little penguins, better known as fairy penguins. The latter spend months at sea, often travelling deep into the Southern Ocean, before returning to Fairyland in late spring to spend the summer nesting and feeding their newborn chicks. You see them at sunset waddling up the beach in little gangs to their rookeries hidden within the sand dunes and salt bushes.

To support the restoration work of Fairyland, including the preservation of its penguin colony, M.J. Bale is pleased to announce our new ‘Penguin Suit’ project. We are donating $25k this year from the sale of M.J. Bale Penguin Suits (tuxedos) to Fairyland, where it will be reinvested into much-needed ecology work: the planting of native trees, shrubs and grasses, including casuarinas, salt bushes, coastal acacias, and grasses. In addition, Paul Davis and ecologist Matthew Taylor from the Gum Tree Lane Foundation (Fairyland’s verifier and administrator), will work with Jason Smith, a Palawa man and expert on the use of traditional ‘cool burning,’ to restore healthy country and prevent the potential of catastrophic bushfires fed by heavy fuel loads.

We want to give back in meaningful ways to communities and likeminded people like the Davis family who share our values and are doing great things,” says M.J. Bale Founder & CEO, Matt Jensen. “With the help of our customers, we would like to try to make a difference.” “We are thrilled to be working with a conscious brand like M.J. Bale,” says Lara Dickenson of The Gum Tree Lane Foundation, “who are prioritising nature balance and tying commercial success to accelerated ecology work.” What makes Fairyland so unique is its connection to the sea. It’s not just penguins nesting in the rookeries here, but also mutton birds, whose annual migration route spans a return trip from Bruny Island to Siberia – one of the greatest feats of endurance for any species. Another part-time Fairyland resident is the swift parrot – formerly 100,000 strong and now numbering just 500. One of the great pollinators, the bright green and red-blue birds noisily flit between the property’s blue gums getting drunk on nectar, before spending winters in the Murray basin and parts of Queensland. Fairyland is also one of the last strongholds of the forty-spotted spotted pardalote and the bittern, which hides in the property’s wetlands.

The Davis family purchased Fairyland in the early 2000s, with the intention of having a quiet waterfront weekender. Then Paul Davis felt the calling. “This place just has such an amazing sense of calm about it,” he says. “The longer we spent here, and the more we discovered about its threatened species, we knew we had to do everything we could. We’ve been doing this for 20 years, but there’s the question of the next 20 years, and the 20 years after that. Because once these endangered birds and wildlife are gone, they are gone forever. And quite often the answer for conserving one threatened species can help with the protection of another species.”