On Saturday July 13, during Kiama’s Winter Festival, the community was invited to paint Daisy the Decorated Dairy Cow at the Old Fire Station.

The day marked a new chapter in the biography of Daisy and Kiama’s strange and endearing fascination with her.

“It was packed, I reckon we probably had 500-600 people through here on Sunday and probably almost a thousand on Saturday. But poor old Daisy looks like she's got about ten layers of paint on her,” says Experience Art facilitator Michelle Springett. 

Springett inhabited the Old Fire Station during the festival inviting visitors to come inside and paint. Whether it be painting Daisy, painting the Kiama mural inside the building or just simply getting some paint and some paper and making something.

“One person said, how nice is it that there's six or seven children around the cow painting, and they’re not home on their mobile phones? Yeah, it was really lovely. We’ve had kids hanging around here all weekend and not just adding one piece onto the mural but adding five, six, seven pieces to the mural,” says Springett.

But it wasn’t only kids painting their magnum opuses onto Daisy, Kiama MP Gareth Ward stopped in to have a go at it and he says that the festival was an incredible success.

“The festival was a success and I just want to congratulate Destination Kiama, Sally (Bursell) and her team, who did a terrific job and I’m just really pleased to have supported them in a request for a government grant to help make the festival a success,” says Ward.

Ward says that although the festival brought in a lot of people, he is interested in garnering the response from the local businesses involved as it is important that they are benefitting from all these community events.

“I’ll be interested to hear some feedback from small businesses in the main street specifically, as they have to pay ongoing rents and overheads. Just to make sure they did benefit out of it because we need to think about our small businesses and the impact on them,” says Ward.

This article is another episode in the continuing saga of Daisy the Decorated Dairy Cow, you can find the previous article here.