Want to own the best wave in Western Australia, maybe lock it up for your own pleasures?
If you surf, you know Gnaraloo. If you’re a little older you’ll remember Jack McCoy’s Billabong Challenges, held there in 95 and 96, the world’s best surfers at one of the world’s best waves, Kelly Slater, Machado, Sunny, Occ.
And, if you grew up in the relatively waveless city of Perth, 1100 clicks south, it was the wave you dreamed about as the cold winds of winter came. As all the best surfers loaded up their Landcruisers and headed north on the North West Coastal Highway, following in the footsteps of pioneers Craig Howe and Charlie Konstantinidis who first surfed the joint in 1975 after being tipped off by a Land Rover salesman.
Now, the primary wave at Gnaraloo is Tombstones, long wildly barrelling left, as you know, but the whole joint spans over over 84,000 hectares and has 65 kilometers of prime coastline along the southern entrance of the Ningaloo Marine Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The sale, which is a combined pastoral and tourism lease, includes 1500 goats as livestock. The realtor, Jarrad O’Rourke, emphasises the desire to keep accommodation affordable, reflecting its rustic roots.
Right now, you got 3 Mile Camp, near Tombstones with its bore water toilets and hot showers and a little shop that sells basic food and cold beer, Gnaraloo Homestead with its self-contained cabins, one-twenty a night, or the big ol Fishing Lodge, ten bedrooms and room for 22 swingers.
The ginger-topped photographer Scotty Bauer told ABC he wanted the goats removed, they pests etc, and “I hope it’s a fresh start for that coastline; it would be great to get someone in there that has some knowledge about running a camp of that nature mindfully. The coast is dying. It’s dead in some places – that is a real concern.”
Want to see how good it gets?
Commented on Disqus? Log out, tap the Disqus button, and your old name and comments come back. The box is ours.
Your comments are still here. Every one of them.
Twelve years of BeachGrit comments came across from Disqus. Connect and we will show you how many are yours. We get your username, nothing else.
Connect Disqus to reveal.
WSL should buy it and host half the WSL tour at the various waves there. I don’t know what would be funnier: watching Felipe post another 0.0 at heaving Tombstones, or listening to the yearly blow-ins complain once they realise their claimed “local” status means jack shit compared to private interests. And yeah, there might currently be wording on the lease that guarantees public coastal access – but that can be quickly dealt with via an ecological protection order or by ‘finding’ an indigenous cultural site.
Didn’t they pay $11million for the Kelly pool? Which would be about equal to the asking price considering the exchange rate.
You have no idea, that’s why you still have a voice. Surfing means f… all to someone who destroys the world and gains a lot of money from the process. It’s happening here and most go along with it, obey, inject, slave, complicit. Look at my new Land Cruiser, took out another loan, yeah what a rebel.
firewood collection a worse problem- goats only graze.
sheep are far worse.
muster and collect half the goats every year= sustainable.
I’d rather buy that house on little Cove at Noosa.
Bull sharks are the angry cunts of the sea
Cheaper than a Slater wave pool that’s for sure.
Yeah, I was thinking Ziff’s wife could buy it and make it a play thing for the tour.
A mate of mine was doing a geology degree in WA. He scammed doing his final assessment at Gnaraloo Station taking samples of the rocks. He told me he finished taking samples and the whole task in about 2 months but stayed for 7 or 8 months, however long before the grant money ran out.
All the students were given the same amount of money for the task, and because he was living remotely (and negotiated free accomodation for access to the study), he was able to stretch out the money a lot longer than people who were living ‘in civilisation’.
Smart bloke. Married a genuine princess from an eastern Indonesian island and now has that on his CV. Might even be a king now…
If one of the big WA 3 will buy it via one of their green /eco/conservation foundations, Gina Twiggy or Stokes and with a sneaky dark horse Tim Robberts even possibly in the mix , then you can start worrying about access and cost, because for those folks dropping 17m on backing up their green washing would not even raise a eyebrow.
I’m gonna buy it and start a goofy footers cult. The Occult. Each member will have multiple kids with multiple wives. Natural footers will be sacrificed..
I would like to be part of this journey.
isn’t this flick palmateers stomping grounds?
Pretty sure she if from Perth but Imogen is from the area in general, not Gnaraloo but Quobba. Blows away Flick on the attractiveness scale.
the era in general being several thousand kilometres …that’s a big call.
It was the backdrop for her vibrator campaign
Felipe Toledo should buy Gnarloo, fully privatize it, and then never surf it.
For $17 mil they better be throwing Imogen Caldwell (Brown) in there as a “personal assistant”. (And yes I know she’s from Quobba, not Gnaraloo).
Gnaral7,000,000.
Selling property via Facebook is insane; they may want to get a new agent.
Seriously, a good agent would be slinging it on TikTok
not a goat impact expert, but in the surf world proper, betwixt the clips dropping from Sydney today, the Silverbacks session from Nate/Ivan/Turko, and that Channel Islands montage with CI’s finest enjoying really solid Rincon, been a world class couple weeks for surf media content
>“People are very protective of it,” O’Rourke told ABC. “[The lease holder] doesn’t want to sell it to the highest bidder … it is still currently affordable for most, and it’s the most amazing place on Earth.”
Things realtors say before selling to someone is going to build an expensive hotel with a giant fence around the whole thing
Always been there, its not a new thing.
Wow, Gosh, an incredible opportunity for a Super-Fun Dear Leader like Trump or Bukele or Orban to buy up some more real estate and turn it into a safe paradise!
Whadda Love most about goats, Mitch?
I do recall a lot of old mates thought Sunny Garcia was a top bloke till watching the Billybog comp video from there and then all talking about what a dick he was for bailing on it cos he couldn’t handle camping.
Then a few years after that three of them successfully killed themselves by hanging, gassing, and jumping in front of a train.
But some years later Sunny failed at his own attempt to kill himself by hanging.
I’m pretty sure they’d still call him a dick for his failure to complete the deed…
You have to set your line and commit to the drop.
$17 Milli?
That’s Gnarly! Ooooo