My magic builds on a 50 year history at Cumberland River Holiday Park. The opportunity is a privately held 95 acres just across the rise, up for mortgagee's auction. Both are embedded in Great Otway National Park, a few minutes, aka kilometres, beyond Lorne.

The price will likely be depressed due to new bushfire zoning rules, but there has to be hope that political sanity will eventually return to deal more constructively with anomalies, especially in the light of new awareness of how different our country was before the invasion 225 years and a day before this auction.

We ran a conference of Australian microcomputer manufacturers in Lorne in 1983, the same year the Ash Wednesday fires stopped just at the edge of town, destroying almost everything further east, and an unseasonal flood on the Cumberland took our original camp with it. While friends who met at the camp and married kept me in the loop in the intervening years, it took a new millennium to book the best site in the camp for me and notional retirement to afford this summer's caravan, concession to an aging body. Little Sheoak was always my place to create a community retreat, an even more intriguing prospect in the new era of open communities. But seven days isn't an option for crowd funding any more than it was for decision making processes of earlier communities.

I had half an idea to post a recent koala pic from up Cumberland Track, but now see the real estate listing linked below contains something too similar, as well as a few others that could have come from my own collection, so I'll just include a screen grab from Planning Maps Online showing a bit more of the context, including the area I'm equally keen about on the other side of Cumbo: