Picnic Island, 800 metres off Tasmania’s Freycinet Peninsula, is up for sale, with a price guide of about $5 million
The island is owned by former Victorian state politician Clem Newton-Brown who bought Picnic Island 20 years ago and used it as a family holiday campsite before developing it as tourist accommodation about six years ago.
The 6753 square metre island is overlooked by the Hazards mountain range and features 360-degree water views, a private jetty, walking trails and accommodation for up to 10 guests.
It rents for a standard rate of $3,300 per night, with a two-night minimum.
In its marketing campaign, the island, which is near iconic Wineglass Bay, is described as an “outstanding and rare opportunity for a buyer to secure a private island retreat for personal use, or a tourism operator to build upon a highly regarded exclusive guest experience”.
Besides developing the accommodation, Mr Newton-Brown has undertaken significant infrastructure improvements including adding a desalination plant, solar hot water system, off-grid solar power with backup generation, and water tanks with over 50,000 litres worth of storage.
Prior to entering state politics, Mr Newton-Brown was Melbourne’s youngest ever Deputy Lord Mayor at 32, when he was elected in 1999.
He served as the Liberal Member for Prahran from 2010-2014.
In 2020, Mr Newton-Brown, who also owns Sawyers Bay Shacks on Tasmania’s Flinders Island, launched a crowd-funding campaign to raise up to $1.5 million to buy and develop more Tasmanian islands as boutique accommodation offerings, betting on a post-Covid boom.
He told The Australian: “In the COVID-19 world the winners in tourism are going to be the smaller bespoke experiences where you are offering something unusual, isolated, and opening people’s eyes to parts of the country which they never would have considered because they were too busy saving up for a holiday in New York, Bali or Greece.”
But given the strong return of the European summer this year, it seems Mr Newton-Brown’s vision may have been incorrect.
Mr Newton-Brown told The Australian Financial Review he was selling Picnic Island because “logistically it’s become too difficult to run” from Melbourne.
Picnic Island is one of just a few freehold islands off Tasmania, and even rarer in that it has permits for commercial use and is titled to the high-water mark with no Crown land.
Apart from hosting cashed-up travellers, it’s also home to colonies of penguins and shearwaters.
Ownership of the island was granted to Captain Robert Hepburn in 1829 after he arrived from Edinburgh with his wife and eight children.
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Several other Tasmanian islands are current on the market, including Ram Island which hit the market in May with $7 million hopes, Puncheon Island and Ninth Island, while Vansittart Island is under offer.
The last Tasmanian island to sell for a multimillion dollar sum was Waterhouse Island, which was bought by Singaporean businessman James Koh for about $5.5 million in 2016.
Picnic Island is being sold by expressions of interest by Knight Frank and Sotheby’s International Realty.
