Kim and Kanye join long list of rumoured Australian fantasy island owners
Celebrities Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are rumoured to be thinking of buying the $5 million Queensland getaway, Turtle Island.
Indeed they want to rename it Isle Kardashian!
That's the New Idea take on the suggestion it will soon be their retreat down under, off the central Queensland coast.
The island off the coast of Gladstone in Queensland has been on the market for a number of years. Turtle Island traded for $3 million in 1999 and before that by horse racing enthusiasts Bob and Sue Bentley, who had bought it in 1994 for $300,000 and built on the island. Believed to have been used as a Chinese market garden in the early 1900s, it had a series of owners who made no attempt to establish a residence. Honeymoon Hotels of Australia bought the island in 1989 for $300,000 but then also failed to develop the site into a resort.
The Christofidellis family initially listed the nine-hectare tropical island at $6,750,000.
Rumours of island buying celebrities have made marketing headlines through the years, typically only to fade away to local buyers eventually picking up the island at much-discounted prices.
This is the 23.25 acre island that Julia Roberts supposedly missed out on owning prior to the current owners purchasing the island around years ago.
Politician Clive Palmer and businessman Geoffrey Edelsten (with Brynne) enquired about the island in 2013, according to the local paper, Gladstone Observer.
Marketing agent Richard Vanhoff of Coldwell Banker revealed yesterday to News Ltd that he was in negotiations to sell it to an overseas buyer.
Vanhoff would not reveal the identity of the buyer but said the intending purchaser had visited the island last week.
Asked if Kardashian or West were the buyers, Vanhoff said “I can’t talk to you about any of that’’.
Kardashian is in Australia at the moment to launch a new perfume.
The freehold 9.41 hecatre island has a 600 square metre single-level house with views to the east over surrounding islands and beyond to the Great Barrier Reef.
It has its own private jetty.
The comedy duo Hamish Blake and Andy Lee are the latest attracted to tropical Queensland island securing a short-term permit to occupy an islet south-east of Mackay now dubbed The People’s Island.
The land, formally known as Iron Islet, neighbours the much larger Marble Island in the Coral Sea. The 4.5 hectare site was an iron mine before being handed off to the government by the Duke Island Pastoral Company.