An entire Australian town has been put up for sale for about £5m, raising fears for the future of one of the country’s smallest and most unusual communities.
Licola, a remote settlement in the Victorian High Country about 250km east of Melbourne, is home to just five people. The town includes a general store, petrol station, caravan park, and several weatherboard buildings spread across about 42 acres.
The town has been quietly listed online after its long-time owners said it was no longer financially sustainable to operate.
Licola has been owned for more than 50 years by the Lions Clubs of Victoria and Southern NSW, which acquired the former timber mill site in the late 1960s and converted it into a wilderness village, hosting camps for disadvantaged children, young people, and groups with special needs.
Founded on the banks of the Macalister River, Licola has also served as a crucial stop for travellers heading into the Alpine National Park, offering fuel, food and accommodation in an otherwise sparsely serviced region. It is the only town in Victoria not connected to the state electricity grid, generating its own power through a solar microgrid, while treating its own water and managing its own waste.
The sale has alarmed residents and supporters of the town, particularly the family that runs the general store. Leanne O’Donnell, who lives in Licola with one of her children, her best friend, and two other children, said she learned of the sale after finding the online listing late last year. Her lease was not renewed and she has been told to vacate the property.
“I absolutely love this town,” Ms O’Donnell told the BBC. “If it gets into the hands of a developer and turns into something that it’s not, it will just break my heart,” she said.
An online petition calling for the store to remain open and for Ms O’Donnell to be allowed to stay has gathered more than 8,000 signatures.
Ms O’Donnell has also launched a fundraising campaign to try to buy the town outright and keep it under community control. “Licola is not just a town,” she wrote on the GoFundMe page. “It is a rare, peaceful, fully off-grid community in Victoria’s High Country.”
She said Licola had provided “essential services, not as a luxury, but as a lifeline” for people living in and passing through the region, and warned that those services could disappear if the town was sold to private developers.
The campaign is seeking to raise up to A$8m to place a bid for the entire town, with the longer-term aim of establishing community ownership through a trust or cooperative model. Ms O’Donnell said donations would be refunded if the purchase does not go ahead. On Wednesday, however, the fundraiser was temporarily paused.
In a statement to the BBC, a spokesperson for the Lions Village Licola board said the decision followed a review of the site’s operations, which found it was no longer viable for the organisation to continue owning the town. Rising costs, insurance pressures, ageing accommodation, and a decline in school and camp attendance were cited as key reasons.
Denis Carruthers, the board’s chairman, said the organisation had a responsibility to protect its broader mission rather than the physical site alone. “The decision to sell was not made lightly,” he said, adding that district governors had been briefed and were supportive of the move.
The board said proceeds from the sale would be reinvested into a new foundation to fund professionally run camps for disadvantaged children across Victoria, although the future of camps at Licola itself remains unclear. A planned camp scheduled for January was cancelled due to low enrolment.
Mr Carruthers said there had been “considerable interest” in the property. For residents and supporters, however, concerns remain that the sale could mark the end of a rare, self-sufficient town whose survival has long depended on community stewardship rather than commercial development.
