So, you want to be a cattle baron with a fancy tropical fishing lodge?

Sir Mike Gooley isn’t as well known as Sir Richard Branson. But over the years this British travel industry entrepreneur has pulled together a brilliant portfolio in Queensland’s hot tropics – the super-exclusive Bloomfield Wilderness Lodge, with its 17 guest cabins, the 1256-hectare Mount Louis cattle station and the 3118-hectare Laura Valley Station.

This job lot, which also features useful extras like helipads, a private bituminised airstrip and wharf infrastructure, is being marketed by Colliers International in an expressions-of-interest (EOI) campaign due to close on December 1 at 4pm (Queensland time). 

Because it is such a multifarious package, the offering is simultaneously listed under the categories of rural, farming, hotel, motel, pub and leisure.

While Bloomfield Lodge once gained the Forbes Magazine award for “world’s best remote hotel”, it hasn’t been operational for a couple of years – the term is “in hibernation” – but has been maintained by caretakers.

Colliers’ Stacey Quaid says the proposition is very much in the zone of “high-net-worth individuals”, and he knows the potential buyers are out there. 

The recent purchases of huge cattle stations and several Queensland resort islands by people such as Twiggy Forrest (Lizard Island) and Annie Cannon-Brookes (Dunk Island) confirm that even though the names of the buyers who might be on the target list for Sir Mike’s Australian estate aren’t as well known, “there is a whole tier of high-income earners who have more money than they can manage”, Quaid says.

These are the types interested in “something like this that can’t easily be had … something that nobody else has got; it’s a very interesting proposition”. 

As an EOI, not even a ballpark price quotation is in the offering. But a clue might be that, as a solo entity, Bloomfield Lodge was floated on the market in March this year for a price estimated by some to be $10 million. According to some reports, Sir Mike has sunk double that into developing it.

Now that the chairman and founder of holistic leisure company Trailfinders has taken the decision to liquidate the two cattle stations as well, the sales campaign has been refreshed. The literature says that, ideally, the package would be sold “in one line”, or as a whole. 

“Sir Mike will possibly look at individual offers because at the end of the day he’s exiting,” Quaid says. “Yet his preference will be selling the package.”

At the conclusion of the almost six-week marketing push, and when all offers are on the table, “we can then make some decisions”, he adds. “But he’s saying, ‘I’ve made the commitment now to sell, so find me the market.’ ”

Because of who Sir Mike Gooley is, and given his experience in the travel industry since starting Trailfinders in 1971, there is a powerful endorsement that this cache of properties – especially the lodge that is virtually on an island of freehold land within the World Heritage-listed Daintree National Park – is a spectacular selection.

Quaid says when he first saw the Mount Louis station, “it hit me that it looked like a golf course – and it’s got pretty sumptuous accommodation with a four bedroom, beautiful house on it too”.

On 2.9 hectares, with an outlook over the Coral Sea and 500 metres of private beachfront, Bloomfield Lodge started out as Sir Mike’s private fishing lodge. It subsequently developed into a super-exclusive resort that is still only accessible via boat or helicopter.