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When Marnie Robertson stumped up $140,000 for a "house and land package" in the Coolah Caravan Park, she thought she was buying into a grey nomad Utopia.
Yet her dream house is literally falling apart around her.
The situation came to a head when the gutter feeding her rainwater tank became the latest thing to break. To get water, she was forced to feed a hose with town water into the tank.
But as the 83-year-old was climbing on top of the tank, she slipped and fell onto a railway sleeper.
"I was crying out for 15 minutes trying to get someone to hear me," she says.
Rushed to hospital, it was discovered she had multiple fractures and a bulging disc.
"The doctor kept saying how close I was to spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair.
After five weeks in hospital, she was discharged back to the scene of the accident.
She says she has no money to move — "and it's only going to get worse".
Back in 2017, an engineer deemed the house "not suitable for occupation" and noted more than 100 defects. But no regulator will intervene to assist Marnie.
A couple of years ago, an electrician put his foot through the waterlogged deck. Now, the tiles have completely collapsed and rosellas feast on the weeds sprouting in between, using it as an extended bird bath.
Under the house, the rotting deck breaks apart when touched by Marnie's neighbour, Geoff.
And the posts supporting Marnie's home are not straight. Their concrete foundations were poured by hand instead of a mechanical pump, in a scene reminiscent of Fawlty Towers. Even Marnie's elderly neighbour was roped in to grab a bucket.
It's not the only decrepit home pockmarking what's advertised as "the best caravan park in Australia". As it crumbles, so do the hopes and dreams of 18 pensioners who were promised "real estate security", but instead face potential homelessness.
Marnie's house was supplied and constructed by the companies in charge of the Coolah Caravan Park.
She had met director Janet Kelly on the road, during the 20 years she spent roaming Australia in her campervan.
Janet, a retired accountant, was on the committee of one of Marnie's grey nomad "chapters".
"She was very knowledgeable, very articulate, well known throughout the organisation," Marnie recalls.
Camped out in Marnie's backyard, Janet unveiled her vision: a "home base" for grey nomads to return to when had they tired of life on the road.
This Utopia would be based at the Coolah Caravan Park, which Janet bought with her partner, Graeme Booker, a small business owner.
To Marnie, the "Coolah Home Base Dream" sounded like paradise; a place where the free birds of the nomad scene could come home to roost.
So, she bought her "house and land package", with Janet and Graeme's companies to construct a kit home for her.
In the early months, Marnie says life in the park was "very enjoyable".
"We used to have a happy hour down in front of the camp kitchen every night."
Long-term residents mingled with the tourists, swapping stories from the road.
"You'd look forward to coming here as a break from your travels," she says.
The party's over
Before long, the party was over.
The residents started to ask questions, wanting to know where their weekly site fees were going.
They'd bought into a company title arrangement, making them shareholders in the company that owned the park. And they wanted to see the books.
Marnie's neighbour, Geoff McMillan, got a lawyer on the case.
"He sent off a polite letter just asking for certain information," says Geoff.
Stonewalled, the residents eventually applied to the Supreme Court to inspect the books.
"After two days, the judge says, 'Stop. This is all a waste of time. There are no books for you to inspect,'" Geoff recalls.
The residents had together put more than a million dollars into the company for their "house and land packages". Yet one of the profit and loss statements they received was simply blank.
And their weekly site fees, it turns out, were being transferred to another company controlled by Graeme and Janet.
"We were gobsmacked," Geoff says.
Soon after, the court proceedings came to a sudden halt. The directors — Janet and Graeme — had put the company the residents had sunk their life savings into under voluntary administration. Their lawyer, Aleco Vrisakis, had been one of Australia's top mergers and takeovers lawyers in the 1990s, with clients including Alan Bond.
Next, it was announced the park would be sold.
Marnie and Geoff didn't understand: The company constitution said the park couldn't be sold without 80 per cent of shareholders agreeing. That had been part of the sales pitch: "The dream is to be debt-free in your own home … without the risk that someone else can sell it out from under you."
But now, the administrators were in charge. And they were, in fact, selling the park from underneath them.
The buyer would once again be Janet and Graeme — only this time, without the shareholders.
"I couldn't believe that they could do that," Geoff says.
"That just blew us out of the water."
Janet and Graeme declined to answer questions or be interviewed, but told the ABC last year that their dream to provide economical housing for grey nomads was destroyed by a small group of residents.
They have argued they were forced to put the company into administration due to the legal costs of defending the Supreme Court case.
A liquidator's report said there was no evidence the company was insolvent leading up to the administration.
One of the administrators gave evidence in court that when he asked Janet why the company was going into administration, she said they'd "had enough".
There is evidence, though, of significant legal fees. In one instance, Vrisakis charged $12,000 to attend the park's annual general meeting. The Supreme Court later questioned Janet and Graeme's decision to bill their legal fees to the residents' company.
The couple also retrospectively charged the company $50,000 in "directors' fees" for their time spent preparing for the proceedings.
Deeply concerned, the residents asked the corporate regulator, ASIC, to investigate. It declined, and would not comment for this story.
The Supreme Court would later call the circumstances of the administration "highly suspicious".
'I was dead scared'
With the park settlement looming, Geoff's neighbour, Jimmy, came home to a letter saying he had no entitlement to continue living on his plot.
He had to sign a new agreement to pay Janet and Graeme's other company triple his current site fees or leave.
"I was dead scared," he remembers.
"I've put my life savings into this place and I thought I'd find bailiffs and all sorts at home."
This cabin was Jimmy's first home. He'd previously been living in a bus while waiting 16 years for social housing.
"I sat on the doorstep, looking at that letter, thinking, 'What do I do now?'" he says.
Janet and Graham told the ABC in 2023 that they had since lowered the site fees for some residents, who refused to pay them regardless. But at this stage, Jimmy was told that to stay he must pay $185 per week — a significant portion of his pension.
The residents were discussing their predicament in the supermarket when an eavesdropping local ventured: "It sounds like you should call The People's Solicitor."
And that's how the residents found solicitor Peter Vogel.
'Stop the sale'
Peter says his firm is known for specialising in "David and Goliath cases" and "lost causes … that no other lawyer would touch".
He isn't your typical lawyer. Peter's actually a famous inventor: the brains behind the first sound sampler, the Fairlight CMI, which helped birth electronic music.
"I think it was in my seventh year of being sued that my wife joked, 'You could have become a lawyer in this time,'" Peter recalls.
So he did. Not long after, the residents came to him at the 11th hour, with the sale of the park imminent.
"The first thing I said was, 'We need to get a caveat to stop the sale,'" Peter says.
He lodged the caveats with mere hours to spare, and the sale was paused.
But ultimately, Peter received advice the caveats wouldn't hold, and the sale of the park went through to Janet and Graeme's other company.
Peter asked the Supreme Court to reverse the sale, lodging so many claims that the Supreme Court judge told him it was "not a royal commission".
The court's position was that despite buying what was called a "house and land package", the residents had not bought any land title. They'd bought a share in a company that owned the land, and once it no longer owned that land, the residents had no entitlement to it.
"I was told the land was mine. But it's not mine," Jimmy says.
The ads, promising "real estate security" and "legally protected" ownership, were found not to be misleading or deceptive. The residents had simply misunderstood what they were buying.
An ex-sailor and circus promoter, Jimmy describes himself as largely illiterate. To him, court was a bewildering place.
At one point, he was scolded by the judge: "Mr James, don't call me mate!"
Jimmy shakes his head at the memory: "That went down like a turd in a punch bowl."
The battle spills over
While Peter was fighting in court, the battle was spilling over at the park.
One month after the park was sold, police took out their first AVO against Graeme Booker to protect a resident — then more followed.
One of those residents was chased on his motorised wheelchair by Graeme, in his Mercedes, according to several witnesses.
Midway through the Supreme Court case, Geoff was watering his shrubs when he heard Graeme approaching.
"He came up behind me, gave me a gobful, saying I was in big trouble and bad things were coming," Geoff says.
When Geoff turned around, water from the hose sprinkled Graeme, who sped down the driveway in his golf buggy. There's still a skid mark on the driveway from where he spun around, before charging towards Geoff.
"My wife was screaming because she could see what he was up to," Geoff says.
"He jams on the brakes and runs into me. I couldn't get out of the way, so I just braced like I used to in football and took the hit."
Graeme later said that, from his point of view, Geoff was the aggressor for getting water on him.
Police visited Geoff in hospital where he received stitches to his leg.
They charged Graeme with assault, but he was found not guilty.
A later judge made a civil finding that the incident occurred.
'Not suitable for occupation'
While the Supreme Court case dragged on, some of the very houses they were fighting over were falling apart.
Marnie had been living in her decrepit home for years since an engineer deemed it "not fit for occupation" — and it had only gotten worse.
"If that engineer came back today, he'd be gobsmacked by the changes," she says.
Due to the subsidence, the doors no longer lock and the bathroom sink has cracked — she uses a bowl instead.
She took Graeme and Janet's companies to court for their construction of the house. However, the case has stalled.
The couple raised a counterclaim against an engineer involved in later works. Janet Kelly said in an email to the ABC that so far, the court had awarded their company $17,000 in court costs which Marnie had not yet paid.
But now, Marnie faces a bigger threat than her home falling down around her; the outcome of the Supreme Court case has left the roof over her head hanging in the balance.
The verdict
After two and a half years fighting in the Supreme Court, throughout a pandemic, it was finally judgement day for the residents.
But the verdict didn't go their way.
The Supreme Court dismissed the claims against Janet and Graeme: unconscionable conduct, harassment and coercion, and misleading and deceptive conduct.
It did find that as directors they'd "oppressed" the shareholders in several ways. This included appropriating the site fees as their own income, and selling themselves 19 shares for $550, when the residents paid $10,000.
"The conduct of Ms Kelly and Mr Booker … is, to say the least, open to criticism," the judge said.
"But the result must reflect the way in which the plaintiffs' case was pleaded and presented to the court."
The judge said many of the issues the residents had raised fell outside of the "scope of the pleadings", but a "sham administration" claim could potentially be made in the future.
He acknowledged the circumstances of the administration were "highly suspicious" and "hard to explain" unless Janet and Graeme "concluded they were better served by seeing [the company collapse] and purchasing the park out of the wreckage".
The judge said a liquidator should be appointed. That liquidator's initial investigation noted four potential breaches of the Corporations Act by the directors.
But the liquidator requested $100,000 to continue. Desperate, the residents launched a GoFundMe campaign. However, they have failed to raise the money.
The liquidator applied to a special fund that ASIC has for people in this situation. They were rejected — ASIC declined to explain their reasoning to Background Briefing.
But Peter did have one, important win.
He observed that the park was set up like a retirement village, but the regulator, NSW Fair Trading, laughed at the suggestion.
So Peter fought for a determination by the housing tribunal, NCAT, which eventually ruled it was a retirement village.
This makes it very difficult for the residents to be chucked out.
Still, Peter had to fight Fair Trading to recognise the tribunal's decision, which it ultimately did.
Peter says these battles have destroyed his faith in Australia's under-resourced regulators.
"If there's a big deal involving millions or billions of dollars, they might take that one on. But when it's just a bunch of pensioners at Coolah … they say, 'tough'," he says.
"There's a lot at stake here for 30-odd pensioners who were trying to do the right thing and fund their own retirement.
"When the shit hit the fan, there was no-one there to help them."
The end of the road
Peter has one final legal avenue. He's seeking leave to appeal to the High Court, motivated by his own win there when representing himself.
"When all else fails, I pull out my DVD of The Castle and remind myself it's 'the vibe'," he jokes.
In a fitting twist, the barrister is even named T. Castle.
The High Court will decide whether it will hear the appeal in the coming weeks. If unsuccessful, the residents will be facing enormous court costs from their losses so far.
"We'll be bankrupt, as far as I understand," Jimmy says.
"They'll take my house and car and everything.
"So many nights I lie here thinking, 'What can I do? Where can I go?'"
Jimmy's family are panicking about being left with the mess. He says his step-daughter asked to be written out of his will.
This week, he got a taste of what's to come. When his card was declined, he discovered $5,000 had been debited from his account on court order.
Janet and Graeme successfully sued five residents for not paying site fees on Peter's advice. They told the ABC last yea