Have you considered second hand?, not for everybody, but I'm pretty sure that Wal can eyeball a lathe with more confidence and authority than many.

There's a lot of old iron on flea-bay, some of it reasonably close to you. A decent (but old!) lathe will likely give you at least as good performance if not better than a Chinese knockoff and likely come with a lot of the additional tooling that would otherwise add so much on top of the Clarke ticket price. It'd possibly be imperial (no big shakes), and may need more imagination to transport, but for bang-per-buck you should at least take a peek.