Yeah Manitou, a NZ brand aren't necessarily a cheap brand although they are not common in Australia. I would recommend purchasing a set of Rockshox, Fox or Marzocchi forks. Purely as they are much more common brand and it is piss easy to find a retailer anywhere around Australia.
Manitou are now distributed by Dirt Works who are, if I recall correctly, the biggest distributor of bike parts in Australia. Piss easy to find a retailer who deals with Dirt Works because they ALL do.
My experience with Manitou forks (currently owning 3 Shermans in various states of repair) is that they're pretty hit-or-miss. They can be either the greatest fork you've ever ridden, or a complete heap of crap. The internals vary from awesome to ridiculously terrible, and they typically combine a few great ideas with a few seriously freaking dumb ones. The Shermans in particular can be real bastards to work on, and the entire spring side of them is rubbish, whereas the damper side combines genius with stupidity. They do things like mix imperial and metric in both threads and fastener heads (eg 6mm allen key on damper side footbolt and 7/16ths or something nut on the spring side), and the seals seem to either be indestructible and awesome, or mainly holding your oil in by blind faith.
What Manitou ARE capable of doing - and I stress the phrase "capable of doing" here, not "what they actually usually do" - is producing a better fork damper than pretty well anyone else. Fox come close in some regards, and the new Rockshox stuff may be less stone-age than its predecessors, but the TPC/TPC+ systems provided excellent compression and rebound damping that was both usable, adjustable and internally tunable with proper shim stacks and all that stuff. Fox would be up there if they gave you any compression damping, but they don't. Of course, Manitou also put SPV in a $3200 DH fork, which proved to be an extremely bright idea as it took away the only good feature of an otherwise crap fork.
There is a reason why they have a bad reputation - they don't seem to have any consistent direction, they use consumers as guinea pigs for new technology that mostly doesn't work very well (SPV/Intrinsic etc) instead of sticking to dampers that already work and improving their chassis to be more in line with the strength/weight/tyre clearance/axle-to-crown height/stiffness/lack of dents in your downtube that their competitors deliver. Basically, you just don't really know if you're going to get a world-beater or a dud when you buy one. Don't get me wrong, some of their better forks have been fantastic (eg the original Sherman Jumpers which became the Gold Labels), but some of them have sucked so hard NASA was actually considering naming them black holes.
