The List

THE NEW GREEN DEAL

Australia is home to some of the world’s most remarkable golf courses. How many of these have you birdied?

Golf shouldn’t be cool, but it is. A favourite pastime of everyone from Cameron Diaz and Donald Trump to Kelly Slater, Alice Cooper and, erm, your least interesting co-worker, its resilience is remarkable. It doesn't matter that it’s the subject of a million groanworthy dadjoke coffee mugs (“Work is really starting to interfere with my golf!”), or that nobody looks good in plusfours. Golf is to sport what coffee is to beverages: too dominant to dip, and too much fun to fall.

Whether your swing’s more of a Peter Garrett dance than an Adam Scott drive, if golf is your go, add a couple of these amazing Australian courses to your bucket list.

CHRISTMAS ISLAND GOLF CLUB

Where: Christmas Island

Best for: Crustaceans

Surprisingly large, at 135 square kilometres, and almost five times closer to Indonesia than Australia, Christmas Island is as breathtakingly beautiful as it is odd. It's home to around 1700 locals, an infamous immigration detention centre and a capital called Flying Fish Cove. Oh, and around 190 million red crabs. It’s the latter population that makes its jungle-lined, nine-hole, par-64 course unique. The crabs’ annual migration usually occurs around late October, carpeting the course’s greens and fairways with a moving carpet of enormous crustaceans.

“If a crab moves your ball you must place it back to where it landed,” Club President Alan Thornton explains, “and if your ball falls into a crab hole, you have a free drop.

“It may also be necessary to move crabs when putting.”

Cute! But also, not. In 2020, another of the island's potentially delicious species, a truly colossal coconut crab, climbed a local's golf bag, then used its pincer to snap one of his clubs in half. It was “like a chainsaw”, said local golfer Paul Buhner.

CARBROOK GOLF CLUB

Where: Carbrook, Qld

Best for: Telling your partner you’re gonna need a bigger boat

Australian golf has a long relationship with sharks. This is largely due to modest battler Greg Norman’s nickname and personal brand, but it’s the southeast Sunshine State’s Carbrook Golf Club that had the real deal. In 1996, raging floods swept half-a-dozen juvenile bull sharks into a 21-hectare lake/water hazard near the course's 14th hole. They lived there for 17 years, “sustaining themselves on [the lake’s] large stock of fish and on the occasional meat treat provided by the club’s staff,” as was reported, remarkably, by The New York Times. The bitey fish have since escaped during subsequent floods… or have they?

Ditch the spikes, crack out the mince and wade in with a snorkel to see for yourself!

HAMILTON ISLAND GOLF COURSE

Where: The Whitsundays, Qld

Best for: Wishing you were a yacht racing wine billionaire

Planned and built over 11 years at a drop-in-the-bucket of just $50 million, the Hamilton Island Golf Course is marvellous in a number of ways, including that it is not even on Hamilton Island. Instead, it climbs, carves and cascades across the adjacent Dent Island, about a kilometre away. The cash was stumped up by the wine tsar Oatley family (side hobby: winning the Sydney-to-Hobart in multiple iterations of Wild Oats). It makes the list because it’s so picturesque, with holes so improbable— and hemmed in by breaching humpbacks and jewelled sea views—that every hole feels like CGI. “We suggest if you’re new to the game, you’ll need around three dozen balls for 18 holes,” says wonderfully named course superintendent Brad Hole.

CORAL COVE GOLF CLUB

Where: Bundaberg, Qld

Best for: Hiring a cart

D-MAX and MU-X owners are famous for enjoying a long drive, and in taking on Coral Cove’s 635m Par 6—one of only two six-pars in the country—you might be wishing you had wireless CarPlay to ease you along. Or 4x4 to get you out of the rough. Flashy on the front nine, rural at the back, Coral Cove is somewhat like a ute, if you squint, but it’s the course's undulating greens and persistent winds that offer temptation and trepidation in equal measure. With nearby boat access to the reef, a kids’ playground and just 20 minutes from the Bundaberg Distillery, the course—while open—is currently undergoing renovation. Play long, hope for the best and try to channel John Daly off the tee… if not at the 19th.

THE PALMER SEA REEF GOLF COURSE & MIRAGE COUNTRY CLUB

Where: Port Douglas, Qld

Best for: Crocodile attacks

Alligator attacks kill around 10 people per year in the state of Florida—arguably America’s home state of golf—a disturbing amount of whom are savaged while walking their local links. And yet American gators are pussycats in comparison to the larger, deadlier, more formidable saltwater crocodiles of Australia’s north. Keep this in mind while playing either Port Douglas’s Palmer Sea Reef Golf Course or the almost-adjacent Mirage Country Club. Both were designed by five-times British Open Champion, Australia’s Peter Thomson, and both have a history of Steve Irwin-esque crocodile encounters. In 2015, golfer John Lahiff was chomped by a 1.2m salty while retrieving his ball from a water hazard at the Palmer. Then, in 2021, footage went viral of a giant crocodile ripping apart a massive barramundi in front of a group of golfers on a fairway at the Mirage. “The whole [fish] exploded, it was incredible,” said one onlooker. Interviewed in his hospital bed, Lahiff claimed his mauling was par for the course. “Just don’t hit balls in the water,” he shrugged.

THE NULLARBOR LINKS

Where: Stretches from Kalgoorlie, WA, to Ceduna, SA. Or vice versa

Best for: Outback noir

An 18-hole, par-72 course that spans 1365km along the Eyre Highway across the mighty, 200,000-square-kilometre Nullarbor Plain. Thankfully you needn’t knock booming drives across the horizon; each hole is situated in an individual town or roadhouse along the way.

To say the holes are varied is an understatement. There’s the verdant, emerald-on-red majesty of Kalgoorlie’s lush fairways and rich putting surfaces, to ‘greens’ consisting of sand, Astroturf, or grass rougher than a nature strip in The Walking Dead. Western Australian pro Hayley Bettencourt set a course record of -2 in 2018. “Anyone who is used to playing on big green fairways has to adjust to the clay and rocks,” she said, “but it is such a great experience and there’s really nothing like it.” Plan around five days to finish it.

RATHO FARM GOLF COURSE

Where: Central Tasmania

Best for: Whiskey and tweed

Australia’s oldest golf course was laid out in the 1830s by an Edinburgh sheep farmer whose family had lived in a mud cottage near Bothwell, about 60km north of Hobart, for three years. Today you’re invited to avoid the resident sheep and play the central highlands course’s 18 holes (six of which, lost over the centuries, have recently been reclaimed, making Ratho Farm both Tassie’s oldest course and its newest 18-hole course.) They offer a ‘full hickory experience’ for history buffs: the chance to play a round in a tweed jacket, plaid hat and with hickory-shafted clubs. If you feel silly, some of Tasmania’s finest distilleries are nearby, all the better to encourage you to feel even sillier later.

BONDI GOLF & DIGGERS CLUB

Where: Bondi, NSW

Best for: Frustrating real estate speculators

The mere perseverance of an old-fashioned clubhouse on some of the nation's potentially most expensive real estate feels like a bulwark against… well, something. This is a proud little nine-hole holdout on the very edge of the clifftops at North Bondi, where $25 gets you a mid-week round on a sparklingly emerald, non-built-out strip of fairway and green, and you can still get a plate of steak and chips for 20-odd bucks. Peer south from the clubhouse and you can see Australia’s most famous, most bustling beach, home to preening bodybuilders, catwalk models and high-fashion hipsters, and glimpse the corner where, on a bright May afternoon a decade ago, James Packer brawled with David Gyngell in the street. But at this end, in the teeth of the nor’easter, serenity reigns. And while the links could rest on the laurels of its location, it’s actually also rather good, having been declared one of the world’s best short courses by legendary fairway architect Tom Doak back in 2018.

COOBER PEDY GOLF CLUB

Where: Central South Australia

Best for: Dendrophobics

World-famous for its gemstones and nationally known for its ratio of unhinged locals, Coober Pedy is one of Australia’s greatest Outback towns. And while extreme heat means the only grass is the Astroturf tees, the Opal Capital of the World boasts an 18-hole, 72-par course traversing desert flats and gibber hills. It features white fairways (rolled with local sandstone) and black ‘greens’, AKA ‘scrapes’, putting surfaces of compacted quarry dust and waste oil. Most unexpected is the club’s reciprocal playing rights agreement with St Andrews, ancient home of the British Open. Coober is the only club with which the Scottish links has such a deal—albeit for St Andrews’ nine-hole Balgove Course, rather than the legendary ‘Old Course’. It was struck after Coober Pedy Golf Club's president badgered his St Andrew's counterpart throughout a live TV interview in 2003.