Australia’s Golden Age of golf architecture was unsurprisingly centred in the big cities of Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne, where the founders of the early great courses and ultimately most historic clubs came across ideal, sand-based land upon which to build some of the game’s finest layouts.
Royal Melbourne’s 1926 committee enticed Alister MacKenzie to Melbourne and not only did he construct what is arguably his finest course, he showed us the importance of great golf architecture and what it looked like.
Outside the biggest cities, not a single course came remotely close to matching the quality of what MacKenzie and his contemporaries – including Alex Russell, Cargie Rymall and Eric Apperly – had made, and very little architecture of any consequence was built after the Second World War. Then, in the early 1970s, Colin Campbell, an old Melbourne golf professional, took a chance
