A round-table discussion of Australian course architects reveals the trends, tales and talking points of golf course architecture in this country and abroad.
[ Gary Lisbon]
Golf courses are a lot like people. Each one possesses different features and qualities; they have their good days and bad, fluctuating health and times when they look and function better than others. Golf courses can also possess human qualities, both physically (straight, voluptuous, lean, tidy) and emotionally (moody, timid, mean, cheerful, welcoming). While it’s the landforms, soils, climate and other factors that help determine the type of layout produced, the outcome also stems from the style, experience and personality of the person designing them.
Golf-course architecture in Australia has experienced evolution in people and approaches yet is currently entrenched in a realm of redesigns along with the occasional showstopping newcomer. With competition high, resources and opportunities scarce and heightened pressure from within the game plus scrutiny from outside it, now might be the most challenging time in golf’s history to be a course architect. We put a series of questions to nine Australian-based course designers covering the key issues in their field. In something of a nod to this issue being the midpoint between our 2022 and 2024 rankings of Australia’s Top 100 Courses, we began the chat with our oft-discussed biennial list.
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Australian Golf Digest: When working with golf clubs in Australia, how often does a desire to improve their standing in our Top 100 Courses ranking surface in discussions or stated outcomes?
Bob Harrison: Probably more than half of our clients are interested in improving their ranking, partly for commercial reasons. So we do review them each time they are produced. Some clients are desperate for good rankings, particularly if they are resort-based or their marketing depends on a high ranking.
Mike Clayton: They are all interested in rankings – as much as some don’t want to admit it. At the job interview for Bonnie Doon, I told the committee it was amazing that they had such a bad course on such a good piece of land, and the fact it wasn’t in the Top 100 (in either magazine) was a reflection of the quality of the architecture – and the potential of the land.
Craig Parry: On nearly every occasion, the golf club wants to be improving in the rankings. I say what they should be focusing on is making the golf course more user-friendly and then everything else will follow.
Harley Kruse: Most clubs don’t outright state a need or a desire to improve their standing in the rankings. Of course, most would like their ranking to go up if possible, and normally this is seen as a by-product of course-improvement works. At times though, I have to explain that better rankings are not achieved by simply making turf conditions better. It is never just about one thing but the combination of solving design flaws and making a range of improvements, big and small. I think raters will take notice when they see a club committed to a well-considered range of improvements.
Richard Chamberlain: My clients tend to be outside the Top 100 and are, for want of a better term, ‘bread and butter’ courses, so it usually doesn’t get mentioned much. It’s funny – if you work with a club that’s outside the Top 100, the list doesn’t mean much, but as soon as you get in it, you definitely use it for marketing. I never, ever stand in front of a club board and suggest I will get them back into the Top 100, however I will say there are clubs in the 60-100 bracket that you can definitely be better than. [A better ranking] is usually a nice cherry on the top to acknowledge the work both you and the club have put in.
Ben Davey: It’s sometimes mentioned, but never the motivation for making changes. Usually, clubs just want their course to be the best it can be within the constraints that exist.
Phil Ryan: Most of the golf clubs we deal with (about six to 10 per year) are focused on creating golf that members will find fair, fun and challenging. They want members to be proud of their golf course, but rankings are rarely mentioned.
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How much attention do you pay to our biennial ranking?
Darius Oliver: I don’t follow ranking lists as closely as I used to [Editor’s note: Oliver was the architecture editor at Australian Golf Digest from 2009-2016], but am still aware of the key performers and where they influence the industry. I think golf clubs spending millions of dollars redesigning recently redesigned golf courses is somewhat influenced by the success of certain golf courses on Top 100 lists. In my view, chasing rankings is not always sustainable – and I would much prefer that golf clubs instead focused on establishing the best golf course possible on their particular site. Sometimes a subtle tweak is all they need, and ripping up an entire course will only result in a marginal improvement – if at all. In my opinion, realistic expectations are crucial in this industry.
James Wilcher: I take notice of the rankings; it’s hard not to as it’s a source of great discussion and sometimes debate. No two people will agree on specific rankings though, so I understand the complexities.
Ryan: I do casually look at the rankings when they come out but do not go back to them when meeting a new client/club.
Harrison: It’s obviously interesting from a personal point of view to see whether what I’ve done is acknowledged in the manner I think it should be.
Kruse: Rankings are a bit of fun and we all like to see where different courses land. The rankings issue always sparks various discussions on social media and in the golf club bar.
Davey: Very little.
Parry: I look at a golf course for enjoyment, not so much the rankings. I love Tuncurry as a golf course. Even if it was rated 200th in Australia, it wouldn’t bother me because I love playing there.
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Name a course(s) not currently on our Top 100 ranking that should be.
Clayton: Twin Waters. I’m shocked it’s not in there. Sun City, Horsham, Ranfurlie and Eynesbury should all be included – and probably better than 80th.
Harrison: If you’ll pardon the obvious bias, I think Townsville and Brighton Lakes deserve to be not only on your list, but moderately well-placed.
Ryan: Gardiners Run. This site was an open-cut clay quarry (clay used for roof tiles) when Pacific Coast Design (PCD) first visited in 2010. The land was offered in exchange for the old Chirnside Park Golf Course, which was planned to be converted into residential real estate.
Davey: Tasmania Golf Club. If Royal Hobart is there, so too should Tasmania. Heritage’s Henley course has always been underrated, in my opinion.
Chamberlain: The lower the number, the less amount of variation or dispute. For example, the top 20 on the list, most of it I agree with and even if I don’t there might be only two or three spots’ difference. As you creep down the list, that variation might extend to five or 10 spots. When you get into the 70-100 part, you could easily move courses up or down 30 spots and not have much argument. In saying that, there aren’t too many courses off the top of my head that I think are worthy of getting in there.
Parry: Tuncurry. And another is Hawks Nest. Both courses were both designed by Kel Nagle and Michael Cooper many, many years ago. Being able to go into those two courses and have the bones of their architecture is fantastic.
Kruse: There are several modest courses across the country that are on good ground and if they had both the ambition and the resources to make the golf better, they could easily get into the Top 100. I’m working with Club Catalina on the New South Wales South Coast. It is on sand with great potential to have some of the best golf between Melbourne and Sydney on Highway 1. We have done one new hole for them and upon getting 17 more done, they should easily crack the Top 100.
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What is your take on course rankings in general? Are they good/bad/indifferent? Do they wield too much influence? Not enough? Do you question the methodology?
Harrison: Rankings are obviously flawed. How could they be otherwise? They rely on individuals’ opinions, and the people chosen as panellists (because of some standing in the golf community) don’t necessarily have any particular ability to assess golf courses. Who does? In any case, rankers’ opinions are always going to be subjective. The same applies, for example, to opinions about composers or paintings or films, etc. But despite opinions being subjective, a certain amount of objectivity still develops. Beethoven, Mozart and company become generally accepted, so perhaps there is a similar level of objective outcomes with golf courses.
I don’t think there’s any great methodology, and I don’t think systems that allocate points work any better than the ones that rely on rankers’ overall reactions to courses. Always interesting, often frustrating – and your own courses are never ranked highly enough.
Clayton: They’re magazine sellers, but they are somewhat important. The Bonnie Doon example is why. If you look back 40 years, the accuracy of them (both magazines) versus now is much improved.
I have a particular objection to the ‘resistance to scoring’ criteria. It means – no matter the view to the contrary – ‘how hard is the course’ and perpetrates the myth that hard is better. [Editor’s note: in 2020 the criterion ‘Resistance to Scoring’ was replaced in our ranking with ‘Challenge’, which is defined as: how challenging, while still being fair, is the course for a typical scratch golfer playing from the tees designated as back tees for everyday play (not from seldom-used championship tees)?]
The GOLF Magazine world ranking has the best criteria. Of all the lists, their World Top 100 is the most accurate reflection of the state of things. They say: “GOLF doesn’t offer formal criteria to evaluate a course except that it is the course, not the club or ‘playing experience’ that you are evaluating. You are the judge and you are on this panel because we recognise your experience and respect what you believe to be important in a design.”
Parry: If you’re inside it, fantastic. If you’re outside it, then they don’t matter! It’s so opinionated. What one person likes in a golf course another person doesn’t like, and that’s just the way golf is. It’s a talking point.
Wilcher: In part, it’s a political list. At least 60 of the courses should be in Victoria with more than 50 percent of those in the top 50. The only reason that’s not the case, in my opinion, is that it’s politically sensitive to not spread the love across the country and not be so Victorian-focused.
What I would question is the amount of ‘cred’ put on conditioning. Unless it’s terrible, I always look past it. A unique, fun hole is just that, and we can’t have too many of them, regardless of conditioning.
The list wields influence but I don’t think it wields too much. As you’d expect, I don’t agree with where some courses fall, but I’d be like 100 percent of your readers [in that regard].
Chamberlain: I don’t think they’re too bad. I think the general managers take most note of them to be used as a marketing device.
Davey: I don’t think they wield much influence.
Ryan: I feel most of the rankings are fully justified, but a small few are a reflection of ‘influencers’ within the golf industry that put a lot of effort into ensuring some golf courses get into the Top 100, as they see this as an enhancement of their own reputations. More emphasis needs to be put onto the ‘success’ of the golf course financially and in respect to the number of golfers it attracts. Investment return from a sustainable golf business is really needed if golf is to grow in Australia.
Kruse: Australia has some outstanding courses on superb golf ground that have been built and opened since 2000. We also have a high calibre of renovation, restoration and remodelling work done in the past 20 years with a highly skilled and experienced industry in the areas of golf course architecture, golf course construction, turf management and facilities management. So with the quality of golf courses now, the 20 best in the country is looking vastly different these days.
We have displacement in the rankings where new courses and well renovated courses have landed in the top 10 to 30 in the rankings, pushing others well down the list. Back in 2002, Tasmania had two, maybe three courses in Australia’s Top 100. Who would have thought that by 2024, Tassie will possibly have five in Australia’s top 10, or six in the top 15 courses in the country?
There is a greater golf IQ around these days and a lot more access to discussion and information on golf course architecture and courses around the world in general. So now, by and large, the ranking of Australia’s courses is hopefully done with a higher level of understanding about what good golf course architecture is, what are good holes and what makes a good course versus something ordinary. We are not going to see a course land in the top 20 anymore just because it has the best conditioned fairways in the country.
Harrison: One aspect of rankings that I find particularly annoying – and really a bit weird – is the proposition that courses shouldn’t be ranked if they are not readily accessible. A golf course is a physical thing that either exists or it doesn’t and should be ranked according to its merits independent of what anyone thinks of the owner’s financial well-being or approach to accessibility.
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What’s the biggest issue in Austra-lian course architecture right now?
Chamberlain: Big question. With many clubs venturing into master-planning and remodelling, they need to match the goals and the design brief with realistic goals of their club and their budget. I still see many works being done producing quite difficult layouts that appear to have very high maintenance requirements. I see trouble with this down the track when they realise five-and-a-half-hour medal rounds aren’t a lot of fun. I am very conscious of finding the mix of a challenge with the maintenance budget, and I can assure you 70 or 80 bunkers just won’t cut it.
Kruse: Rapidly rising costs. Not only in all areas of materials and construction, but the costs of running a course, added to by the great difficulty of getting skilled staff to look after courses. This does impact architecture and decisions around renovation works.
Clayton: Courses down the rankings can all be improved by sensible tree removal. The best courses have the best-managed vegetation, and trees largely don’t negatively influence play of the holes.
For tournament play, it’s that almost all our courses are driver, wedge affairs. Peter Thomson was right when he said we don’t have a championship course to match the test of Carnoustie, Troon or Muirfield. Caddieing for Elvis Smylie this summer, I’m shocked at how many par 4s are drives and wedges – to the point of saying “the vast majority”. Of course, the problem lies with the administration and them finally rolling back the ball because most of our championship courses have very little room to move tees back any further.
Harrison: One of the obvious big issues is the shortage of work for a substantial number of designers. It’s hard to imagine how some members of the Society of Australian Golf Course Architects can sustain themselves if golf-course architecture is their main source of income. Another issue, which affects not just us and not just the golf community but the general community as well, is the astonishing difficulty of getting anything approved. This often comes down to the power given to newly graduated ecologists/planners within the authorities because these people are generally anti any development at all, no matter what its merits. The sad thing is that their superiors often recognise that this is not how things should be but are unwilling to intervene or control the situation in a world that is unbelievably ‘woke’ and politically correct.
Parry: Golf courses that are made too hard, over-bunkered and have greens that are too undulating.
Wilcher: Too much trying to take things back to the way they were when the course opened. Take Yarra Yarra; why would you try to return the course to the Alex Russell design when the game has moved on? Course conditioning alone has made this a futile exercise. In the same vein, Royal Melbourne has hundreds of fairway bunkers that a good golfer doesn’t even notice nowadays. Over the years there has been too much emphasis on length and not enough on subtlety. Great golf design is always subtle, with the short holes usually the most interesting. That’s one of the reasons Lonsdale Links has been well received.
Ryan: There are two:
Sustainability. There are too many golf courses outside the top 50 that are finding it very difficult to maintain the golf course due to rising costs (labour, materials, required capital works, machinery, etc.). We are always having discussions with clubs on how to minimise maintenance costs while maintaining or enhancing golf integrity.
Safety. We all know the golf ball is going further, however with a lot of Australian golf courses being designed decades ago, the safety parameters have shifted significantly, leading to the issue of golf balls going beyond the boundary of the golf course with possible legal implications. It is a real shame when hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent by clubs on safety fencing rather than golf.
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New builds are becoming more and more scarce, yet redesign and renovation is seeing more activity than ever. Is it a window to how the course-architecture landscape in Australia is likely to look long-term?
Parry: There’s no question about that. And that’s been happening for quite a while. All the good land is more or less taken for residential.
Kruse: If we look at our main population centres, new greenfield sites within 90 minutes’ drive of the city centres are becoming rare and seriously expensive. To secure a piece of land large enough for a course and real estate is nigh on impossible. Even if a site did become available, it’s unlikely developers would want to put a golf course there when there is such demand for housing, so what we are seeing with new builds – with the exception of Seven Mile Beach in close to Hobart – is destination golf on stunning golf course sites: King Island, Bridport and the soon-to-be-built course on Kangaroo Island. Build it and they will come. There aren’t a lot of these new builds going on, so yes, it is the master-planning of course improvements and the renovation of existing courses that will become the bread and butter of golf course architecture in Australia.
Clayton: So many of the top 30 courses have been through major transformation and all have been very successful: Kingston Heath (since 1982) Victoria (1995), Peninsula Kingswood (both courses), The Lakes, Royal Queensland, Lake Karrinyup, Grange (both courses), Royal Canberra, Bonnie Doon, the Gunnamatta course at The National, Killara, Lonsdale… Royal Sydney will be a big success. The question is what the 50-to-100-ranked courses do to improve their architecture.
Harrison: Whether the future is more oriented to new builds or redesign, or neither, is probably just a response to the market. Will golf continue to remain popular and grow? The answer is probably yes, and, if that’s the case, it’s likely that there’ll come a point when more new courses are appropriate.
Chamberlain: Since my departure from Ross Watson’s firm in 2008, and the establishment of Richard Chamberlain Golf Design, I find master-planning and remodelling is my focus. It’s definitely the way of the future for Aussie clubs and, more importantly, keeping clubs alive. In Queensland, I’ve watched North Lakes and, more recently, Arundel Hills close and it looks like they are gone forever. Courses like these need to survive and thrive and I think the course architecture plays a part. I have a brand-new course to design and build at Gladstone and I will take note of all the recent course failures when I design the final plans.
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Why are foreign course architects getting so many jobs in Australia?
Harrison: G.K. Chesterton would probably be amused at the idea of foreign architects getting so many jobs. To some extent it’s the ‘worship of the wealthy’. There’s no real need for this because there are Australian designers capable of doing the work well. It sometimes gets down to the ego of – or the unbalanced advice given to – a club president or official. It’s happened to me in a few cases. Of course there are good overseas designers, and perhaps there’s a marketing advantage in using them in some cases.
Wilcher: Marketing, I’d say. I am embarrassed for Pennant Hills, thinking that Gary Player [Design] might be a good choice – they won’t get as good a result than had they used any one of half a dozen Australian-based firms. Complete waste of money. I’d probably say the same about Concord. While a so-so golf course, I don’t believe it’s any better than it was before Tom Doak did the greens. And as for New South Wales, I wouldn’t take the gig because there’s too much downside. The course is top-two in Australia, in my opinion, and getting an English firm to re-do it is a complete waste of time and money!
Clayton: Because they do great work – Bill Coore, Tom Doak, Gil Hanse, Mike DeVries. And the most significant influence on our game was Alister MacKenzie, a foreigner who came here and showed us what great golf looked like. Without him, we’d have been sentenced to second-class golf.
Davey: Because they are regarded as the best, and clubs that can afford it want the best.
Kruse: I’m not sure if foreign architects are getting ‘so many’ jobs in Australia, or it’s more the high-profile ones. Once upon a time in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, the cultural cringe was alive and well. It was a time across many creative industries (music, film, architecture) that the better ideas, creativity and the latest trends all came from overseas. Local talent and knowledge was overlooked. Golf course architecture didn’t escape this mindset, and perhaps it still exists to a point, but today like many industries it has become truly global. Australian golf course architects are also plying their trade throughout the Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and now the USA – often getting high-profile jobs.
Parry: The world’s becoming smaller. As far as a lot of architects that may still be on the other side of the world and draw plans for a golf course here in Australia, it’s similar to what I can do here. I can get any property anywhere in the world, download the image and then work with a scale and get that all to an AutoCAD file and work out how big the greens are, how long the holes are, how much area they’ve got – and they’re doing that from the other side of the world as well. And clubs are selling that to the members: “We’re getting this person.”
What you’ve also got to remember is, golf is different in Australia than it is in, say, America or Europe. The air is very dense out here, so the ball moves a lot in the air. You don’t find that if you’re playing in America – the air’s a little bit thinner and the ball goes a little bit straighter; it doesn’t affect the ball. Here’s a little bit more like the links golf courses of Britain, where you can be chipping or putting and the ball can move with the wind. So you have to be careful who you pick as they’ve got to know our weather.
Chamberlain: Another good question, and I see two possible answers. Either it’s a much better marketing edge for a club to use an offshore architect or we simply aren’t good enough. No Aussie architect wants to believe they aren’t as good as the imports, but I think we need to pump up our tyres a lot more. It does surprise me when some of these overseas guys produce the plans and simply mail them in, without ever visiting the site during construction. And, yes, it does happen.
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Quality bunker sand is becoming more difficult and more expensive to source, while it’s widely acknowledged that bunker maintenance soaks up a disproportionate amount of labour. Is it logical that more clubs seek to reduce the number of bunkers on their course? And when doing so, how do you choose to navigate that situation architecturally?
Kruse: Most courses I see these days will have some bunkers superfluous to play. Typically, reducing these bunkers makes a lot of sense, as does the reduction in size of some bunkers while retaining their strategic role. Navigating the bunker situation should always be more about the quality of bunkers and each bunker having strategic importance. Why is it there and what does it ask the golfer to do? This is in contrast to the bunkering ‘eye candy’ approach we saw across many parts of the industry in the heady ’80s and ’90s. These days on interesting, non-sandy sites with plenty of land movement, an 18-hole layout doesn’t need more than 50 well-placed and built bunkers to be a good test of golf.
Ryan: PCD has a new 18-hole public golf course opening soon in Minnippi for the City of Brisbane. It has 15 holes within a floodplain and no sand bunkers. PCD instead put forward to have timber fences as golf hazards in locations where a bunker may have been positioned – inspiration came from many of the old courses in the UK that use these. Such timber fences act in a similar fashion to sand bunkers in that golfers need to use similar clubs to achieve moving beyond the hazard and the grass behind such fences can be shortened or lengthened to increase/decrease difficulty depending on the standard of golf being played. The benefits of these hazards are the reduced cost in construction, longevity and ease of ongoing maintenance (mowing). PCD has also used such timber fences at our other golf courses and we plan to utilise this solution more often.
Chamberlain: It’s a no-brainer to cull bunkers on a golf course, particularly if they have a maintenance staff of fewer than 10, which is most clubs. In my eyes, and the types of courses I work on, the days of 80 and 100 bunkers are gone. I’ll give it away if I can’t produce an interesting and challenging layout with less that 40 of them.
Parry: There are going to be more golf courses cutting back on bunkers. Clubs are definitely starting to understand, OK, we only need to have bunkers where we need to have them. We don’t need to have them just for a look. Having just one bunker in the correct position can still influence the way the hole is played and the strategy behind it.
Oliver: As a general observation, I think the issue with bunkering in Australia – and more generally with golf course design here – is that we are still far too heavily influenced by American design and trends. Our best old courses were more British in character than American, and yet modern designers seem to prefer to copy what’s fashionable in the US, rather than what has stood the test of time here and in the UK.
Despite sand being more expensive to maintain than turf, for many designers the easy solution to an apparent design challenge is to build bigger bunkers or add sandy wastelands. They often look great, but either serve minimal strategic purpose, or impact on playability for shorter hitters. My personal design influences are much more British, and perhaps more understated. Although it has worked for some clubs, I don’t think adding huge areas of sand is a sustainable model for other golf clubs to follow.
During the Depression years in America, one of their prominent Golden Age designers, A.W. Tillinghast, toured the country advising golf clubs on which bunkers to remove. Labour was short and sand was costly to maintain. I’m hoping Aussie golf clubs don’t make the same mistake during this current post-COVID bump and neglect to plan for the ongoing maintenance of any proposed major works.
Clayton: Too many golfers complain about the sand and blame their technical inadequacy on the surface. If members ever learned to rake bunkers properly, it’d help. There are a few bunkers that the best courses could fill in without taking away from the golf, but as a rule our better courses are very well bunkered.
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What other design trends are you noticing that you like or dislike?
Clayton: Short courses. Sandringham and Healesville are the two best examples. Himalayas putting greens are a great way to introduce people to the game. With no need to hit the ball in the air, it gives beginners a way into the game without being intimidated.
Davey: Wider fairways, more short grass and less complicated bunkers are all good trends.
Wilcher: I like cutting grasses similar heights, like on the Melbourne Sandbelt where the surrounds and tees can be seamless. I would take this approach everywhere if I could. I try to design for the site and the conditions so try not to be too stylised but stick with wanting to see sand in bunkers and water when it’s in play. Otherwise it’s about trying to create sustainable golf courses where ‘in-play’ areas are well-groomed and the rest of the site not so. I love integrating wetlands, which are great environmentally.
Chamberlain: Bunkers are probably the most subjective item on a golf course and I see many new ones built that are crazy difficult and also taxing to walk in and out of. Greens with minimal pin placements built on courses that have in excess of 50,000 annual rounds is also disappointing.
Ryan: The increased use of native grasses or plants to create minimalist maintenance zones outside primary golf areas is a good trend and reduces maintenance costs over the longer term. New putting-green grasses brought to the market in the past few years have allowed golf architects to maintain speed without excessive slopes on greens, making putting more skillful.
Kruse: I really like the movement towards longer and more flexible tees along with gender-neutral tees. Flexibility of length means you don’t roll up to a tee and play within the same five metres of the tee survey markers, week in and week out.
Parry: I do like – and I try to do this at all the golf courses I help – to have the golfers tee off from whatever markers they want. It doesn’t matter what colour marker it is, they should be allowed to go and play from whichever markers they like. The one thing I don’t like about the Slope rating is you get only 100 metres between where the course is rated from and how you set it up. That means a lot of tees can only be five metres forward or back, so you’ve got a lot of tee you will never be able to use again, which is crazy. You have some golf courses where tees never get used, yet they’re cutting it, fertilising it and maintaining it. The tee markers should go wherever the superintendent thinks they should go.
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Why is tree removal so difficult to ‘sell’ to those outside golf? How do clubs, course architects and the entire golf industry better educate the public that tree removal can have biodiversity benefits?
Kruse: Firstly, we need to stop looking at all trees as having great ecological and/or high environmental value because some of them simply don’t. The other matter is that, like humans, trees have a lifecycle and some cark it at 40 years old and others can live well past 200 years. Others have failures and need to be removed. But when someone complains about a 30-metre-tall camphor laurel (a declared weed species) coming down, or a bunch of exotic trees coming out of a heathland restoration area, there needs to be an explanation that these are weeds.
There are a lot of golf courses with the wrong tree species planted in the wrong places. Thirty, 40 to 50-plus years later, courses are having to fix these issues and restore their holes to how they were originally intended. This has created opportunities for clubs to plant local flora species after tree removals and increase both flora and fauna diversity. We are assisting Yarra Yarra with this at the moment, whereby poplars, cedars, spotted gums and pines have been removed, and an incredible range of local heathland species and more appropriately scaled local trees, such as manna gums, are going back into the course.
The education of members and the public is that a golf course landscape, like all landscapes – be they natural reserves or parks – is not static as all plants go through their lifecycles. Good vegetation management needs to replenish plants and areas of planting in decline to sustain landscape amenity, biodiversity and ecological values.
Clayton: They need to make the case for indigenous plants and sell a 50 to 100-year vision of what the course will look like. It should be to return the vegetation to what was growing on the site before the golf course was made. Peninsula Kingswood North is the purest course from this standpoint. Every tree is indigenous (not ‘native’) as are the smaller heathland plants. The Sandbelt is the sole preserve of small heathland plants in Melbourne – all would have been wiped out if it wasn’t for golf. Bonnie Doon, too, has some brilliant Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub in Sydney.
Oliver: Tree removal and tree elimination are very different, and I think problems are sometimes caused by golf experts promoting tree elimination as the only way for a golf course to move forward – or at least creating the impression that they believe tree elimination is necessary. I’m no fan of trees interfering with the design and playability of a hole, but they clearly have a place on most suburban golf courses and provide important habitat, visual appeal, carbon capture, etc. A lot of regular people – not to mention a lot of regular golf people – love trees and we do need to be careful not to vilify trees to the point that people assume we are calling for all to be removed.
The tree issue can be so specific, and is really a case-by-case question for most clubs. It’s harder to delicately trim back intruding vegetation if you are shutting a course and redesigning all 18 holes at once. If you aren’t, I think tiptoeing through tree removal and highlighting feature trees as you go can help to bring naysayers along for the ride. Yarra Yarra, for example, did an excellent job a few years back with tree removal on their first two holes in particular. They took out a lot of trees, but also left a lot of trees – and really highlighted those that remained.
Wilcher: Tree removal is tricky. Take Royal Sydney. While their arrogance meant they ‘sold’ what they were doing to local residents badly, they were absolutely right in what they were trying to do. I think the industry must keep trying to sell its environmental credentials because it’s worth selling.
Parry: Trees get put onto golf courses, they grow up and then their ‘wingspan’ comes out across fairways and impacts the way the hole is played. If the correct trees are put in to start with and in the correct positions, we won’t have that problem going forward. The problem we’ve got is, anytime we knock down a tree we get crucified because we’re ‘ruining the planet’. The biodiversity we have on golf courses – from not only trees, but plants and animals – we’re way ahead of it. We look after the environment probably more than any other organisation. I think we need to be cut a little bit of slack.
Chamberlain: Tree removal does my head in. When I dispute the value of a tree on a golf course, the emphasis seems to be on its visual or aesthetic value rather than its impact on the ball flight and playing strategy. But more importantly, its what’s going on under the surface – that’s the real issue. It’s only when a club starts to dig trenches for irrigation or drainage that the true impact of tree roots is revealed.
Ryan: Always a difficult topic, but often the golf architect is left out of the discussion, with many of the final decisions being made by local government, who are often more about public opinion or ticking boxes than discussing the whole picture. We only remove trees when we must for safety or golf strategy reasons. Many of the trees on golf courses that need to be removed were planted long ago by well-meaning committees or volunteers who picked unsuitable trees based on availability rather than suitability and biodiversity. To get the general public on side, the golf industry needs to produce supporting evidence or articles in news outside golf magazines, and this is best co-ordinated through the national and state golf associations.
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How crucial is sustainability in modern golf-course architecture?
Chamberlain: It’s No.1. As mentioned before, the goals and design brief for a golf course needs to match its maintenance potential. I still see small regional clubs out there really struggling with two or three staff and yet they still have 40 bunkers to look after.
Davey: Extremely, that’s why putting concrete in bunkers worries me.
Wilcher: I think we pay way too little for golf in Australia, which isn’t going to change for the masses. I’d say sustainability is therefore probably the most important issue in trying to turn out well-conditioned courses without paying too much more for their maintenance. But where are the greenkeepers of tomorrow coming from? They need to be paid better if we are to attract them to what is a great industry. It’s perhaps the single biggest problem. Without volunteers, many courses would be dustbowls.
Ryan: Sustainability is applicable to all areas of golf clubs. To be successful and thus ensure longevity, clubs need to have a good golf course that’s fun and challenging with good maintenance and good ongoing management. Without the golfers, clubs start down a spiral of reduced budgets, less maintenance and less value for money. So, golf architects need to work with the club’s management to ensure the target golf market is happy with the facilities. Like any business, if the product and service is poor the patrons go elsewhere.
Clayton: Of course it’s important to be responsible users of water and chemicals, but golf needs to better sell the importance of how it preserves and promotes indigenous vegetation. The environmental disaster of suburban Australia was a rush to plant vegetation that didn’t belong and had no relevance to the land.
Parry: We need to be sustainable. A lot of golf courses here shouldn’t worry about the course turning brown in summer; it’s just part of living in Australia. You’re not going to be able to use as much water on the golf course as you would probably like. We have to go other forms of watering. Paspalum’s good because you can water it with saltwater and it’s a perfectly good grass to play golf on.
Kruse: It is crucial, as sustainability comes down to the bottom line of the costs to have courses ready for play in Australia for essentially 365 days of the year. Course architecture does impact these costs in terms of the maintained areas of turf and the amount of labour, water, fertilsers and pest and disease-control measures that need to be carried out to have the turf in the expected condition. Non-turf and vegetation areas need to also be done in such a way as inputs are relatively low.
Oliver: Sustainability is a bit of a buzzword right now in golf. I think the term should relate equally to human resources as it does to environmental concerns. There is just no point building a golf course that requires 20 greenkeepers to maintain if the business model can only sustain 10 staff. That won’t work long-term. Some of my concerns with the current state of the Australian golf industry relate to the viability of major redesign projects. Private club membership in this country used to be as affordable as anywhere in the world, but Melbourne and Sydney in particular seem to be slowly lurching towards an American model, where metropolitan clubs charge steep membership fees and compete for members on the back of their conditioning. The never-ending quest for grooming excellence is likely to work out well for some clubs, but not for all.
