With brilliant golf, empty beaches, world-class wine country and the arrival of The Cliffs Kangaroo Island, South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula is becoming one of Australia’s great golf road trips.
There are golf trips you take for the golf and there are golf trips where the golf is merely the excuse. South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula gives you both.
Point the car (in our case a Genesis GV60 Advanced) south out of Adelaide and the city disappears surprisingly quickly. And, as we quickly discovered, taking an EV on a Fleurieu golf road trip presents few complications, with plenty of range for the journey and charging readily available along the way. Suburbs give way to vineyards, rolling hills and glimpses of Gulf St Vincent. McLaren Vale provides the first temptation to pull over, the coastline soon begins doing its thing and somewhere in the boot, beneath an unnecessarily large collection of golf shoes, balls and wet-weather gear, are the clubs.
This is Great Drives territory.
The Fleurieu has always had the ingredients of a terrific golf escape. It’s accessible, spectacular and packed with good golf, while somehow retaining the feeling that you’ve properly escaped.
Links Lady Bay and Mount Compass provide genuine destination-quality layouts, while Victor Harbor, McCracken, South Lakes, Willunga and Wirrina Cove give travelling golfers plenty of reasons to extend the itinerary.
But this November, everything changes.
Sitting just across Backstairs Passage on Kangaroo Island is a golf course that promises to transform the region from a very good Australian golf destination into something altogether more significant.
Its name is The Cliffs Kangaroo Island.
And if you enjoy golf played in wild, beautiful places, put this one on your must-play list.
THE ROAD SOUTH
The beauty of a Fleurieu golf trip is there’s no great rush. Adelaide is the logical starting point, but once you head south, the itinerary can be as serious or relaxed as you want it to be.
Willunga makes a fine opening round. Set among old gums, creeks, vineyards and rolling hills, it’s a public-access layout that has that wonderful country-golf quality where the surroundings are as much a part of the experience as the scorecard.
From there, head towards Normanville and Links Lady Bay, one of the anchors of Fleurieu golf.
Designed by Jack Newton, Graeme Grant and John Spencer, Lady Bay is built on sand and asks many of the questions you want from links-style golf: control your trajectory, think about angles and, above all, pay attention to the wind.
It’s also enormous fun – the sort of course where your 160-metre club can suddenly become your 130-metre club, where a low-running shot can be more useful than something launched towards the clouds, and where the same hole can play completely differently the next morning.
That’s proper holiday golf.
Then there’s Mount Compass, about 20 minutes from Victor Harbor and another course deserving of a prominent position on the itinerary.
The Neil Crafter-designed course moves through gently undulating sandy country, with gorse, water and plenty of bunkering providing the defence. There’s a strategic quality to Mount Compass, too. It’s not simply about finding fairways and greens; the better golfer quickly discovers there are good places and very bad places to miss.
Then you reach Victor Harbor.
Few opening tees in Australian public golf deliver a better introduction than Victor Harbor Golf Club. From its elevated first tee, the Fleurieu coastline unfolds in front of you, providing one of those moments when everyone temporarily forgets whose honour it is.
Nearby, McCracken Country Club provides another option, with Tony Cashmore’s design featuring undulating fairways, bunkering and plenty of water – enough trouble to turn an innocent social round into a lengthy discussion about handicaps over dinner.
Further east at Goolwa, South Lakes adds a flatter, links-style experience on sandy ground, with the nearby coast providing the soundtrack.
You could happily spend several days working through these courses. But keep driving, because the best may be waiting at the end.
THE CLIFFS CHANGES EVERYTHING
Cape Jervis sits near the southern tip of the peninsula. From here, the car goes onto a ferry and, about 45 minutes later, rolls off at Penneshaw on Kangaroo Island.
Twenty minutes away is The Cliffs. Australian golfers have been hearing about this project for several years. Now it is real.
Opening in mid-November, The Cliffs is an 18-hole, links-style course designed by Darius Oliver on one of the most extraordinary pieces of golf land imaginable.
Oliver knows a thing or two about dramatic island golf. He was the co-architect behind Cape Wickham Links on King Island, and The Cliffs project has involved key members of the team with experience delivering that course.
The comparisons will come, but The Cliffs deserves its own identity.
Five holes – the second, third, eighth, 14th and 15th – run along the clifftops. Another three – the first, seventh and 13th – play south towards the cliff edge. Beyond them are dunes, native vegetation, enormous skies and the Southern Ocean.
Oliver has used the property’s existing contours and scale to create golf that looks as though it belongs there. The course moves between exposed clifftops, rolling duneland and native vegetation before the 18th opens back towards sweeping views of the Southern Ocean.
Australia’s best destination courses share a common quality. Barnbougle. Cape Wickham. Lost Farm. They aren’t simply collections of excellent golf holes, they create a sense of journey. You remember what shots you hit and where you were. The Cliffs appears capable of joining that conversation.
Australian Golf Digest walked the course during construction and came away convinced this could be one of the most significant new courses built in Australia in decades. The scale of the property, ocean frontage, natural dunes, wildlife and isolation give Oliver something most architects spend careers waiting to find: genuinely extraordinary land.
There will be photographs, of course. Thousands of them. But great destination golf is rarely captured properly through a phone. You need to stand there. Feel the wind. Work out whether that flag really is as close to the Southern Ocean as it looks. Choose a club. Change your mind. Change it again. Then hit it.
MORE THAN 18 HOLES
The other advantage The Cliffs possesses is Kangaroo Island itself.
Golfers will come for the course, but it would be madness to treat “KI” as somewhere you simply play 18 holes and leave. This is one of Australia’s great natural destinations: more than 500 kilometres of coastline, beaches, cliffs, native wildlife, wineries and local produce.
Places such as Seal Bay, Flinders Chase, Remarkable Rocks and Vivonne Bay give non-golf-playing partners, and golfers prepared to put the clubs down occasionally, plenty of reasons to stay.
That combination is precisely what makes destination golf work. You need the golf to be good enough to justify the journey. But you also need the journey to be good enough to justify the golf.
The Fleurieu and Kangaroo Island now have both.
PACK THE CAR
The ideal Great Drive?
Give yourself four or five days.
Leave Adelaide and play Willunga or Links Lady Bay. Stay around Normanville. Play Mount Compass the next morning before continuing towards Victor Harbor. Add Victor Harbor, McCracken or South Lakes depending on time and how much golf your body can tolerate.
Then drive to Cape Jervis. Put the car on the ferry. Forty-five minutes later, Kangaroo Island appears. And the next morning, stand on the first tee at The Cliffs with the Southern Ocean ahead of you and one of Australian golf’s most anticipated new courses waiting.
You will have to go a long way to find a better drive in Australian golf. You can fly somewhere, check into a resort and play the course outside your room, but where’s the fun in that?
Golf’s best trips have a sense of adventure. They have winding roads, questionable playlists, bakery stops, arguments over navigation, golf bags in the boot and someone insisting the double-bogey on 17 “didn’t really count”.
Most importantly, they have anticipation.
On the Fleurieu Peninsula, every kilometre south now takes you towards something special. And at the end of the road, across a narrow stretch of ocean, golf awaits on the edge of Australia.
WHAT WE DROVE
For golfers, getting there should be part of the experience, and the Genesis GV60 Advanced makes a compelling case as the perfect companion for a Great Drive.
Its fully electric 84kWh powertrain produces 168kW and 350Nm, delivering the smooth, responsive performance that suits everything from city traffic to the sweeping roads of the Fleurieu Peninsula.
Inside, it feels every bit the premium tourer. Leather-appointed seats, dual-zone climate control, acoustic glass and air purification help create a quiet, refined cabin, Particularly welcome when there are a few hours between tee-times and travelling down the coast.
For the driver, the appeal is simple: comfort, practicality and effortless performance. Load the clubs, throw in the overnight bags and head south. The GV60 turns the drive between courses into part of the golf trip rather than simply the transport.
And on a road trip as spectacular as the Fleurieu and The Cliffs, the GV60 adds to the experience. genesis.com/au
