Long-suffering Kogarah Golf Club members are preparing to farewell their Sydney course. The 97-year-old club at Arncliffe alongside the Cooks River and Sydney Airport will close on Monday after an arduous journey.
Kogarah Golf Club has amalgamated with Liverpool Golf Club at Lansvale in western Sydney and many of its members will relocate to the new entity known as Oak Point Golf Club.
Kogarah will receive “north of $50 million” after selling its 18.5-hectare parcel of land to John Boyd Properties, which intends to pursue a commercial development. The proceeds of the sale will be invested into the Liverpool site on the banks of the Georges River.
Kogarah has been a popular public-access course in Sydney’s south with a midweek green fee of $45 for visitors. In its heyday, Kogarah featured the rare mix of six par 5s, six par 4s and six par 3s.
However the merger has been more than a decade in the making. Since 2016, Kogarah members have been playing a 15-hole layout after the acquisition of part of the course for the WestConnex motorway project.
Kogarah Golf Club owned almost half of the 39 hectares on which its course lies. Other landowners were Bayside Council (formerly Rockdale City Council), Sydney Water Corporation, Roads and Maritime Services and Sydney Airport. But with volatile lease arrangements for the 20.5 hectares it didn’t own, it was apparent Kogarah would eventually have to sell its land and find a new home if it wished to have an 18-hole course.
The drawn-out saga has clearly worn thin on the Kogarah membership.
“If you asked them if they could wave the magic wand, would they stay? If it’s not 100 percent, I think it would be pretty close. It’s a pretty devastating time for all of the members. Everybody is affected by this,” says long-time Kogarah Golf Club general manager Tony Rodgers.
In 1996, Kogarah Golf Club was approached by the NSW Government and Sydney Airport to create a Darling Harbour-style development in the lead-in to the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
“There’s so many moving pieces to what we’ve been through. In 1996 we were approached about the Cooks Cove Project. So we’ve been dealing with the potential for disruption, relocation, redevelopment since then. So it’s been a long haul,” Rodgers says.
“Government departments have no commercial imperative. They do what’s important for the government of the day. When you’re needing something off them, they’ve got many other people to satisfy. You just get in line and interests change over time.
“And when they can’t get their ducks lined up and get completed, they just leave you swinging. So we have wandered through the corridors of Government and Planning more times than I care to think.”
“It’s hard. We were never in charge of the entire site. Do I think we have been entirely fairly dealt with? No. But I’m not sure what my realistic expectations should have been, either.”
