Anthony Quayle left behind status for opportunity and inadvertently became a symbol of the PGA Tour of Australasia’s renaissance, which is producing a new breed of homegrown stars.
Phil Scott, the PGA of Australia professional, golf-course designer and father of Adam Scott, had seen the look before. A tour pro who seemed to be in a rut, created by the harsh realities of playing across the biggest circuits in professional golf. While playing golf for a living can be fun and lucrative, the travel and nomadic lifestyle can take a toll.
Scott Snr had learned to recognise players caught in the crosshairs of tour pro life. After all, he’s had plenty of practice, raising a son who came to be Australia’s only Masters champion at Augusta National – not to mention a wide variety of Scott’s peers and pro-golfer mates he had observed during the past three decades.
Last year, Anthony Quayle, who Scott Snr had already known for a long time, had that look. He’d spent six years playing golf on the Japan Tour between 2018 and 2024, dealing with the long stretches away from his Queensland home base.
“Phil said, ‘Quayley, you don’t look happy; normally, you’re always up for a yarn but you don’t seem yourself,’” Quayle tells Australian Golf Digest.
Quayle had initially adored playing in Japan, a prestigious tour in the ecosystem. The camaraderie among the Australian players and lucrative tournament purses offset any homesickness. Then COVID-19 hit and changed everything.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m a golf nerd and it’s the coolest job ever,” Quayle adds. “But the hard parts of being a tour pro are very difficult. The guys who I’d spent the most time with on the Japan Tour were Adam Bland, Brendan Jones, and Matt Griffin, but they had lost their cards, and although I had Brad Kennedy, [New Zealand’s] Michael Hendry and [South Africa’s] Shaun Norris, often we were staying in slightly different hotels and couldn’t practise or even go out for dinner together. The last couple of years on the Japan Tour, I wasn’t playing particularly well, and the schedule is condensed where I was away a lot.
“One stint was 10 weeks, and I made one cut in that two-and-a-half months. I missed the majority by one shot or two. Japan business hotels are normally great, but when you’ve missed the cut and you’re spending a weekend almost alone in them with your thoughts, you just want to be home.
“Phil Scott was instrumental in helping me make that decision to come back to Australia and play the Australasian Tour. My goal would be to play my way into one of the three cards on the DP World Tour from the Australasian Order of Merit.
“At first, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was sacrificing too much because I had full status in Japan. But as I spoke to Phil more, I realised it was an investment in my future.”
Despite a pair of missed cuts in his first two events back on home soil, Quayle ignited his march towards Europe with a T-3 at the DP World Tour co-sanctioned Australian PGA Championship before two third placings and two fifth-placed results spanning the next five events.
“I played really well and I learned a lot; I had a sense of calm being around mates in Australia,” Quayle recalls.
As the calendar turned to 2025, he finished T-4 in two events leading into a dramatic Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia season finale at The National tournament at the club of the same name on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. In the final round, Quayle was trailing the lead by three strokes playing the last hole, where he struck a 2-iron from 215 metres into a heavy breeze. The ball settled eight feet from a back-left pin, and he made the birdie putt needed to secure outright second place in the tournament – and the 107 Order of Merit points required to leapfrog past several players and lock up the third and final DP World Tour card by just 10.3 points.
“That 2-iron might have been the best shot I’ve ever hit considering the circumstances,” says Quayle, who hit a plethora of great shots during his T-15 finish at the 150th Open Championship at St Andrews in 2022.
“The 18th at The National, into that breeze, might have been the toughest par 4 all season,” he says. “It was a satisfying way to get the job done at the end of a season when I’d sacrificed a lot and worked hard towards a new goal.”
Quayle’s was one of many stories that made the 2024-2025 Australasian season one of the most compelling in recent memory. There was Ryan Peake, the West Australian former child golf prodigy who spent several years in jail – after getting caught up with motorcycle gangs – only to rediscover golf after his release. With the help of supercoach Ritchie Smith, Peake contended in tournaments all season long before winning the New Zealand Open with a stunning final-hole par save. With it, Peake secured the second DP World Tour card after Australian PGA winner Elvis Smylie and before Quayle.
If it weren’t for Peake, left-handed Smylie was a candidate for story of the local season. After turning pro during COVID-19 and having his rookie year hampered by travel restrictions and pandemic-induced border closures, Smylie broke out as a household name in golf in 2024. He played in the final group at the Australian PGA at Royal Queensland with his idol, Cameron Smith, and defeated the major winner, who once awarded a place in his own scholarship program to Smylie. A little further down the Order of Merit was Jack Buchanan, the South Australian who won twice earlier in the season.
In terms of big names, there was also a very endearing narrative of LIV Golf stars Smith and Lucas Herbert returning home to play in several state opens and PGAs in addition to the two Australian ‘majors’. Fans walked in the fairway with Smith at the Queensland PGA while at the NSW Open, Herbert battled and defeated Smith in an enthralling duel alongside the Murray River.
“Including ‘Peakey’, myself and others, there were so many narratives that fans could invest their time in because, I guess, they are more relatable than the best player in the world making $60 million this year,” Quayle says. “Don’t get me wrong, that’s awesome and I hope I’m doing it there with [Scottie Scheffler on the PGA Tour] at some point, but I think from the fans’ point of view, there’s something really relatable about the Aussie tour and the product they’ve created.”
That parasocial bond Australian golf fans feel with the domestic players boils down to a series of likeable personalities and a quest that every sports lover can appreciate: a promotion from their own tour to the bright lights of Europe. Counter-intuitively, the more pressure heaped on Australasian Tour pros chasing three potentially life-changing carrots at the end of the season freed Quayle from obsessing over week-to-week results.
“I was just so focused on a long-term goal of getting a European tour card that I didn’t get too up or down when I had a series of close calls in Australia without winning,” he says. “I just thought, Oh well, they’re still valuable points. I could reset myself every tournament.”
As he looks ahead to the 2025-2026 season in Europe, which begins with this year’s Australian PGA, Quayle says he will draw on experience from his play on the Japan Tour, DP World Tour and in majors. But he’ll take inspiration from battling it out on the good old PGA Tour of Australasia, which he will play plenty of this summer as he awaits the big tournaments on the calendar for the 2026 portion of the DP World Tour.
“I’ve got seven years of pretty high-level tour experience and a little bit of international tour experience. I’m probably not going to feel overwhelmed when I get to play on the DP World Tour, and the majority of my record in DP events, co-sanctioned or other full events, is quite good,” Quayle says. “I think I’ll use the same mindset I had on the Aussie tour, which is just that every week is another opportunity.”
The question isn’t who will take those opportunities this summer, rather how many more stars will emerge in the pursuit of them.
A New Era Dawns
The 2025-2026 Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia tees off this month with unprecedented momentum, bolstered by record prizemoney, returning international superstars and a reinvigorated schedule that stretches across six Australian states and territories plus Papua New Guinea.
With $7 million on offer across 10 official Order of Merit events before Christmas, this season marks the tour’s most lucrative and far-reaching first half yet. The theme is clear: “The Chase is On.” Professionals will be competing not only for trophies but for transformative opportunities – DP World Tour cards, international exemptions, and a chance to follow the likes of Elvis Smylie, Ryan Peake and Anthony Quayle.
Two events lead the charge: the BMW Australian PGA Championship at Royal Queensland (November 27-30), which now boasts a record $2.5 million purse, and the Australian Open at Royal Melbourne Golf Club (December 4-7), offering at least $2 million and headlined by Rory McIlroy.
The calendar also welcomes back several prestigious venues. The WA Open returns to Mount Lawley Golf Club for the first time since 2018, now featuring its acclaimed redesign. The Ford NSW Open heads back to the vineyards of The Vintage Golf Club in the Hunter Valley, while the popular Webex Players Series resumes at Willunga in South Australia with its mixed-gender format.
With more drama to come in early 2026, including the full Webex series and a final sprint to crown the Order of Merit champion, the stage is set for a defining season in Australasian golf.
2025 Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia schedule (pre-Christmas)
- Aug. 14-17: PNG Open – Royal Port Moresby GC ($225,000)
- Aug. 28-31: NT PGA – Palmerston GC ($200,000)
- Sep. 27-28: World Sand Greens (non-OOM) – Binalong GC ($140,000)
- Oct. 9-12: WA PGA – Kalgoorlie GC ($250,000)
- Oct. 16-19: WA Open – Mount Lawley GC ($200,000)
- Oct. 23-26: Webex SA – Willunga GC ($200,000)
- Nov. 13-16: NSW Open – The Vintage GC ($800,000 min.)
- Nov. 20-23: Queensland PGA – Nudgee GC ($250,000)
- Nov. 27-30: Australian PGA – Royal Queensland GC ($2.5m)
- Dec. 4-7: Australian Open – Royal Melbourne GC ($2m min.)
- Dec. 11-14: Vic PGA – Moonah Links ($250,000)
Feature photograph by Hannah Peters/getty images
