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golfing heaven
Mention Melbourne’s Sandbelt to serious golfers anywhere in the world and there is the kind of instant recognition that usually comes with a dreamy smile and a story about playing or always wanting to play there.
Mention that you are a native of Melbourne and strangers treat you as they would someone from St Andrews in Scotland or Augusta, Georgia, and assume you are a handy player with a deeper understanding of the game than most.
At home, Melburnians tend to take their rich golfing heritage for granted and those who don’t play - the majority - would struggle to locate this mystical place or name more than a few of its courses.
For the record, it is a band of rolling, grey sand terrain that roughly follows the eastern shore of Port Phillip Bay a couple of kilometres inland. Melbourne has more than 100 courses within a 15-kilometre radius of the CBD and eight (Commonwealth, Huntingdale, Kingston Heath, Metropolitan, Peninsula, Royal Melbourne, Victoria and Yarra Yarra) make up the Sandbelt.
Formed in 1891, Royal Melbourne started it all when it moved from its original course at Caulfield to the wilds of Sandringham in 1901, then in 1926 hired the famous Alister MacKenzie to design its West Course. MacKenzie was delighted with the terrain that undulated nicely, drained beautifully, grew wonderful turf and easily yielded up his signature bunkers to horse-drawn earthmoving equipment.
Assisted by 1924 Australian Open champion Alex Russell and curator Mick Morcom, he gave the world a masterpiece and helped a dozen other clubs in the Sandbelt modify their layouts while he was there. It did not take long for the fame of the area to spread.
American Gene Sarazen, at the time the best golfer in the world, was one of its first fans. “It burns me up that with the billions of dollars spent on course architecture in the past 50 years, all the architects together haven’t been able to build another Royal Melbourne,” he said in 1931.
Tom Doak, another American and one of the best of the modern designers, concurs 80 years on. “If only Melbourne were not so far removed from America, the standard of American golf architecture might well be higher,” he said. “Were both countries closer, however, it is just as likely that America would have dragged Australian standards down to its level.”
Mick Morcom and his son Vern, the superintendent at Kingston Heath, designed or modified more than 80 golf courses to the MacKenzie philosophy while others became adept in the art, copying his style and building courses that claimed a MacKenzie connection they did not have. It puts one in mind of Mark Twain’s travels through Palestine in the 1860s when he said he was offered enough pieces of the true cross to build a bridge. Even Royal Melbourne stretches things a bit with a MacKenzie burger on the menu. There is no way known he designed it.
While the great man was building Augusta National in Georgia with Bobby Jones, Russell designed RM’s East Course, which many believe is at least the equal of the West.
Since 1959 all the big tournaments have been played on a composite course made up of 12 West and six East holes and this is the layout on which most rankings by golf magazines are done. On this basis it has been ranked number one in Australia and consistently inside the top 10 in the world for the past half century.
Some argue that Kingston Heath’s 19 holes are better than either the East or the West, although six-time Major winner Nick Faldo does not agree. “I’m not sure that I really want to nail my colours to the mast, but the West Course at Royal Melbourne might just be the best golf course in the world, period,” he said while playing the Heineken Classic in 2005.
She did not win the Women’s Australian Open there in 2009 but Katherine Hull says: “Metropolitan is the best golf course in Australia by far.” She was echoing the sentiment of Walter Hagen, who in 1930 described the course “by far the finest I have played in Australia”.
The only sure way to settle the issue is to play them all. Most are more accessible than people think and by world standards are remarkably inexpensive. Most allow visitors who are members of interstate or overseas clubs a game on selected week days. Fees and availability can be obtained from the clubs or via selected golf tour operators.
Victoria Golf Club offers a great deal of a night’s accommodation in the clubhouse, three meals and a round of golf for $AU275 per person twin share, and is a great base because it is slap in the middle of the Sandbelt. Peninsula, which has two courses, also offers accommodation and is a place to launch either north to the Sandbelt or south to the Mornington Peninsula.
By Brendan Moloney
Course pictures: Gary Lisbon
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