Here are 8 must-do activities when visiting Melbourne.
If Australia wasn’t a bucket list destination for you, you may change your mind after hearing about kangaroos hopping down rolling fairways and the plethora of activities to do.
Many people dread the thought of long plane rides, but the views, excursions and wildlife make it more than worth it. The plane ride is a good opportunity to catch up on sleep in preparation for a hefty time change.
Golfweek took a trip to Melbourne to play extravagant golf and explore the city. While the Aussie accent didn’t stick, the memories and experiences will last a lifetime.
St. Andrews Beach Golf Course complements numerous American courses that are frequently preferred by younger players looking for adventure
St. Andrews Beach, initially intended to be a private club that fell on hard times. It has since been revived as a must-see daily-fee facility. Its layout by Tom Doak and Mike Clayton opened in 2006, and simply put, it’s familiar to the classic Sandbelt courses to its north as far as turf conditions go, but the facility’s irresistible vibe and design set it apart from other courses we played in Australia.
For comparison’s sake, St. Andrews Beach matches up well with several American layouts often favored by younger players looking for adventure. Think Sweetens Cove in Tennessee or Tobacco Road in North Carolina. The simple clubhouse at St. Andrews Beach is a temporary metal building (there are plans to build a new clubhouse), and the bathrooms are out back in a trailer – again with that Sweetens Cove comparison. There is zero pretentiousness, just golf. Not even a range, as players can warm up into a net next to the parking lot. The peak green fee is about $70 in U.S. dollars.
Gary Lisbon, an Australian golf photographer and writer of international acclaim who also helps direct golf tours, had joined us as a sherpa on much of this trip, and his drone frequently followed us around the humps and bumps and sometimes tumbling slopes of St. Andrews Beach. Kangaroos watched our threesome from adjoining fairways, with several larger specimens sauntering onto the sixth green as we played our approaches – no need for an ecotour here, the ‘roos were everywhere.
St. Andrews Beach presented a totally relaxed setting, just golf and laughs and big animals that could care less about first, second and sometimes third attempts to escape deep bunkers. Those traps might not be as impeccably maintained as at some of the nearby private clubs, but they fit perfectly well in the raw terrain and add greatly to the memorability factor. The course ranks No. 19 in Australia and New Zealand.
In this video, Golfweek takes on members of the Royal Melbourne over 9 holes at the East Course.
Averee Dovsek, Jason Lusk and Gary Lisbon had a match planned against an Aussie side led by Royal Melbourne members Darcy Brereton, a professional who competes on the Handa PGA Tour of Australasia and Henry Peters, Owner of Under The Card. We won’t go into the details – the lopsided match turned out as anyone might expect when a tour pro is involved. But those results didn’t matter, because this was Royal Melbourne.
We played the East Course this day, the somewhat underappreciated sister course of the world-famous West Course. The East checks in at No. 11 on the Golfweek’s Best list of top courses in Australia and New Zealand, and six of its holes are used alongside 12 from the West to create Royal Melbourne’s Composite Course that is played in many top-tier competitions, including 16 Australian Opens and three Presidents Cups.
It was a blast, even as our American team was blasted in the nine-hole match. The course doesn’t return to the clubhouse at the turn, so we kept swinging, unwilling to miss any of this layout. As is often the case, the top-ranked course at any facility receives almost all the adulation in the press and on TV. But the East at Royal Melbourne is not to be missed, not a single shot of it.
Kangaroos, koalas and golf: A trip to Melbourne and Victoria in Australia is even better than you can imagine.
I had the typical American checklist of expectations as I boarded the massive Qantas A380 en route to Australia: koala bears, kangaroos, surf breaks and cool accents.
I was headed to Melbourne in the state of Victoria on the country’s southern coast, so I was out of luck when it came to crocs – the fierce biters that live far to the north, not the shoes worn by several jammie-clad passengers on my overnight flight. But there would be plenty of nature on tap during Golfweek‘s visit to the second largest city in Oz and its surrounds.
I also had plenty of expectations for Victoria’s golf just south of Melbourne. The Sandbelt region is famous among fans of course architecture, for good reason. Royal Melbourne, Kingston Heath, Victoria Golf Club and a handful of others pepper the lists of best classic courses around the world, including those compiled by Golfweek’s Best ranking program.
I knew this late-April trip to Australia would be full of big bounces, putts from off the greens, beautiful bunkers and some of the most intoxicating greens in the game. The inland equivalent of links golf would be a fair description, with firm and fast sand-based layouts that force a player to think instead of just fire away at a distant flagstick. In other words, my favorite kind of golf.
St. Andrews Beach Golf Course on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia (Courtesy of Visit Victoria/Gary Lisbon).
My hopes, based on years of reading and studying photography and watching elite international events broadcast from Australia, were high. Scotland, Ireland, England, even a handful of U.S. resorts that successfully mimic the best of links golf – this is the style of play I wanted to experience in Victoria.
With expectations so impossibly high, I was gobsmacked when Australia surpassed all of them. Every box was ticked. Simply put, Victoria serves up the best kind of golf at dozens of courses, nine of which I sampled.
The terrain, the textures, the turf – it all rolled into a level of golfing perfection on frequent repeat. I was on the ground nine full days, playing golf for six of them, and it wasn’t nearly enough time to take it all in. But the courses I did play in mostly sunny conditions and ideal autumn breezes – remember, spring in the northern hemisphere is fall to those south of the equator – ignited a desire to return. The flight is long, that much is true. But the list of courses I want to replay or tackle for a first time is even longer.
Much of this is credited to one man who put the Sandbelt on golf’s map in a big way. Alister MacKenzie – a Scot famed in America for his later course designs at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia and Cypress Point in California, among others – visited Victoria in 1926 and laid out the West Course at Royal Melbourne, which ranks among the top 10 in the world on most critics’ lists of courses. He also lent his services to several other clubs in the region, be that rebunkering an existing course or suggesting changes to putting surfaces. MacKenzie’s fingerprints are almost everywhere in the sand.
The par-3 fifth hole at Royal Melbourne’s West Course in Victoria, Australia (Jason Lusk/Golfweek).
Golf already existed around Melbourne, but it was Royal Melbourne’s West Course that proved elite golf could flourish in the Sandbelt. Other prominent designers have followed in MacKenzie’s footsteps, and in the nearly 100 years since his visit, the region has become a mecca for international golf architecture aficionados who heed the call, walk down a jetway in some faraway land and jet off to Melbourne to discover what all the fuss is about. Count this region alongside the United Kingdom and Ireland as must-sees for anybody who truly loves great golf courses.
I was in Victoria with a film crew and Golfweek contributor Averee Dovsek, a former college golfer and now a long-drive competitor who also makes fitness and instructional videos for Golfweek.com. With the government agency of Visit Victoria as our host, Dovsek and I were to play a series of matches against local golf pros and club members on several of the area’s top courses. Then I was scheduled to play several other courses on my own – when it comes to this kind of golf, I can’t get enough. Australia is a long way for an American to travel for golf, so when you’re there you have to take advantage of every possible chance to play. VisitMelbourne.com is a great place to start, as is TheSandbelt.com.
