After your chartered flight to King Island, Cape Wickham unfolds on the island’s northern tip, in the middle of Bass Strait. American architect Mike DeVries and Australian golf writer Darius Oliver routed eighteen holes around the island’s lighthouse, the tallest in the Southern Hemisphere. Nine holes run along the water, three of them par threes, and the wind off the strait rarely lets up. It opened to the public in 2015 and was ranked 24th in the world within a year, a debut few new courses have matched.
Barnbougle Dunes opened in December 2004 on what had been a potato farm on Tasmania’s north-east coast, designed by Tom Doak and Mike Clayton along three kilometres of dunesland above the Tasman Sea. It was the first new Australian course to enter the world’s top 100 since rankings began, debuting at 49 and later climbing into the mid-20s. The fourth hole, a short par four, plays to a green tucked into a natural punchbowl and guarded by the deepest bunker on the course. A second course, Lost Farm, opened next door in 2010.
St Andrews Beach opened in 2005, Tom Doak’s second design in Australia after Barnbougle Dunes, again working with Mike Clayton. Doak left sixteen of the eighteen fairways untouched by machinery, shaping greens around natural blowouts and saddles rather than building new contours. The second hole, a 305-yard par four framed by a sandy blowout, is one Doak rates among the best short par fours he has built. The club operates as a fully public course, unusual among Australia’s highest-ranked layouts.
Kingston Heath opened in 1925, designed by Sydney professional Dan Soutar on a flat, modest stretch of Melbourne’s Sandbelt. A year later Alister MacKenzie, in Melbourne to design Royal Melbourne’s West Course, was brought in to design the bunkering and converted the blind par-four 15th into an uphill par three now regarded as one of the finest in world golf. Kingston Heath is a private club; our guests play here through the relationship we’ve built with the club over many years, rather than a public booking.
Royal Melbourne’s West Course was designed by Alister MacKenzie during a single visit to Melbourne in late 1926, before club member Alex Russell and head greenkeeper Mick Morcom carried out construction over the next five years. It opened in 1931 and remains the highest-ranked course in the Southern Hemisphere. As with Kingston Heath, access is by invitation only; we’ve cultivated the relationship that gets our guests onto the West Course.
Kauri Cliffs sits on a former sheep station on an oceanfront plateau in the far north of Northland, with holes carved through ravines, native bush and clifftop. Several run parallel to the Pacific, several hundred feet above it, with little engineering needed beyond clearing the route. It was architect Dave Harman’s final major project before his death in 2004, and it’s still one of the most photographed courses in the country.
A short drive south of Tara Iti, Te Arai South is Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw’s contribution to the same coastline: a figure-eight routing that begins in forest and dunes before breaking onto headlands above the sea for its closing holes. It opened to the public in 2022, the first of two courses built at Te Arai, and plays as a more open, walkable counterpart to Tara Iti’s tighter, more private layout next door.
At Cape Kidnappers, the golf takes a back seat to the setting for about as long as it takes to reach the first tee. Tom Doak routed the course along finger ridges that drop straight to the Pacific, with the par-five 15th, nicknamed Pirate’s Plank, playing out to one of the most exposed cliff-edge greens in golf. It opened in 2004 and has barely left the world’s top 100 since.
