Tom Doak’s St Andrews Beach has been freshly-ranked the 89th best course in the world by a reputable website, and you will hear no argument from our Deputy Editor, who, on his first go-round, describes the course as “more fun than both Luna Parks”.
One of the tricks of the golf course review game (a stretch to call it “work”) is to take notes on the way around using your phone’s voice recorder.
Less finicky than notepad and pen, accessible from your pocket, you flick it out, press record, and trot out observations. It will even transcribe them into words.
After my first go-around St Andrews Beach, the Tom Doak and Mike Clayton collaboration on the glorious golfing dune lands on the southern coast of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, the memo bank was full to bursting.
Memo: St Andrews Beach, eh? Heard a lot about you. Picturesque from the back tees on the first, you can see the pin in the distance and you best mark it because you won’t see it from the fairway, is what they say.
My drive shoots out over some heather and onto the wide, brown land below. Our man Doak, it appears, has channelled his muse, [Dr Alister] MacKenzie, with a signature, friendly tickle first-up: a 500-metre par-five with a fairway, might be 80-metres wide, most of the way down.
It appears The Beach isn’t here to beat you up. Not early, anyway. And why would it? We’re here for fun, baby. Hard and fast fun. The best kind.
And on it went, gibber like that, with my phone, as with accusations levelled at myself, ever more full of it.
And, yet, I can honestly and unashamedly say – gush, really – that I loved St Andrews Beach from the get-go.
I had been told how good it was, but you still have to play it, right? It was still a blind date. But, over four hours, two balls and in a feisty nor-west wind, I had as much fun as I’ve had alone on a golf course since a first solo go-round Barnbougle Dunes in 2008.
There was a strong nor-wester, but I was glad for it. It was so much fun shaping the ball under it, across it, with it, fashioning shots on the breeze and watching it track around the curvature of the land.
I hit driver off the deck. I hooded the face of six-iron and bent it flat and low. I created a golf round. Created an adventure.
I didn’t keep score. And I would urge everyone, in some rounds, perhaps even all rounds: do not keep score. Even in your head. Just play. I had such a fun round, on my own, just playing. It was Barnbougle, Wickham, Kidnappers, even Tara Iti adjacent.
Granted, this all might sound a little bare-foot hippy for some. See also: Mike Clayton. The Golf Australia magazine Architecture Editor worked with Doak on St Andrews Beach, has a home nearby, and drops in regularly to offer advice on an ad hoc consultancy basis to the management team.
Voice memo: A mighty bunker is carved like a jagged whale’s mouth from the left of five fairway and I admire it for the length, until finding my ball nestled against the sheer dirt wall of this abomination.
But it’s not my ball, hurrah, for that sits middle of the fairway. But it is a new Pro V1 with a kangaroo stamped on it, and onwards we roll, freshly in love.
With dormant couch fairways and firm, bentgrass greens, St Andrews Beach has the look and feel of – let’s call it – an Australian links. There is a rugged, gnarly aesthetic. Your golf ball will run and run, bouncing about according to the curvature of the land on a course they carved out of marvellous dunes. The couch is tight and fine. The native bush is largely decoration. Mobs of eastern grey kangaroos loll about. A reptile or two would not surprise in summer. As Gangajang sang, This is Australia.
Voice memo: Hard and fast? Friend, I normally hit three-wood 200m tops. This baby, second shot on one, on the wind, across the dormant, tight turf, it’s gone 250m … and some of that journey was uphill! The ball ran and ran and ran, and I found that I’d taken an unwitting Tiger Line and left myself 125m to the top of a largely blind pin set in a basin. I love this place already. Love it like first love Barnbougle.
As is the way with golf on the fringes of our mighty island continent, wind is a factor. A hole that’s driver-driver-wedge one day, might play driver-nine-iron tomorrow. It’s the nature of the beast even if actually, perhaps counter-intiuitviely, it’s relatively sheltered.
Not having water views works in the course’s favour. When there are horrendous days with big southerlies, the higher a course sits, the more you can be blown away. But a lot of the holes at St Andrews Beach sit in gullies. Obviously, it can still get very windy. But on higher courses you could have your head blown off.
Regardless of the wind direction, St Andrews Beach offers a full array of golf shots. It would be a different course each time you play, even with slight shifts of breeze.
If it’s drizzly and the course plays longer, holes like the first aren’t achievable in two. Play in the middle of summer and you can pump one down there, downwind, and you might be coming in with 5-iron. The ball can bounce around. There are subtle bowls around the greens. You can cop a couple of friendly kicks. Other times, not so much.
Voice memo: Fairway bunker on two, short par-4, with the wind, 130m out, I nip a wedge, pure, back foot, just punch it out there, flat, a beautiful strike. It does everything I want it to do. It runs around the curvature of the land, rolls and rolls, I can’t even see it, I know it’s rolling. It ends up back of the green on the fringe. I couldn’t have stopped it had I hit the green, so I envisioned running it up and it did that. How very cool. And there follows a second par. Two holes in and the nor-wester is up. And it’s more fun than both Luna Parks.
Such lyrical waxing is no surprise to Ian Denny, managing director of Golf Services Management. Even on a Tuesday in June, after the course had been pounded by weekend warriors, after their busiest summer of golf ever, the Beach is always a delight for travelling players, as Denny will tell you.
“It’s always playable. It’s pretty rare, when you think about it, to have a course 12 months of the year, always dry, always with golf carts out. Even when the course should be at its ‘worst’, people walk in and say, ‘I can’t believe how good that was.’ That consistency is a credit to the team who prepare it so well, year-round,” Denny says.
Golf Australia magazine rates St Andrews Beach as the 13th-best in Australia and our fourth-best public access course. Certainly, it’s up there for fun with Cape Wickham and the Barnbougles (and the secret new one at Seven Mile Beach near the airport at Hobart).
What did surprise and delight Denny and his team is when St Andrews Beach was recently ranked the 89th-best golf course in the wooorrrld ...
Denny says the team had no idea rankers from the respected website “Top 100 Golf Courses” had even been in the house. He knew there’d been accolades in Facebook groups. Architecture nerds love the place. Seems that some of their number assumed human form and turned up.
“We’ve had so much social media after being ranked in the top-100 in the world, which is quite bizarre, because we didn’t even know anything about it,” Denny says. “We just got this email saying, by the way, tomorrow we’re releasing the top-100 in the world, and you’re number 89. And we were like, wow, what are you talking about?”
Social media, in the way of social media, remains in something of a flap today because St Andrews Beach has been ranked ahead of Peninsula-Kingswood, Victoria, Lost Farm, Royal Adelaide and Royal Melbourne East, among others. They rank it sixth in Australia and seventh in Oceania.
Rankings are, of course, subjective. Yet clearly enough wandering rankers agreed that St Andrews Beach is world-class. “It’s pretty unique and a great milestone for us,” Denny says.“It shows what the golf course is because these people playing it for the first time, there’s no political bias. They’re just people coming out from America and worldwide, playing it and loving it.”
When the list was announced in May, almost immediately, those time-rich eccentrics who travel the world to play “Top 100” courses and notch them on a belt as bird-watchers might chronicle rare finches, began to descend on St Andrews Beach. Locals have always known what they have. Now the world does.
The Tom Doak brand has been a factor in the course’s popularity. Denny says with that comes pressure to continue to trot out a world-class track.
“People’s expectation is that it’s going to be awesome, so there’s pressure there. But everyone just walks up and says, ‘That’s one of the best golf courses I’ve ever played.’ People playing it for the first time, they just come back and say, ‘My God, I can’t believe how good that golf course is,’” Denny says.
St Andrews Beach was once a private members course, but today, on the entry road out the front, there’s a sign that reads: “All Players Welcome.” There are no members.
No parking spots for directors. No affectation. For $125, people can book a tee-time for 9am on a Saturday. In terms of value for money, it’s as good as it gets. Put it this way: were the course on the Monterey Peninsula of California or part of the Bandon Dunes group in Oregon, the green fee could be six, seven times as much, even – true story – one thousand Australian dollars.
While the course has always been a beauty, the “clubhouse” was once a demountable, “donga” style affair with a corrugated iron roof and tiny barred windows. Today, there’s a fine, modern and functional 19th hole with a view to a chipping green that could be a spare hole and/or post-round bet settler.
And things are about to heat up at St Andrews Beach, with a hot springs planned in the next stage of development. It will sit on the site of the old clubhouse building, which they’re using as an office. There’ll be more apartments for play-and-stay. And with the golf course trading and operating at a sustainable level, and then some, the progressive owner is investing money back into the business to ensure that it remains at the level they’ve attained.
St Andrews Beach is not constrained, or taken in manifold directions, by individuals on committees arguing for changes to certain holes, for parking spots for directors, and so on. Instead, there’s a five-year plan.
Voice memo: The third is a 405m par-4 into the wind, super-wide fairway, dog-leg right then left to a green raised in a saddle; it is very cool, my new favourite hole taking over from two which took over from one. I sting driver low into the wind, hit it maybe 170m, pure. Driver off the deck is toppy, but perfect, never more than six foot off the deck, slicing hard into the fan. I nip up wedge into the saddle and know it’s close. There follows a par. Good times, baby.
St Andrews Beach has its quirks, which, for mine, add to its appeal. Fun, short par-4s are complemented by par-4s so long into the wind, they play longer than some par-5s. The 13th is case in point: a 442m par-4 that, when played into the nor-wester, could be driver-driver-wedge – as it was the day I recorded a pretty cool bogey. The 13th could be the hardest par-4 in Australia.
The last time Doak was in town, Denny asked him about it.
“The hole is over a hill to the fairway, and nigh-on impossible to hit it with a second shot in the nor-west wind,” Denny says. “Two woods, you still can’t get there. So, I said to Tom; ‘How do you make 13 a par-4?’
Doak, bless him, replied, “I couldn’t care less,” according to Denny.
“He said, ‘You either make 17 a par-four or a par-five, or 13 a par-four or par-five. They run opposite ways. So, they’re a par-nine depending on which way the wind blows.’ And I couldn’t argue with him,” Denny says.
I could not argue either, after reaching the fringe of the green on the par-5 17th with two-hybrid and, nearly, so very nearly, rolling in a big-curling bomb for an eagle for the ages. As you have may deduced, one’s memos sounded a little breathless.
Voice memo: On to the sixth, par-three, uphill, into the wind, two mighty bunkers right, carved out of the hill, I hit a dud, fading three-wood that is not the shot-shape you want, like, at all; the ball going maybe 150m into a gnarly, fat front bunker. I’m well under the hole and can’t see the green, much less the pin, but clip out wedge-perfect; pure, centre-face, and I know it’s going to be good, the feel off it off the face, know it’s up there, bouncing past the hole, coming back off the backboards in the bowl, sucking and spinning, dear god, but I love this game, I’m sitting 10 feet. When I curl in the putt, I have made, perhaps, the greatest sand save of my near three-score years upon the Earth. These are good times, baby.
Doak was equally lyrical when he spoke to our former editor, Brendan James, when the course opened in 2005.
“The land at St Andrews Beach was so good for designing a golf course that it became difficult to decide which holes we couldn’t build,” Doak said.
“There are natural golf holes laid out there of all shapes and sizes, but we could only use the two best combinations of 18.
“In some cases, we just had to find the right spot to put a green, locate the nearest high point near that green to put the next tee and the following hole would present itself.
“I can’t help but feel that Alister Mackenzie would be mad that he never got the chance to design a course on land this good.”
Voice memo: Onto seven, a par-four for Australia, into the wind I hit driver and driver again, and am still short, 100m under the hole. I take 8-iron off the back foot, hood the face slighly and punch it, one hundred percent pure, hard, the ball sluicing up under the wind. It flies and sticks past the flag, sucks and spins off a ramp at the back, rolls out pin-high. Oh dear Lord in all the Heavens, whatever Andrew did, no wonder they made him a Saint.
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