It’s early doors at Royal Queensland and we’ve left the hordes with the marquee Min Woo group and travelled out under woolly skies towards the mighty Gateway Bridge.

And there we sit among flame trees that find a wayward driver.

It's mighty Lincoln Tighe – built like a rower-come-backrower, fitter than a big brown trout – he's lying one in the rough under a Moreton Bay Fig. He has five-iron in his hands. He’s maybe 40 metres from the flag with a swale and front-bump in his way.

His bump-n-run, you might play it in your dreams. It’s the golf shot you’d play if you practised it every day for 27 years. He strokes in the four-foot birdie putt. He will finish three-under 68.

Yes, it's a cracker of a score, and you can bet our Lincoln will not being throwing it back. But there is red ink everywhere here in the AM at RQ.

Rain has softened things up and the world-class players in this Professional Golfers Association of Australia championship, co-sanctioned by the world’s second-biggest golf tour the DP World tour, are making hay while the sun doesn’t shine.

Rod Pampling happens by, he’s 55, been playing since the dawn of man. He scuffs a dud low 5-iron under the boughs of another giant fig, but fashions an up-and-down from 40 metres, receiving a generous smattering of applause from the Pamps Army; a half-dozen grey-haired buzzards in the uniform of the club comp chopper.

Elvis Smylie's six-under topped the leaderboard in round one of the PGA Championship at Royal Queensland. PHOTO: Getty Images.

We switch fairways, for there, coming down six, is the yellow bucket hat of Daniel Gale, visible from far across the savannah. Love watching this fellah – his takeaway is that of an angry 18-marker before he transforms at the top, chrysalis-like, into a flusher, coming down and through the ball and smashing it into the ether.

It’s the funkiest swing on the Australasian Tour. He’s like a poor man’s Jim Furyk, except without the stupid stuff at the top. Yet both men come back down, on plane, and spank that puppy, pure, time and again.

I also like his handlebar moustache though he could lose the weird knife-shaped mutton-chops, he looks like an extra from The True History of The Kelly Gang, the film with George Mackay, Charlie Hunnam and Russell Crowe as "Harry Power", which is bad.

Funny old day! The southerly breeze is light, and then gusty, carrying spits of mizzle across the inland links-land. The Sunshine State may be perfect tomorrow but is clearly drunk today.

My but the play is slow. If the three-ball two groups ahead took this long in your Wednesday stableford competition, said buzzards would have them cooked and eaten. There’s a lot of standing around, watching golfers standing around. There are “Quiet Please” signs for people already quiet. It’s very polite. It’s soporific. Somnolent.

Min Woo Lee finished with four-under 67 but went out a lot hotter than that. PHOTO: Getty Images.

Yes, people are being respectful of the players. And, yes, it’s 10:42 on a Thursday morning. But by this time in round one at LIV Adelaide there’d have been 27 nude shoeys, six of them by Greg Norman.

We head up to 7 green and peer back up through the mizzle – somewhere out there is Elvis Smylie; four-under and co-leading this Australian PGA Championship.

Long and lean, a lefty, he’s like a greyhound that’s evolved to walk on two legs. His hands are large, his fingers long like a tropical frog’s, they lightly grip his wedges and waft the ball close from tight surrounds.

He birdies seven with an up-and-down. He shaves the hole on eight. He leads the field by midday on day one after smoking a mighty drive, striping a slightly flared hybrid, hitting a bunker shot fat into another bunker, and holing-out for birdie from there.

Gale, who'll make eagle to finish 3-under 68, offers a fist-bump. And you think, Golf - don't go changin'.

“I didn't touch the green and made four, so a pretty good way to finish,” Smylie smiles post-round.

So. How good is he? Well, he's clearly got game. He's this year on tour. But Next Big Thing? The next Jason, Cam or Min Woo Lee?

We’ll see.

But know this: he wants to be.

“It’s great having the Aussies back home to compete in these big tournaments and it’s great to compete against them because ultimately I want to be in their shoes and do what they’re doing in their career,” he says.

Smylie grew up an hour down the road on the Gold Coast. He says the PGA at RQ is like a “home game”. He says every part of his game at the moment is "really good".

“I’m really confident in what I’m doing," Smylie says.

“And I’m really excited for the next few days.”

You and us both, Elvis.