A list of the regional Victoria’s best golf courses would not be complete without Leongatha Golf Club in South Gippsland and its Vern Morcom-designed layout is about to get even better.
Lukas Michel from the course architecture firm Clayton, DeVries & Pont recently began replacing all of the club’s bentgrass greens with 007XL.
That’s not a James Bond reference but a newer blend of ‘super’ bentgrass, which is becoming more popular in Australia.
And it’s not just new grass in the offing for the club located a little over 90 minutes’ drive south-east of Melbourne’s city centre.
Several of Leongatha’s greens will also be enlarged and some recontoured.
The entire process could take more than five years and, for a highly undulating and predominantly clay-based layout which receives more rainfall than Melbourne, drier year-round conditioning shapes as the greatest benefit from the changes.
“The bottom line is, it’s going to be more playable in winter,” Course superintendent Jim Jeffery, who created the impetus for the green replacements, said.
Late last year, Jeffery renovated Leongatha’s 9th green, adding sand-based soil under the surface. The result was a firmer green which withstood the most recent winter with far greater success than the other 17 greens.
That got Jeffery thinking about the potential of replacing all of the club’s clay-based putting surfaces. He played a round of golf at Leongatha with Michel just before winter and the idea gathered momentum.
“In my memory, it was really good, but it had been three or four years since I’d been there,” Michel said.
“I went up there, I played golf with Jim and we just sort of looked at the greens and discussed it and he mentioned that he might be progressing with works.”
The club then committed to replacing its greens and Michel got the gig.
It is a significant job for Michel, a highly accomplished amateur golfer who won the 2019 U.S Mid-Amateur Golf Championship which earned him starts at the following year’s Masters at Augusta National and U.S Open at Winged Foot in New York.
More recently, Michel has shifted his energies into course design for Clayton DeVries & Pont, which is a global partnership formed by Mike Clayton and international architects Mike DeVries and Frank Pont.
Michel and Clayton are both members at Metropolitan Golf Club in Melbourne and the pair have also spent plenty of time together in the past couple of years working on the Seven Mile Beach course in Hobart, which is due to open later next year.
Leongatha presents a great opportunity for Michel to make a name for himself as an architect in his own right.
“Chatting to Jim and ‘Clayts’, Clayts has got enough on his plate, there was no real need to get Clayts involved so it really is just my little project,” Michel said.
During his visit to the club just before winter, Michel was largely impressed with the condition of the heavily tree-lined layout.
Like just about any regional club, Leongatha doesn’t have vast sums of money to draw from, but Michel could see that new greens and soil profiles would be a great way to improve drainage.
“We’ve just done the 1st green and potentially either the 3rd or the 10th or both in March/April I think,” he said.
“It will be two to three greens a year, maybe more if money becomes available,” Jeffery added.
Sand will be added to the top 300 millimetres of soil under the greens, while the 007XL super bent is touted as a disease resistant grass and one which could save the club tens of thousands of dollars on fungicides and remove the need to fight the spread of poa annua.
“If we can get pure greens that are poa-free, they’ll look a lot better and then obviously our course ranking should improve because of it,” Jeffery said.
Money will largely dictate the speed of the project, but Michel is hopeful that positive feedback will play its part too.
“Quite often, these sorts of things start off and members will see how good the new greens are and they’ll sort of accelerate things,” Jeffery added.
The 1st hole at Leongatha is a mid-length par-4 with a gentle dogleg right, small green and it happens to be Jeffery’s favourite hole on the course. Michel plans to increase the size of the opening green and several others to create more pin position variety.
“[The] average sandbelt greens are about 500 square metres,” he said. “I think we’re pushing the 1st to be in the low to mid 400 square metreage.”
Nervous putters come unstuck at Leongatha where several greens feature prominent slopes which Michel said needed to be reduced in terms of severity.
Michel said lessons could be drawn from how Alister MacKenzie went about green building and incoporating dramatic slope without losing a lot of pin positions.
“Leongatha, some of the steep ones, there might only be one spot and its sort of in the middle of the green which isn’t necessarily the most interesting whereas if you could have two or three spots, you could still have a fairly steep green but it would just be more interesting,” Michel said.
“Reducing the slope in areas and maybe adding a little bit of internal contour without just having a straight slope of five percent which quite a few of them have.
“I think we can lift a long way the quality of the course. It’s already regarded as one of the best courses in the Gippsland region.”
Leongatha is one of many regional and rural courses designed by Morcom who did the bulk of his course designs in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Morcom’s best work included Spring Valley Golf Club and the former Kingswood golf course on the Melbourne Sandbelt, both courses at The Grange Golf Club in Adelaide and nearby Glenelg Golf Club. He also designed several courses in Tasmania including Royal Hobart, Sea View Golf Club in Perth and Cobram Barooga’s Old Course on the Murray River.
Morcom’s penchant for travelling was quite extraordinary when you consider course design was not his primary source of work; he was the head greenkeeper at Kingston Heath Golf Club from 1928 to 1967.
Vern followed in the footsteps of his father, ‘Mick’, who was famously the head greenkeeper at Royal Melbourne Golf Club for 35 years and was instrumental in the construction of both its famed East and West courses.
Clayton’s company’s involvement at Leongatha continues his connection to Vern Morcom courses, having overseen redesign work on Spring Valley, Rosanna and Curlewis Golf Clubs in Victoria.
Prior to his successful career as a touring professional, Clayton won a 72-hole amateur event at Leongatha and he maintains strong knowledge of the layout.
“The good holes there are really good,” he said. “7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 are really good holes.”
Carved out of dense vegetation on heavily undulating land, Leongatha is far more interesting than most country courses.
There are 17 bunkers and, excluding the par-3s, very few – if any – straight holes.
The par-3s at Leongatha are fantastic and provide great variation starting with a rare uphill one-shot hole at the 4th. The 7th is a long par-3 protected left and right by sand and the 137-metre 14th is a gem with a beautiful bunker hugging the front and right edges of the green. The 146-metre 16th features a thrilling drop to a green flanked short-right by a bunker and a cavernous valley left of the putting surface.
Separate from the green replacement program, Clayton says the course could be enhanced tremendously with some design changes to the closing stretch of dogleg right holes, namely the par-4 15th, par-4 17th and par-5 18th.
“The thing with all of [Morcom’s] courses is all of the straight holes he built were really good,” Clayton said. “17 and 18 at Spring Valley, brilliant holes, 15, 7, 9.
“And he was a beautiful builder of bunkers and greens.”
Drawing on his past experience working on Morcom courses, Clayton said some of the dogleg holes change direction too close to the tee and are so well guarded on the inside of the dogleg by tall trees that choosing an iron from the tee is the only viable strategy.
If he had his way at Leongatha, Clayton would make ground hazards – such as bunkers or low-lying vegetation – more prominent on the inside of the sharp doglegs on the 15th, 17th and 18th holes.
He has also thought about a bold plan to reduce the severity of the 15th hole dogleg.
“The way you fix the 15th is unsellable to the membership which is to put the 15th tee on the other side of the 14th green and drive across the 14th green. That works.”
Leongatha was rated No.60 in Golf Australia magazine’s Top-100 Public Access Course ranking in January this year and the green replacement program promises to elevate the club which, in the eyes of many, is already regarded as the best layout in all of Gippsland.
Perhaps the course’s greatest strength is its Santa Ana couch fairways which, for most of the year, are impeccable.
Jeffery said Melbourne golfers who play the course in the warmer months often remark that the fairways are comparable to the quality of those on the Sandbelt.
“There’s a fair bit of pride when you hear comments like that from visitors,” he said.
Jeffery is one of only three ground staff at Leongatha though volunteer support among the members is exceptional.
“There are two people that are out every week for a day doing mowing which helps out a lot,” he said. “They keep the rough under control. We have a working bee once a month where we get 10 to 20 [people] out.”
If Leongatha can boast new greens which rival the quality of its fairways, demand for memberships and tee times will grow and just maybe the need for volunteer course maintenance will all but disappear.
FACT FILE
LOCATION: Koonwarra-Inverloch Rd, Leongatha South, Victoria.
CONTACT: (03) 5664 3314.
WEBSITE: www.leongathagolf.com.au
DESIGNERS: Vern Morcom (1956-60); Lukas Michel – Clayton, DeVries, Pont (2023 and ongoing).
PLAYING SURFACES: Bentgrass/poa annua (greens, currently); Santa Ana couch (fairways).
COURSE SUPERINTENDENT: Jim Jeffery.
GREEN FEES: $50 (seven days).
ACCOLADES: Ranked No.60 in Golf Australia magazine’s Top-100 Public Access Courses for 2023.
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