For eastern and western staters, the charming coastal townships of Wallaroo and Port Hughes, two hours north of Adelaide on the Yorke Peninsula, can be a revelation. Fine food, beaches, fishing, history - and a nine-hole golf course designed by a legend.
Copper Club at The Dunes Port Hughes, in the beach town of Port Hughes on the Yorke Peninsula of South Australia, is like a resort course without a resort.
It has roughly the same infrastructure and volunteer ethos as any Australian bush track – Clare, for instance – but with a quality, nine-hole, 18-flag golf course for its members and guests.
That it's in Port Hughes, with apologies to Port Hughes, is incongruous. Because it's a friendly, public track with a small membership base who play on a top-class, nine-hole route designed by Greg Norman, no less. It's nine holes of fun and wind and sand and Shark.
Going into the course, I had zero preconceptions. It's a good way to go into a course. When it's very good, it's surprising.
The mighty greens all have two flags. There are multiple tee-boxes to present each hole with a different feel. The whole place feels “big” and open.
The Dunes is bordered by homes on the north side, though they’re not “of” the property. On all other sides is farmland and space for the next nine holes, if anyone can find some money to pay Sharky to make it.
Yet it’s plenty good enough as it is. Not even sure it needs another nine. It is a unique and quite cool and fun layout, with a real “Shark” feel: mighty greens; giant, amoeba-shaped bunkers.
How much time the great man spent on the site is negligible. Don’t think he piloted a Bobcat to shift any dirt, but his mark is certainly upon it from an architecture perspective. There is a lot of Shark in it.
And, like our Shark, it has its quirks.
One of the greens - perhaps better described as a green complex – supports four flags. Holes two, four, 11 and 13 share the same tight-cut surface. Right in the middle, a good-sized bunker. Sharky, you quirky devil.
The fairways, on the day I played in the first days of spring, were fine and hard and fast. They didn’t look “pretty”, per se, being several colours ranging from green to fawn, but the actual surface was pure enough. I certainly found an extra 20-metres’ run with several hybrid approaches scooting through greens.
There are good, strong par-4s which require mid-irons in, depending which of the several tee-boxes you would attack from. The wind off the water can be a factor, though the routing is to all points of the compass. Not to labour the point, but it does feel like a “big” golf course, incongruous for a nine-holer and incongruous for one in Port Hughes, two hours out of Adelaide on western coast of the Yorke Peninsula.
The 8th/17th hole, for instance, par four, goes up to a green with two big, steep bunkers left. The day I played, into the wind, it was probably four clubs up the hill. My approach measured 140m, played 170m – difference between 7-iron and 3-hybrid.
I don’t take a lot of divots. The surface is firm. You wouldn’t say spongy. You would say cracking surface. Which is probably a good trick by grounds staff, who include volunteers and retirees, who do their best in the four seasons, one of them as hot as Dubai.
Bottom line, for a small community, it’s an outstanding golf course. Being nearly two hours out of Adelaide, you could call it the bush. Port Hughes and Wallaroo are fishing, boating and beach-enjoying communities, with a rural and dockyard feel, in parts. Many of the homes look like holiday ones.
However, if you lived here, and The Copper Club was your home track, and you played every Wednesday and Saturday with the usual 46 suspects in the winter competitions, you would be wondering what the poor people are doing. The members of modest Ashlar GC, who now play upon Norman’s first design in Sydney, Stonecutters Ridge, could empathise.
We begin the tour in the nearby burgh of Wallaroo and enjoy a taste of the delicious beers and gins of the Bond Store. A storage space for barrels of rum and whiskey in 1865, today it’s a funky little bar, microbrewery and distillery with options for tasting upstairs and down, and where they make several styles of beer that come out on a small cricket bat-shaped bit of wood.
At Coopers Ale House, we dine with views of the marina and North Beach, and tuck into a rib-eye steak of singular goodness. For breakfast it’s The Smelter next door to the Bond Store for a big coffee and scrambled eggs.
And so we’re away upon a two-hour drive to the crackerjack town of Adelaide and into a room with a view of the Adelaide Oval and Torrens River, before we’re out to Gaucho’s Argentinian Restaurant for a mighty steak made the Argentinian way, that being seared magnificently on the outside, soft and pink in the middle, washed down with a Malbec from Mendoza. A man could get used to it, and like Homer Simpson in France, become a gourmand.
To finish our trip, as one might enjoy a cinnamon dish with a sticky dessert wine that’s a heady mix of complexity and decadence, with citrus blossom, fresh grass and marmalade mixing with ripe tropical fruits, we’re off for a round in the competition at The Grange, where the heroes of LIV will descend in February, and which sparked this entire food and golf tour for the ages.
The Grange is tight-cut and fun, and as adjacent to the Sandbelt as there is outside the Sandbelt. Adelaide has four top courses – Royal Adelaide, Glenelg, Kooyonga and The Grange, which has 36 holes, east and west, and upon which our man Norman had an albatross and won the West Lakes Classic in 1976.
I play the West Course with three locals, and greatly enjoy the par-3 12th hole – you may know it as the Party Hole – a 165m beauty with a green that seems more raised than it does when it’s surrounded by posh tents and party people. I make a par, sign off for 35 points, and decide that I will return for some mates and/or wifey – that marinated citrus fish dish and high altitude Riesling will not be enjoyed by itself.
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