Occupying the oldest real estate in Australia—the very point around which Captain
Cook sailed into the harbor to found Botany Bay Colony across the
water—New South
Wales is a rugged test of golf in a rugged setting. The
land is a series of choppy ridges creating some dramatic elevation changes, and
much of the area between holes is covered in bottle brush, a native shrub that
grows as thick as Scottish gorse (though thankfully without the prickly
parts).
Ironically, the most famous hole, the par-3 6th with its tee
on the rocks playing back to the headland that is Australia’s answer to Cypress
Point, is not Alister MacKenzie’s doing—local amateur Eric Apperly fine-tuned the design
in the late 1930s and after the war, and all the short holes are his additions.
Rating: 8 (December 1998)
