I have received much mail from this club insisting that the
design of their 18 holes is entirely Alex Russell’s, laid out a few months after
Dr. Alister MacKenzie left the Antipodes, and I have no real evidence to the contrary.
Yet Yarra Yarra’s par-3 11th hole, with its wicked green, is more reminiscent of
MacKenzie than many of the holes he actually constructed!
Perhaps he just taught his disciples well. The four short
holes at Yarra Yarra are about as good as you could hope to find anywhere, and
the par-4 5th, with a giant bunker-infested knob short left of the green, is one of
my favorite holes in golf. However, the club has traveled in retrograde in
recent years, flattening a couple of the coolest greens and having trouble with the
neighbors over the many right-hand boundaries on the course. In fact, dealing
with O.B. right may have been Russell’s weakness as a designer; Royal Melbourne East has several similar problems.
Rating: 6 (March 1993)
