I promised earlier not to forget my camera again. I’m pleased to say that I didn’t for my visit to the National Golf Club. Sadly, however, the above (taken as I approached the club) is the only photo I have as the battery packed up on the first fairway. The club has a pretty good website and anyone wanting to see pictures can see them here.
National has four courses, three (the Old, Moonah and Ocean) at the Cape Schank site where I was. I was playing with Peter and his wife Sandi and Charles and we were going to play the Moonah, designed by Greg Norman in the morning and the Old, by Robert Trent Jones Jnr in the afternoon. The forecast was for temperatures in the high 30s with strong winds and a possibility of a thunderstorm.
I hadn’t played Greg Norman course before and it’s fair to say that his stock is not high amongst those I talk about golf courses with. The only RTJ Jnr course I had previously played is at Palmares in the Algarve and I really like Palmares a lot.
As we set off on the Moonah the strong winds bit of the forecast had materialised, though the temperatures has not. I’m not a long hitter but I don’t think I’ve ever hit a 5 iron to a flag 130 yards away before. I liked the Moonah more than I expected. It has some slightly forced quirk (a windmill in the middle of a fairway, anyone?) but it’s on excellent land and that land has been used pretty well. We lost a few balls but it was surprisingly playable in the wind. The suggestion I had heard is that all three courses at the Cape Schank site were difficult but that the Moonah was the most playable of the three and I think that is fair.
After lunch we ventured out again and it became clear immediately that the forecast heat had now arrived. I had walked with a trolley in the morning and we had planned to ride carts in the afternoon. Charles and I decided, however, that we would walk again. I dispensed with the trolley, which just wasn’t working with my lightweight bag. I had popped back to the pro-shop to get a drink when Charles saw a tiger snake cross the cart path approaching the first, which he duly reported. There had been several recent reports of snakes at National. There are a couple of my balls out there that I’d normally have looked just a bit harder for. Poisonous snakes may well encourage a speedy round!
The Old Course is on hillier, higher ground than the Moonah. In fact, in may ways, it is a similar piece of land to the other RTJ course I have played at Palmares. Like Palmares the site offers some simply stunning views of the ocean and the peninsula. As a course, the Old just didn’t really work for me. There are some really good holes (the 2nd has magnificent views but, more importantly, uses the contours to make for a tough but interesting hole) but some really poor ones (the 3rd may well be a real challenge to the long, low single figure golfer, to someone like me and therefore for most golfers, it’s a hole where I’m never going to go for the green in two, despite it being reachable and where I’m going to take pot luck on a lay up to a shallow ledge). The order the holes are played in changed a few years ago when the new clubhouse was built, which means the course doesn’t quite flow as it should, with some of the hardest holes, presumably intended as a testing finish, coming early in the round. I actually played pretty well on the Old, being better than handicap most of the way round, I just didn’t enjoy the course nearly as much as the morning. It seems to me that the Old doesn’t use its land as well as RTJ did later at Palmares, a much more exhilarating, less threatening set up. The round was very slow and we had a couple of long waits for groups in front of us. As Doak showed at SAB, a course can be made difficult to score on without beating up the average golfer or taking forever to play.
More than the difficulty, though, it strikes me that there was nothing distinctive about the course. If it had been on the Costa del Sol or the Algarve it would be one of the better but perhaps not the best courses there. Nothing about the Old or its style told me I was in Australia. If I was a member here I’d be spending most of my time on the Moonah, I think. Sadly, having hit our drives on the 17th the siren sounded as the threatened electrical storm arrived, so we didn’t get to finish the last couple of holes.
Finally, that new clubhouse. I have commented before on the tendency for Australian clubs to build enormous clubhouses. I had been told to expect National’s to exceed expectations. It is huge. There’s a two story underground car park and a really well appointed clubhouse. It’s difficult, though, I think, for that size of building to really feel like a club. I think it’s better to err on the small side, so that when busy a clubhouse feels full, than have a building feel empty most of the time. The high ceilings don’t help give it any feeling of intimacy. Presumably clubs here see these monolithic buildings as an attraction to members. I can’t help wondering whether they really are, or whether any club is actually a better club for having a bigger clubhouse than its neighbour.
We enjoyed a drink after our game and conversation inevitably turned to Trump and Brexit. Charles (a psychologist from Washington State) and I agreed to catch up in the UK in future (he’s a member at Ballyliffin as well as the National) and then I headed west to Portsea, where I was staying the night.
A Golfing Sabbatical in Australia 