The Great Australian Golf Getaway, Part I: Mornington Peninsula

Within hours of touching down in Melbourne, Australia, for a blowout buddies’ trip, I’d yet to check whether toilets really flush in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere. But I’d verified another law of physics: slices spin in the same Down Under as they do back home.

It was a sun-kissed afternoon, midweek, mid-March, and I’d just missed the middle of a fairway by a mile on the 3rd hole of the North Course at Peninsula Kingswood, a rustic beauty where straying from the short grass can be ruinous for many reasons, not all related to your score. Just before our start, a club representative had treated us to a pre-round speech worthy of Steve Irwin, telling us excitedly about the course and the venomous snakes that reside on it.

“If one of them gets you,” he said, grinning. “You’ve got about an hour.”

Maybe that accounted for my shaky play. Certainly, jet lag was not to blame.

On our 16-hour flight from Los Angeles, my colleagues — Darren, James and Sean — and I had been upgraded to Qantas business class, where the seats lay flat, pajamas were provided, and the time passed in a relative flash. We arrived the next morning at far end of the world, rested and ready to hit the ground running, with Sean, the most skilled of our foursome at driving on the wrong side of the road, piloting the rental car.

Like the most famous Melbourne-area courses — Royal Melbourne, Kingston Heath and Victoria — Peninsula Kingswood is part of the Sandbelt and bears the hallmark features of layouts in the region, with firm, fast turf and steep-faced, sharp-edged bunkers. But the club sits farther south than its siblings at the gateway to the Mornington Peninsula, a boot-shaped protrusion below Melbourne that doubles as a draw for golfers, surfers and nearby city-dwellers on weekend getaways.

“It’s sort of like what Long Island is to Manhattan,” Mike Clayton, the acclaimed golf course architect and Melbourne native, told me.

As we motored south, though, admiring vineyards and bay views, other comparisons came to mind: the Mornington Peninsula was Northern California, minus the congestion; it was Scotland with nicer weather and better wine.

Analogies aside, it was not shabby spot to start our 10-day escape.

Peninsula Kingswood made a sensible first stop in part for its location, just less than an hour’s drive from the airport, but also for its pedigree. Formed by a merger of two clubs (Peninsula and Kingswood) with roots that reached back to the early 1900s, it occupies a rolling, sandy site and is home to two highly regarded courses —the North and the South — both of which were restored in recent years by the Aussie quartet of Clayton, U.S. Open winner Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead.

Of the two layouts, the South is longer, flatter and — based on the course ratings — more difficult, but the North offers a more faithful introduction to Sandbelt golf in the style and scale of its sandy wastes and bunkers, as well as in its heathland vegetation. To say it’s easier than the South doesn’t mean it’s shy on strategic demands.

As our group learned quickly, being out of position brings all kind of non-reptilian problems to the fore (it’s worth noting that snakes, as our Aussie friend made clear in his pre-round pep talk, want even less to do with us than we do with them; just thump the turf with a club whenever you’re ball hawking and if they happen to be near, they’ll stay away). The real issue is angles. The North Course is all about them. A well-placed drive opens up a world of opportunity, while an errant tee ball, even if it finds the fairway, leaves you playing defense on your approach.

No matter the shot, taking dead aim at the flag isn’t often the wise choice. In quintessential Sandbelt fashion, the North Course is a bouncy celebration of the ground game, which is less a game of darts than it is a mogul run. And one of the great pleasures of playing it is anticipating the hops and rolls and trying to execute accordingly. Some randomness applies, of course. The rub of the green can work both ways.

This was apparent throughout our round, but nowhere more than on the par-5 17th hole, where Darren’s blade runner of a layup skipped and skirted before coming to rest in an ideal spot, some 70 yards from the pin. Good breaks are only good if you take advantage of them, and Darren’s next shot was pro-model, a perfect baby wedge that landed on a ridge at the front right of the green, then rolled and curled, as if GPS-guided, into a back-left cup for eagle — a fist-pump moment made even more euphoric by the fact that it was filmed by a drone that Darren had set hovering behind the hole.

This highlight of the round was also a focus of our post-round conversations. With the sun dipping low over Port Phillip Bay, we made the scenic drive through vine-latticed terrain to Pt. Leo Estate, one of many bright lights in a constellation of area wineries, where we sat for a spot-on farm-to-table dinner.

The Mornington Peninsula’s temperate, coastal climate is similar to that of Sonoma County, and the same grape varietals — including pinot noir and chardonnay — thrive in both locales. The cuisine, sustained by the seasonal and local, is reminiscent of California cooking, too. Over a feast of grilled lamb and roast vegetables at Pt. Leo’s glass-walled restaurant, we gazed out at a modern sculpture garden, backed in the distance by the bay, while reliving the day in the smack-talk language in which all golfers are fluent. Then we made our way to our accommodations and got ready to do it again.

Our place of stay was Moonah Links, and our place of play was the Open Course, one of the resort’s two 18-holers. True to its name, it was designed by five-time Open Championship winner Peter Thomson (the Tom Watson of Australia), as a cap tip to the links on which he had so much success. One of the longest layouts in the country, the Open Course, which stretches more than 7,400 yards and has hosted the Australian Open twice, is peppered with riveted pot bunkers, many hidden, links-like, in the folds of the fairways. And though not hard on the water, like most Open rota venues, it plays under the influence of coastal winds, which adds to both the challenge and the entertainment. None of us broke 80 but we all had a blast.

Where the fun might take us next was another matter. The peninsula is loaded with so many courses, we were forced to pick and choose within the two days we’d allotted for this portion of our tour. After some debate, we opted for the National Golf Club, a luxurious retreat where we faced another choice because the National has four courses, including designs by Greg Norman and Tom Doak.

With no way of going wrong, we wound up going with the Old Course, a late-1980s Robert Trent Jones Jr. layout that many architecture nerds regard among the finest efforts of his long career. The routing is a verdant roller coaster, built on a heaving canvas of dunes and tea trees, with daunting looks at fairways that are more forgiving than they appear to be off the tee. Compared to the two rounds we’d already played, this was a more target-y test, with lusher turf and more forced carries, and the adrenaline rush of do-or-die shots was enhanced by the spectacle of the ocean, photobombing in the backdrop.

It called for our attention from high points on the course, and captured it fully on the 7th hole, a short par 3 over a canyon to a green set on a bluff with an infinity of blue extending behind it. After a solid pin-high play and a routine two putt, Sean stood at the green’s edge, taking in the postcard vista, and half-jokingly suggested that we camp out where we were for the rest of the day.

It was not a bad idea, but it was good that we kept going. After 36 hours and nearly three rounds, we’d yet to come across a snake in Australia. But on the very next hole, an uphill par 5, we had our first encounter with a different native species: a troop of kangaroos, lazing and grazing astride the tilted green, as bored by us as we were thrilled by them.

Distracted, I three-jacked. Another bogie and another nugget for the memory banks, with more to come. Two days down, we still had eight to go in and around Melbourne, where my game seemed very similar to what it was back home, but the golf — our group had already come to realize — was unlike anything anywhere else.