COURSE REVIEW: THE KOORALBYN VALLEY NATIONAL GC
GOLF COURSE
One of Australia’s most challenging courses also happens to be a beautiful place to play.
Lying within the beautiful and tranquil surrounds of the Queensland bush, is one of this country’s sternest golfing tests. WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY BRENDAN JAMES
The grandfather of Australian golf, the late great Norman von Nida, didn’t need much convincing the first time he laid eyes on Kooralbyn’s championship course when it opened for play in October 1979.
“There should be one like this in Heaven,” he said glowingly.
Nestled in Kooralbyn Valley in Queensland’s picturesque Scenic Rim – just over an hour’s drive south west of Brisbane and west of the Gold Coast – it o ers a layout like few in Australia. It is set against the magnificent backdrop of the MacPherson
Ranges, with clear country air and stunning sunrises and sunsets over the valley. The course aside, von Nida was astute in his observation. It is a beautiful setting for golf.
Kooralbyn is Australia’s first golf resort, having been built in the late 1970s by lawyer Sir Arthur George, then President of the Australian Soccer Federation, and transport mogul Sir Peter Abeles. Abeles enlisted awardwinning architect Harry Seidler to advise on the resort accommodation buildings as well as designing the Italian village-inspired ‘Hillside’ housing, which now overlook the 1st fairway.
The Kooralbyn course was designed by Desmond Muirhead, an American-based Englishman, who was recognised as the most creative golf course designer in the game throughout the 1970s.
The Cambridge University graduate created more than 80 courses worldwide during his career including the Tournament Course at Mission Hills Country Club – where the
LPGA’s first major is played annually – and he worked alongside Jack Nicklaus to produce Muirfield Village, home to The Memorial Tournament. His work on these two highlyrated American layouts put him in high demand, which led to his appointment to design Kooralbyn.
Like von Nida, Muirhead was smitten with the location from his first visit.
Muirhead was joined on-site in 1977 by American designer and shaper Fred Bolton, who was also overseeing Nicklaus’ reconstruction of The Australian Golf Club in Sydney. Nicklaus apparently suggested to Muirhead that Bolton was the ideal man to help bring his Kooralbyn creation to life.
Muirhead and Bolton were inspired by
THIS IS THE MOST PERFECT SITE I HAVE EVER WORKED WITH.
– COURSE DESIGNER, DESMOND MUIRHEAD
their surrounds and created a layout of terrific playing quality and great scenic appeal. “This is,” Muirhead said on completion, “the most perfect site I have ever worked with.”
His creation became one of Australia’s most popular golf destinations during the 1980s and 90s. The great von Nida took up residence as Kooralbyn’s first teaching professional and Greg Norman was the resort’s touring pro. The Shark used the layout to fine-tune his game whenever he returned to Australia to play the local Tour.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, it was the home course for Adam Scott, Jason Day and Steven Bowditch, who were all part of the golf program at nearby The Kooralbyn International School.
During that time, the resort changed owners several times. Sadly, the resort was a victim of the Global Financial Crisis and its then New Zealand owner closed the doors in 2008. The resort remained closed for five years before Brisbane-based developer Peter Huang purchased the rundown resort. It took another three years of significant financial and labour investment in the resort and course before golf was once again being played at Kooralbyn.
I visited the course shortly before it reopened in 2016. During its closure, many of the playing surfaces had been overrun with chest-high scrub and weeds, and had to be slashed before any rebuilding work could be done. Having learned this during my visit, I was impressed with the work that had been completed to bring Kooralbyn back to life. The bunkers had been reshaped, all the greens were rebuilt and a new irrigation system installed.
Today, as a result, with its high-wooded hills, tree-lined gullies and vast lakes and lagoons, Muirhead’s course remains a picture of serenity.
That illusion does not last long once you get to grips with the challenging layout. Yet it has the indefinable something, no matter how tough the contest, which makes you want to go back again and again.
The name ‘Kooralbyn’ is indigenous for “land of the copperhead snake” and while there aren’t too many of them about these days, it is the sort of course, which, as the name implies,
can strike suddenly at almost any time.
From that name derivation, Kooralbyn launched in 1984 the famed Copperhead Challenge – a weekly competition pitting players against the course’s most difficult set-up with tees off the tips and flags tucked behind hazards. Such is the difficulty of the challenge, it is estimated only two percent of the hundreds of thousands of golfers who have teed up in the event’s history have broken their handicap (which earns every player who does, a dozen golf balls).
For a course with a scratch rating of 76 (four shots over its par of 72 off the tips), Kooralbyn, surprisingly, has only 54 bunkers spread throughout the 6,471-metre trek. A dozen or so have been added since Muirhead signed off on the course.
After a straightforward opening hole, the rest of the outward nine winds through a series of valleys where dogleg fairways demand accurate driving and plateau greens
WHILE THE INVESTMENT INTO THE COURSE IN RECENT YEARS HAS BEEN SIGNIFICANT, IT WAS ALWAYS GOING TO BE A LONG ROAD BACK, IN TERMS OF CONDITIONING, TO RECAPTURING ITS GLORY DAYS.
require precise approaches.
A gradual climb through valleys on the par-4 3rd and short par-5 4th, leads you to the top of a ridge and a short walk to the 5th tee and the most famous of Muirhead’s holes at Kooralbyn. Forget the fact that it is a par-3 of 220 metres (from the tips). The tee is plateaued atop of the aforementioned ridge and the green, with a bunker left and right, lies some 35 metres below. Design-wise it’s a simple creation but the joy here comes with hitting your tee shot up into the beautiful tree-covered backdrop and watching it hang there before falling back to earth, hopefully, onto the green.
One of my favourites at Kooralbyn is the 6th hole – a 379-metre par-4, known as ‘Snake Gully’. The drive here is uncomplicated but it needs to be long enough to give you a view of the green, which is 45 degrees right from the centre of the fairway and across a water and scrub-filled gully (hence the name). For right
handers it is a daunting shot because there is an ever-so slight camber in the fairway that could leave you playing a long shot with the ball below your feet.
The inward nine is less confined but the temptation to open up the shoulders a little more is dampened by lots of water hazards. In fact, the par-3 14th hole is the only hole in the last six of the round where water doesn’t play a significant role.
Kooralbyn’s hardest o ering is the 387-metre par-4 15th hole, known as Twin Lakes. As you can imagine, there are two lakes that come into play right in your direct sight line from tee to green. Picture this … if there were no lakes, the fairway in front would be nearly 60 metres wide. Now, dig out two lakes right up the middle of the fairway, leaving you two narrow routes – left or right of the hazards – to the green. Birdies here are as rare as hen’s teeth.
If you managed to stay dry on 15, you still have another real chance to o er a ball to the Golfing Gods at the 182-metre (from the back markers) par-3 17th. It’s an all or nothing tee shot over a lake to find the green, which is guarded by four bunkers. If you choose an extra club to make the carry, you will likely find one of the back bunkers, leaving the daunting prospect of hitting a recovery shot out of the sand back towards the water. It’s a heart-racing prospect, which is a regular occurrence during a round here.
While the investment into the course in recent years has been substantial, it was always going to be a long road back, in terms of conditioning, to recapture its glory days. Some rough edges remain, but the playing surfaces have improved significantly in the past five years.
* At the time of going to press, we learned Kooralbyn – the entire resort and golf course – was on the market to be sold by owner, Peter Huang. Watch this space.