Someone should produce a coffeetable book on Australia's bush courses. Here, for example, is Coober Pedy's answer to St Andrews:
PGA pro Craig Hocknull demonstrates some other bush-bred talents:
An old joke says that holding a one iron one above your head will always keep you safe in a lightning storm. Not even God can hit a one iron, you see. Hocknull can not only swing one, he can pick off cans dangling on strings. Remarkable.
There used to be a yarn years ago about a Top End gold course some of the squattocracy used to maintain out in the sticks.
ReplyDeleteIf your ball went too near a croc, you were allowed to play the ball without penalty if you could plug the reptile without disturbing the ball.
In this day and age of wildlife conservation, Top Enders would probably replace crococide with temporary throttling.
Reminds me of the time 20 years ago when I had a round at Boort Golf Course. Money in the honesty box, sandscrape greens and we had the whole course to ourselves.
ReplyDeleteI was in Boort visiting friends about 15 years ago and it seemed everything in the town was run by a bloke called Frank. He was the mayor, and CoC president, and secretary of the trotting track and probably the golf club, too. Must have heard his name invoked at least a dozen times. It's a nice little town. Good pub, if memory serves.
DeletePlayed the sand at Windorah in 1995 and night golf at Hughenden in 1994. Hughenden was cooler.
ReplyDeleteThere used to be a par-3 night golf course beside Albert Park lake. Putter and a wedge was all you needed. I think it was paved over when the Grand Prix moved in.
DeleteNo doubt about it, reading this blog is having a civilising effect on old Teach...
DeleteBit of a wanker.....
ReplyDeleteRoos are not a game animal, "hunting for kangaroos in the outback" is illegal.
Shooting is legal with a pest control permit....done via spotlight.
No hunting involved.
Fom my experience,there's nothing quaint about playing a course with oiled "greens". I've had a few rounds at Collarenebri and to call the greens slow, would be like saying putting in molasses was quick!
ReplyDeleteI spent a few days in Beechworth, where the Rufous Bird was looking for the grave of an ancestor who died during the gold rush. They have sand greens and yes, they were slow. But their worst deficiency is that they are always flat, otherwise the sand slumps. It was a challenging course, as I recall -- narrow fairways, lots of overhanging trees on some holes. And lots of bits of dead rabbit.
DeletePs,mr bunyip... Can't we rid ourselves of the bloody anoyying random code that must be deciphered each time one tries to post?
ReplyDeleteSorry, LeftRightOut, but that is built into the blogging software and there is no way, so far as I know, to get rid of it. Mind you, it does serve a purpose. You'd be surprised at the volume of spam comments that come in, and those curly are the best way to keep them out.
DeleteSorry for the annoyance, but even if this site were to move from its Blooigger host, there would still be something similar.
Just keep hitting edit and each time you get another series of annoying letters to interpret. Eventually you get a set that you can decipher. Sometimes you get the bonus of an interesting-sounding new word which you can put to good use somewhere and perhaps share. A while ago a little book called The Meaning of Lif came out. It utilized strange English placenames in such a manner as above, appointing these names to concepts where they would be useful, such as 'the fear of doing too few potatos' (an Irish malady, from which I now suffer). Currently, I am looking for a good word to express 'Lizzie's way of stacking the dishwasher is best' and short way of saying 'please put that bloody bedside light out and go to sleep' without fully waking myself up. After all, why let all that robotic creativity go to waste when there are so many helpful ways in which to apply it?
DeleteHere we are already: the one decipherable word is 'esnota'. I can grunt that even when almost comatose.
In the 1950s on Norfolk Island, golfers shared the course with a dairy herd. The greens were fenced to keep the cows off the putting surface. Dunno what the rules allowed if you bounced your ball off a bovine.
ReplyDeleteYou've brought to mind a comment by a laconic codger a few weeks back that fair busted a gut. The pub-TAB coverage was on a daylight trots race in rustic NZ. The midfield was populated with freshly-shorn sheep which the cameras hovered over while the square-gaiters field lined up. "Ah, the ladies' pavilion,'' the oldtimer opined.
DeleteBroken Hill has a fine course.
ReplyDeletePlayed the 13th and 14th back in 1987 now the club has reciprocal rights at St Andrews need to join the club.
ReplyDeleteThe cricket ground at outback White Cliffs is named after the town's most famous son - Bill O'Reilly. It's all rock and sand and seems an awful contradictory nursery patch for one of Australia's greatest tweekers.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed watching all the golf tragics come over that cute arched bridge at St. Andrews and plug the little hole on the 18th when in Scotland recently. Successful players exalted in a raised-club rain-dance of joy. Every golfer's expensive moment of glory, Prof? At the other end of the golfing spectrum, saw a fight break out on a sand and spinifex course in a mining town in WA some years back, requiring Tommy the Town Tamer to be called in to make arrests. It's said to be an infuriating game ...
ReplyDelete