Victoria Golf Club (Australia)

Favorite Hole

No. 15, par 4, 316 yards

Even among the Melbourne Sandbelt’s many stellar short par 4s, the 15th at Victoria stands out. Its simple design belies the complexity of the problems it creates for the golfer. The hole runs along the top of a ridge at the center of the property, bending slightly to the left. A chain of bunkers cut into the downslope on the left starts about 210 yards from the back tees and 105 yards from the middle of the green. The central question of the hole is how much club to take off the tee. Stronger players might consider anything from 5-iron to driver. The farther up the fairway you play, the more you bring the left bunkers into play.

Conservative plays and inaccurate home-run swings will lead to dicey second shots. If you lay up short of the bunkers, you will likely end up at the bottom of a rise in the fairway, with your view of the green partially blocked. If you take more club but bail out to the right, you may find yourself in scrub and trees, trying to manufacture a running approach that skirts the greenside bunkers front right. And if you go for the green but miss long, your ball will disappear down a vicious runoff.

GREAT GOLF HOLES: Playing Victoria’s 15th with a major champion

As Geoff Ogilvy told me when we played this hole together, this kind of short-par-4 design tempts good players into over-aggression and silly bogeys while giving average players the chance to play along the ground and make par. That’s why the hole is so beguiling, and why it has stood the test of time.

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Overall Thoughts

Victoria Golf Club is comfortably one of the five finest golf courses in the Melbourne Sandbelt. It is a cut below the West Course at Royal Melbourne (as are all but a few courses in the world), but it’s in approximately the same class as Kingston Heath, the East Course at Royal Melbourne, and the North Course at Peninsula Kingswood.* This is just my personal evaluation, but I doubt any knowledgeable Sandbelt golfer would find it terribly off-base. Victoria’s greatness is well known among players in the region.

(*In this case, I’m defining the Melbourne Sandbelt just broadly enough to include Peninsula Kingswood and Long Island, which are located about 30 minutes south of the Victoria-Sandy-Royal Melbourne nexus.)

Yet, internationally, Victoria may be the least famous, least written-about, and least bucket-listed of the top Sandbelt clubs. I think this is because it’s difficult to identify one standout characteristic that makes the course world-class.

Kingston Heath has a striking variety of strategic hole concepts. Royal Melbourne East boasts an astonishing set of Alex Russell greens. Peninsula Kingswood North offers visual splendor not seen elsewhere in the Sandbelt, thanks to its long-range views and OCM’s painterly bunkering. And Royal Melbourne West combines first-rate land with a complete, well-preserved Alister MacKenzie design.

Victoria is not the best at any one thing; it is instead excellent in many different ways. Its land is varied and undulating (but not as consistently great as Royal Melbourne West’s); its strategic design is smart and sound (but not as creative as Kingston Heath’s); its greens are varied and appropriately challenging (but not as exciting as Royal Melbourne East’s); and its visual effects are well presented (but not as immediately pleasing as Peninsula Kingswood North’s). Victoria is the hard-working, well-rounded college applicant competing against a pool of savants.

If this makes Victoria sound dull, my apologies. That’s not the case at all.

The course begins with a zap of eccentricity: a very short par 4, drivable for longer players, on which laying up away from the fairway bunkers leads to the type of pitch shot that no one is prepared to hit fresh out of the car. The next four holes lighten the tension, using calm topography along Victoria’s northern and eastern boundaries (the par-3 fourth, with its gorgeously bunkered, dogbone-shaped green, is a highlight), while Nos. 6-8 work toward the middle of the site. Each hole presents its own variation of the fundamental dilemma of strategic golf: how close are you willing to play to this hazard in order to earn that advantage?

Throughout the front nine, the topography grows gradually more energetic. On the par-5 ninth, the course arrives at its first outstanding landform: a spine that crosses the fairway about 175 yards from the green, making the second shot mostly blind. From there, Victoria plunges into its best terrain: the 10th banks off a ridge and swings through a swale, the 11th travels uphill all the way, the 12th races downhill, the 13th climbs up and over a bulge before ascending again to an elevated green. Following those four consecutive par 4s, the par-3 14th scrambles back to the property’s high point—a natural gathering spot shared by the seventh, 11th, and 16th greens.

The course finishes with four holes that can produce a broad range of scores: the short par-4 15th, profiled above; the tough, uphill par-3 16th,* where those who miss long will be happy to escape with bogey; the long, bending par-5 17th; and the short par-5 18th, which gives strong players a chance at a closing eagle.

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(*Ogilvy said this of the 16th during my recent interview with him: “We all end of up hitting it way short there because of the fear of hitting it over the back. So the firm conditions and all the short grass, it asks a really tough question…. To shoot low scores out here when it’s set up tough, you have to be brave.”)

So Victoria offers a little of everything: different kinds of risk-reward scenarios, different intensities of topography, and different levels of opportunity and difficulty. It’s a five-tool player, to use an analogy that would fly over the heads of most Melburnians.

But if one of Victoria’s “tools” is slightly sharper than the others, it’s the turf and native vegetation. The fairways and greens play firm and true, and the areas just off the playing surfaces are pleasantly scraggly without being overgrown. On the lovely par-3 seventh hole in the particular, the grounds crew has been successful in cultivating the type of heathland vegetation that most Sandbelt clubs have lost. Victoria would still benefit from additional tree management—especially targeting the invasive, golf-hostile tea tree—but in general, the club’s restoration and maintenance work over the past three decades has paid off handsomely.

A Melbourne golf itinerary fills up quickly. Trust me, I know. But no trip to the Sandbelt is complete without a visit to Victoria Golf Club—and considering what else is on offer in the area, that’s saying something.

2 Eggs

(How We Rate Courses)

Victoria is a prototypical two-Egger. It doesn’t quite reach the thrilling heights necessary for three-Egg status, but it distinguishes itself more than enough across our criteria of land, design, and presentation to escape the one-Egg category.

Course Tour

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