Australia’s Top 100 golf courses: Australian Golf Digest

The Royal Melbourne composite course was traditionally used in lists of Australia’s best golf courses. But despite now being split into its individual east and west golf courses, it has managed to still be ranked highly. The Royal Melbourne West layout has been ranked as Australia’s best golf course and Royal Melbourne East was ranked eighth according to Australian Golf Digest’s 2012 list.

The 2012 Top-10 according to Australian Golf Digest.

Five of the top 10 courses are in the sandbelt region of Melbourne, and I do love the fact that most of these are relatively short golf courses.

Only a month ago, Golf Australia magazine released their own list of Australia’s Top-100 golf courses and it too ranked Royal Melbourne West as Australia’s best golf course. The two lists side-by-side make for an interesting comparison.

Most notably, Golf Australia chose not to include Ellerston Golf Course in its list. Ellerston is the golf course that Kerry Packer built and one could argue that most golfers have more chance of playing Augusta National than Ellerston. Interestingly though, Australian Golf Digest have ranked at as Australia’s third best golf course.

I’ll have more to say on the merits of these lists over the coming weeks.