KAMERUKA The search for a lost Australian golf course

A couple of golf addicts go in search of a lost Australian golf course.

We also shared this down our Twitter feed as we think it’s a fabulous, unique Australian golf story published in last month’s Golf Australia Magazine.

There is something sad, a little eerie but incredibly exciting about stepping foot on an abandoned golf course. Imagining the shots played, making out the course routing – it is a surreal experience. Often the story behind its demise is as interesting as the course itself.

Golf Australia’s Adrian Logue wrote Finding Kameruka – a lost golf course on the south coast of NSW, now under pasture, which has some links back to St. Andrews.

Logue and golf course designer Harley Kruse go in search of the site – jumping a few farm fences in order to do so.

Could it be that one of that era’s most famous golfing families had established a beachhead in Australia years before the celebrated visit of Dr Alister MacKenzie?

Could Kameruka be to Australia what Askernish is to Scotland? A lost course with the pedigree of a legendary St. Andrews golfing family?

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Harley had been tipped off while consulting on a course in a nearby town. It turns out, yes, there was an abandoned course on the estate – it wasn’t a mystery to the locals – they fondly recalled a humble old nine-holer with sand-scrape greens and minimal maintenance.

They say it had once had grass greens and was considered a course of some note but its gradual decline was complete in the early 2000s when its broken-down condition just wasn’t viable anymore and people stopped going there to play golf.

It’s a wonderful read – check out the full article over at Golf Australia Magazine.