Adam Lawrence reports on a visit to the forthcoming second course at Barnbougle Dunes in Tasmania.

Following up a smash hit is never easy, and the design team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw have their hands full in the dunes of Tasmania.

Tom Doak and Mike Clayton’s Barnbougle Dunes course was acclaimed as among the best to open anywhere in the world in the last few decades, and the Coore team has equally good land to work with. Just to add extra pressure, co-developer Mike Keiser has gone on record as saying he believes the Lost Farm course could be the best built since Augusta National!

GCA toured the site yesterday, with Coore and Crenshaw shaper Keith Rhebb, in a howling gale. Sand was whipping around in the wind, and the irrigation system – turned up to the max in an attempt to keep shaped areas intact – was facing an uphill battle.

But the course is already shining through. Holes such as the par three fourth, Sally’s Point, and the run from the thirteenth home, will be a stunning golf experience. The par three thirteenth, built as an extra hole because Keiser disliked the uphill one-shot seventeenth (which is also awesome) is already beautiful. The par four fourteenth, a shortish dogleg to the right from a tee high in the dunes, playing straight towards the Bass Strait, might be the pick of the bunch. But it will be a hard-fought victory if so.

A full article on the Lost Farm development will appear in issue 19 of Golf Course Architecture, to be published in January.