Australians, in general, like to travel. If the focus of the developed world can be said to be (historically at least) in Europe and North America, well, Australasia is a long way away from both. And Australia, because of the way it developed as a modern country, tends to breed a particular sort of person: friendly, laid back, optimistic and happy to travel. Almost perfect personality traits, in fact, for careers in golf course architecture!
Bob Harrison is the paterfamilias of the Australian golf design community. He found his career earlier in life, albeit partly by accident.
“Contact with the Australian property development company Lend Lease was my break,” he says. “I studied civil engineering at university, and it was great fun, but I wasn’t really motivated and in my final year asked the professors if I could do my thesis on a golf course project. This wasn’t totally preposterous because golf course projects involve earthworks, drainage, water supply, dams and the like. They agreed, provided I could find someone in the commercial world preparing to develop a golf course project and they were then able to compare what I did with the real thing.
“So, I chased around and found Lend Lease, who were preparing to relocate the golf course at Campbelltown outside of Sydney into their proposed residential development nearby. The then golf course became the site for what is now Campbelltown Hospital. Von Hagge Barnes & Devlin (VBD) had been engaged by Lend Lease and were well-advanced with the design process. Lend Lease needed somebody to work for them on the project management who understood something about golf – and I got the job after graduating. VBD had produced a design which subsequently proved to be far too expensive, and after a year Lend Lease fired them and took a chance with me. So, I ended up with the design of an 18-hole course about a year out of university.”
After working for Lend Lease for a while, Harrison made the move that would define his career. It was the late 1980s, and Greg Norman was the world’s number one golfer. As such, he had a lot of opportunities in the then-booming signature golf design market, so he established his own design firm in 1987. Norman himself was, by that time, based in the USA, but as a son of Australia, his homeland offered many opportunities, so he needed an Australian-based design associate.
“I got very lucky but was also resourceful,” says Harrison. “I got the best job going in the golf industry in Australia when I teamed up with Norman and IMG at the very beginning of Greg Norman Golf Course Design (GNGCD) to do the design in Australia and Asia. My scope included the documentation of the first five courses in the USA before they established the design office in Florida. Norman was at the height of his career and his time was obviously devoted mostly to playing, and based in the Sydney office of IMG, I was fairly remote. I was fortunate to have a fair degree of autonomy.
“The press in Australia gradually began to attribute the design, at least partly, to me. And they began to describe the projects as Norman/Harrison. The most prominent of the Australian writers, Tom Ramsey, went one step further and reversed the order of the names. I suspect that this didn’t sit well in the USA, but that’s just my impression. I had the job for 22 years and I’ll confine my comments to saying that it wasn’t as enjoyable in the latter stages.”
Working in a signature firm has pros and cons for architects. In the final analysis, it is not your business, and not your name on the golf courses, but on the other hand, you tend to be working on big money projects for high profile clients, and that is certainly so for Harrison. In the late 1990s, GNGCD, and therefore he, was commissioned by Australia’s richest man, media mogul Kerry Packer, to design a course at a remote location in inland New South Wales, about four hours’ drive from Sydney.
The course he built, Ellerston, is remarkable for several reasons. It is good enough to be considered a top ten course in golf-rich Australia, it is renowned for its difficulty, and it is one of the hardest-to-access courses anywhere: to play there requires a personal invitation from a member of the Packer family (Kerry died in 2005, four years after the course opened).
“In the first instance they intended to develop a course elsewhere and Kerry Packer had a connection with Norman that led to us being chosen to do the work,” says Harrison. “Eventually Packer moved the project to Ellerston and the instruction was to build a tough course for handicap ten and below. And during the process of design and construction he would always ask me in review meetings, ‘but is it hard enough?’ The interesting thing about this is that I didn’t set out to make individual holes as hard as possible, but the brief made it possible to choose holes that would not fit onto a municipal course, for example, which has to cater for a lot of play by golfers of all standards. There was sort of an artistic freedom that eventually meant that the course could be really interesting and spectacular.”
Ellerston was also indirectly responsible for Harrison being hired for what would turn out to be the job of his life. He had left Norman and started his own firm in 2010, and the year after, late one night, the phone rang. It was Greg Coffey, an Australian, but at the time London-based, hedge fund manager.
“He asked if I would be interested in building a new course on a remote Scottish island. Part-way through this conversation, it suddenly dawned on me that this was probably a friend playing an outrageous prank,” says Harrison. “But an email the next morning confirmed Coffey’s intentions, and I was on Jura for the first time four days later. In the meantime, I told my wife, Colette, that I wasn’t sure if I could do justice to such a remote project, and I’m pleased to report that she insisted I get straight back in touch with Jura and get on with it pronto!
“During that first telephone conversation, Coffey told me that he was planning to build a private golf course and had done some research on Ellerston, which was also private, and read that it had been designed by Greg Norman. He then said that he knew that couldn’t be correct, and that he assumed it must have been me.”
Ardfin was developed as a private course, but the estate, which is centred on the historic Jura House, is now run essentially as an extremely upmarket hotel complex. It is one of the most expensive golf courses to play, anywhere in the world, but you can play it.
Having seen the course in 2015 during construction and knowing Ellerston’s reputation for difficulty, I concluded that Harrison must have an affinity with extremely tough courses. The architect says otherwise. “It was never my intention for the course to be overly difficult to play, and I would very much like to see parts of it made easier for average golfers,” he explains. “My understanding is that this process is well under way, and I’m grateful for that. I’m obviously biased, but I can’t see why Ardfin wouldn’t be ranked in the world’s top 20, but perhaps understand that that might come once the course is a little more user-friendly. It was extremely difficult to build but mind-blowingly spectacular and interesting. And it took 14 concepts before arriving at the final one, because I was determined to squeeze the very best out of what was on offer.
“There were ancient stone walls in the old-world landscape, and some were used to determine the strategy of holes. We built new walls for the same reason. With the cliffs and walls determining strategy there are not many bunkers. They were not needed, and the very difficult ground conditions of peat and rock were another consideration. Sand for greens, tees and bunkers came from Ireland, and the turf for greens and tees from Yorkshire. Despite all these difficulties, the cost of construction was between six and seven million pounds – not the much higher costs nominated in some publications. I visited the site 27 times during the process and it’s my favourite place.”
The increasing popularity of golf in Asia has meant that a lot of Australian golf architects have spent a fair amount of their time travelling across the continent. Harrison’s biggest Asian job, while working for GNGCD, was the Nirwani Bali course, which opened in 1997, and was immediately heralded as one of the very finest courses anywhere in Asia.
“You don’t often get the opportunity to design holes directly along spectacular and beautiful cliffs, but Nirwana Bali offered five holes that had a wonderful interaction with the ocean,” says Harrison. “It took a long time to choose the best arrangement of these holes, and I hope they have strategic interest and variety. I was then determined that the inland holes would not be poor cousins to those on the ocean. We constructed extensive areas of active rice terraces throughout the inland holes to create the illusion that the course had been constructed through them, and to make the holes spectacular to look at and Balinese in flavour. They are properly functioning rice fields and are farmed by the local people. The planting of different areas was staged so that at any one time some sections are nearing harvest, some are wet, and others are green.”
But Nirwani Bali has been closed since 2017. In 2015, Donald Trump licenced his name to the resort, and plans were put together that included a new hotel and associated Trump Tower. The course closed two years later for a revamp, apparently under the auspices of Phil Mickelson (though it is not clear who was actually proposed to do the work). But for whatever reason, the project has not gone ahead, and the course remains shuttered, with no signs of being revived. “When I first heard that the Trumps were planning to blow the course apart and start again, I was horrified,” says Harrison. “I made some attempt to approach them about helping do whatever changes were necessary. That didn’t happen, and I really don’t know what the outcome is – it would be too distressing to follow it up.”
After a long and successful career, Harrison says he still has some goals he would like to fulfil, most notably, building a course in authentic sand dune land. He built the Moonah course at the National Golf Club on the Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne, for Norman: it opened in 2002, and, like a lot of Australia’s top courses, it shares characteristics with links layouts, but is not, however, truly built on linksland.
“Moonah lies in very attractive, rolling sandy country but is not strictly ‘dunes’ land, and I’d very much like to have at least one completed course in the dunes at some stage,” he says. “We’ve got one in perhaps the best dunes country I’ve ever seen on the South Australian coast ready to start construction. But it’s been nine years in the making, and we have done very detailed design including accurate contours in order to gain a very difficult approval, and we’re now just waiting for the opportunity to put it on the ground. The major changes to Newcastle should be starting construction early next year, and we are going to move a number of holes further to the north-east to ‘dunesy’ country closer to the beach. This project also has a lot of appeal. I’m also pleased that Scott Champion, who worked part time with me at GNGCD while doing his landscape degree, is still with me and has worked his way into all aspects of course design.
“Other than that, I’m quite pleased to have had the diversity that my career has offered – from building courses in mountainous country in Asia where the earthwork is on a massive scale, to courses such as The Glades (and four others in Australia) where the site was dead flat and the proposed shape had to be drawn in half-metre contours over the entire property to satisfy the local authority’s flood requirements. It’s been a really interesting ride, and mostly enjoyable, and I’m glad I didn’t trade it for a career with Lend Lease!”
This article first appeared in the January 2025 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.