It’s almost a century since Alister MacKenzie sailed to Melbourne, Australia, transformed the city’s golf courses, and established the country’s reputation as a serious golfing nation. It was his actions that led to the city joining New York, Philadelphia and London as one of the world’s four greatest cities for golf course architecture.

Without MacKenzie, the situation would have been akin to that in South Africa. If you doubt that statement, try to find anything there that matches the ten best courses in Melbourne. Alternatively, look where he didn’t visit and study the poor quality of architecture there.

There is now more first-class architecture within an hour’s drive of Royal Melbourne than the rest of Australia combined, a fact underscoring the importance of MacKenzie’s contribution in partnership with Alex Russell, his local design collaborator, and Mick Morcom, the Royal Melbourne superintendent who influenced and built the world-renowned sandbelt bunkers at Royal Melbourne, Kingston Heath and Victoria.

After MacKenzie sailed on to the United States in 1927 to take up his commissions at Cypress Point, Crystal Downs and Augusta National, one of the biggest decisions local committees had to make was how to vegetate their new courses and then manage that vegetation long into the future. Bear in mind that, at that time, sites such as Yarra Yarra and Metropolitan were virtually treeless.

Not to put too fine a point on it, and despite their best intentions, most made a mess of it. Preferring quick fixes, they planted fast-growing trees mixed with attractive native (but not indigenous) flora. In retrospect, it’s easy to see the mistakes this short-sightedness caused, but understanding the extent of those errors at that time is critical when deciding where courses should go from here.

There was almost no reverence for indigenous eucalypts. Only Peninsula’s then-unloved North course, which was completed in the mid-1960s, championed the use of existing coastal manna gums. Likely no one at the club thought much of the vegetation on its second course as few had any affection for it and, as a consequence, little interest in ‘improving’ it.

Committees seeking ‘variety’ imported ‘natives’ from all over Australia no matter how inappropriate they were in Melbourne. They planted too many trees too close to each other with the inevitable result that few had the space to develop to their full potential. A common argument supporting this haphazard approach is that mass planting created hole-by-hole isolation; some members have a deep affection for the result and crave not being able to see any other hole save for the one they are on. One wonders why this is the case when almost every top 100 course in the world champions long views across the course.

Metropolitan imported red flowering gums (Corymbia ficifolia) from the southwest of Western Australia, a result of an existing tree outside what became the clubhouse. That one famous tree, which was finally removed in 2024 having stood there for more than 150 years, was the exception proving the rule, and most of them planted across the course are dismal imitations of the one that became the club’s logo.

It’s always a mistake to move trees from an environment to which they’ve adapted over many thousands of years and expect them to thrive and feel part of the environment. Ask any member if their course should ‘feel natural’ and you’ll get 100 per cent affirmation (and remember that it’s all but impossible to get members to agree on anything). Despite that, they have little understanding or interest in the fact there is nothing guaranteed to make a course feel more unnatural than planting it out with non-indigenous vegetation.

Starting with Kingston Heath in the mid-1980s, many sandbelt courses have been restored and rejuvenated by architects who understood that their best versions were in the decade after their completion, long before a series of committees made unwise choices that lacked a long view often fuelled by personal likes rather than professional advice. Almost without exception, these initial alterations were unnecessary – gratuitous even – and took away much of what MacKenzie, Russell, Morcom and his son (Vern, Spring Valley), Sam Berriman (Huntingdale), J.B. Mackenzie (Metropolitan), J.D.A. Scott (Woodlands), and Charles Lane and Sam Bennett (Commonwealth) had envisaged and left.

Commonwealth lost its great par-three seventh hole. Yarra Yarra blew up Russell’s amazing sixth and eighth greens. Metropolitan’s lack of appreciation for the greatness of its ‘lost eight holes’ on the back nine cost it plenty as its new holes on poorer land and soil never succeeded in matching the quality of what had been lost. Huntingdale set off down a wretched path to make the golf course more difficult and, post-World War II, Victoria and Kingston Heath both filled in bunkers and planted poorly chosen and badly positioned trees.

At Victoria, after Jack Nicklaus hit a big hook on to the far side of the eleventh fairway then holed an incredibly difficult pitch for eagle, a Corymbia maculata from New South Wales appeared to the left of the par-four fifteenth green. “No one is ever going to do that again,” was the secretary’s curious response to that one shot. It would have been better if he’d installed a plaque but, then again, Nicklaus in 1964 wasn’t the Nicklaus he was soon to become.

It should be pointed out that Royal Melbourne largely avoided the pitfall of thinking it could improve on the great architecture MacKenzie left behind. The two significant changes made to the West course – building a new seventh hole and moving the twelfth green to the left – were triumphant decisions.

Given the Sandbelt has never been in better architectural form, where should it be headed and what will it look like long into the future? It’s clear that the long-term replanting of these courses should highlight indigenous coastal manna gums which grow round and squat to combat the constant battering of the coastal winds coming off the bay. The definition of the ideal combination of gums and heathlands is the North course at Peninsula.

This doesn’t mean clubs should tear out all of their trees. Rather, responsible, well-administered clubs should adopt a 30 to 50-year vision of what their courses will look like and proceed accordingly. They won’t be dissuaded by what MacKenzie described as recalcitrant members with ‘a particular affection for the mud-heap on which they play’ and who are opposed to all and any change. It’s better to move on without their consent and remember support for the 1980s alterations to Kingston Heath, which transformed the course and catapulted it into the world’s top 30, was far from universal.

Adopting the principle of only using indigenous trees makes a committee’s decisions very simple. The second critical element is the promotion of heathland plants which add much to the texture, look and feel of the golf course, not to mention their environmental value. The area in front of the seventh tee at Victoria is the finest example of heathland planting on the Sandbelt.

Formerly smothered in Ti trees – a plant Peter Thomson described in the mid-1980s as a “creeping weed” – which were unmanaged for many years, the area was rejuvenated by long-time superintendent Ian Todd who removed them and allowed beautiful little heathland plants to re-establish and flourish.

Richard Forsyth, Royal Melbourne’s current superintendent, is promoting heathland plantings with great success but not without opposition from those who think Ti tree has a place on the Sandbelt. Thomson was right when he targeted the plant. Its elimination and replacement is a critical part of the course’s enhancement. Sooner rather than later, clubs will come to recognise that the condition of their golf courses is not simply defined by the state of their playing surfaces. Rather, the true definition of the condition of any golf course is the state of everything inside the boundary fences. Managing vegetation – including removing, planting and replanting – is an important part of the superintendent’s job, one too often neglected because staff numbers and budgets dictate the prioritising of playing surfaces. The problem with that thinking is that the longer vegetation management is neglected, the more overwhelming the task of ‘fixing’ it becomes. Too often, the proverbial can is kicked down the road.

It is also reasonable to assume that those with no attachment to or affection for the game will at some point be arguing that golf courses take up too much space, are bad for the environment, and should be repurposed as houses or public land. Were golf courses to single-handedly become the sole preserves of indigenous vegetation in the city, promoting such species would make the ‘anti-golf’ attacks much less potent.

The more time I spend in Europe and the US with my colleagues at CDP, the more I realise that derivatives of this argument for the long-term maintenance of the Sandbelt are no less valid in the world’s other great centres of golf course architecture.

Mike Clayton is a golf architect and partner at Clayton, DeVries & Pont.