The Dunes Golf Links (The Dunes)

The links course at the Dunes runs through, as the name suggests, sand dunes a few hundred metres from the Mornington Peninsula shore. The nearest towns are Blairgowrie, Rosebud and Sorrento at the very tips of the southernmost claw of the Peninsula.

The architect, Tony Cashmore, has fulfilled his brief of creating a championship style course that is suitable for public access play. It is neither too long, too narrow or too arduous to put off the casual player and yet it is crunchy enough to tempt back the single handicapper.

Since The Dunes’ 1997 completion, other links courses of comparable merit have been completed in Australia. Kennedy Bay near Perth, Barnbougle Dunes on the north coast of Tasmania and the Moonah at The National are all strong contenders for the title of the best new links course in Australia.

The two nines of The Dunes Golf Links describe concentric clockwise loops so there is plenty of variation in angle of breezes to be played. The accent is very much on novelty and variation so the golfer will be asked to perform many direction changes, cope with side hill lies and fire to hill top greens.

The par threes for example are very different to each other: The 124-metre 3rd is very exposed to the breeze and plays to a long kidney shaped green with a pronounced back tier. The 6th is a very long downhiller where the best strategy is probably to land short, the 160-metre 13th calls for precise clubbing to hold a fairly narrow and well bunkered surface with a distinct frontal slope, finally the 179-metre 17th is in the spirit of the Sandbelt and would not look out of place at Kingston Heath: a raised complex, well bunkered green structure that calls for a firm spank into the prevailing breeze.

My favourite of these is the 6th, certainly very traditional Scottish in its conception and unusual for the fact that it calls for a running shot and the best approach is not always directly for the flag. The water hazard at the back, in my view, deals a harsh penalty.

The above passage is a brief edited extract from The Finest Golf Courses of Asia and Australasia by James Spence. Reproduced with kind permission.