Yarrawonga Mulwala (Lake)

With a total of 45 holes available for play here, it might well be that Yarrwonga Mulwala Golf Club Resort is the biggest public access golf complex in all of Australia. Situated a 3-hour drive north of Melbourne on the Murray River, the club operates two 18-hole courses, the Murray and Lake, and a 9-hole executive track.

Golf in the twin towns of Yarrawonga in Victoria and Mulwala in New South Wales goes back to 1886, when a 3-hole course was in play in the centre of Yarrawonga. Founded in 1897, Yarrawonga Golf Club was located at the local racetrack before moving across the Murray River to a dairy farm outside Mulwala in 1923.

The club’s inaugural 9-hole course was expanded to eighteen holes in 1940 before a further one hundred acres were acquired in 1953, allowing the club to plan a new 27-hole set-up. Vern Morcom was contacted initially to design a revised layout but the job fell to Sam Berriman, the curator at Huntingdale.

The new course opened for play on 26 June 1959. Twenty years later, plans for a third nine, designed by Peter Thomson and Mike Wolveridge, were accepted and the new Gold nine opened on 12 July 1981, with the older 18-hole Berriman course renamed the Blue and Red nines.

More ground was obtained to the west of the property, leading to the construction of the Murray course, which Thomson and Wolveridge fashioned, and this opened on 29 November 1986. Three holes on the Blue nine were lost to the Murray and the other six holes were revamped as a short executive nine, with the Red and Gold nines becoming the Lake course.

Yarrawonga & Border Golf Club – as the club had been renamed – was retitled again as Yarrawonga Mulwala Golf Club Resort in 2011.