Time and space put golf in the rough

Declining membership is feeding fears local governments will devour golf courses in a perfect storm that threatens to extinguish the game.

Ringwood Golf Club members, left to right, Bryan Condon, Gordon East, Alan Nelsen and Glenn Haslam on the green. Ringwood is Melbourne's largest club but faces an uncertain future. Picture: Paul Jeffers

Declining membership is feeding fears local governments will devour golf courses and destroy clubs in a perfect storm that threatens to extinguish the game across large areas of our cities.

Membership at golf clubs has been declining since before the millennium, peaking in 1998 at 500,000 members nationally, that’s despite Australia’s population growing by almost five million in that time.

Golf also has a gender problem. Women only make up 21.1 per cent of members, 77,294, a number which Golf Australia general manager David Gallichio says has been declining since the 1970s.

“It was a 65-35 per cent split then, now it’s 21,” he said. “The fact is that clubs still host female-only competitions predominantly through the week.”

Gallichio said golf was facing a series of issues: people were busier, less inclined to take up memberships, and councils looked at golf courses as easy answers for parkland.

“Golf is not immune to the trend that society is tracking towards a non-organised and casual participation, that’s especially apparent on the female side,” he said.

However, this decline in memberships and sales has seen an inverse increase in social golf, up 2.3 per cent over the past five years, but many in the industry say the increase is not enough to make up for the memberships that keep clubs trucking along.

Australia is a nation of lapsed golfers, with countless bags and clubs gathering dust in sheds.

Much of the land set aside for golf in cities is owned and leased by councils to clubs. But councils are seeing the decline of the sport as a way to claw back land by cancelling leases and returning them to parkland.

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The nine-hole Elsternwick Golf Course, in Melbourne’s inner-south, was shut in 2018 by Bayside City Council. The public course and club had occupied the site since 1925.

“Councils are looking at land, they’re looking at how they can best utilise their assets,” Gallichio said. “Councils want what golf clubs want, space and facilities. The reality is you need golf courses to play golf.”

It’s not just councils getting in on the act. Eastern Golf Club in Melbourne’s Doncaster Hill, opened by prime minister Stanley Bruce, operated on the site for 85 years but has sold up and moved to the Yarra Valley, making way for huge housing developer Mirvac.

Most golf is played on an 18-hole course, but many councils are looking to slim down public courses to nine or phase them out altogether.

Plans have been floated to replace half of the large Wallacia Golf Club in Sydney’s west with a cemetery in a move strongly opposed by local members.

The Albert Park Golf Course in Melbourne is also under threat, with plans floated and then shelved to cut the grand course down to nine holes.

Professional golfer Nick O’Hearn said nine-hole courses may be the answer for clubs struggling to grab players.

“On the weekend, getting four, five, six hours’ play is getting harder and harder,” he said.

O’Hearn said plans to shrink courses did not spell doom.

“I grew up on a nine-hole golf course, I just go round twice if you want to make it 18,” he said.

“I think maybe the traditionalists are thinking of the tradition of the game, it’s always been 18 holes in the beginning.”

Ringwood Golf Club in the east of Melbourne is facing plans by Maroondah Council to pull the course back from 18 to 12 holes.

Alan Nelsen, a golfer at Ringwood, is campaigning hard against the plans which he says will dismember the club. He says the club is prospering as local residents reach peak golf-playing ages.

“Ringwood is one of Victoria’s busiest golf clubs, Ringwood has 80,000 rounds of golf played. The average seems to be 50,000-plus for most 18-hole courses,” he said.

“So when you want to play you pay $25, that’s very suitable for retirees on fixed incomes.”

Nelsen said the club had made a tidy $2m profit for the council over the past 10 years. “There are a whole lot of things the council hasn’t considered,” he said.

Marrickville Golf Club in Sydney’s inner west has big questions hanging over its head, with a review from Inner West Council looking increasingly likely to reduce the size of the course.

Brad Johnson, manager of the 80-year-old club, said he was exhausted by the uncertainty over the future of the club.

“It’s in a holding pattern. Whether there’s a new plan of management being drawn up we don’t know,” he said.

“A nine-hole golf course would be the end of us, It’s not a viable proposition for us.”

Golf Management Australia CEO Paul Vardy said the fate of many golf clubs in Australia would be determined by councils.

“The challenge with growing cities has become alternative uses for land,” he said.

“That’s been a common theme for quite a few years in every city. It’s just a reality of growing cities and demands on open space.”

He said that if public golf courses disappeared it may put the future of professional golf at risk.

“A lot of public courses have always been the training ground for golfers,” he said.

Data from the Organisation of Economic Complexity, which uses a basket of international trade statistical sources, reveals golf’s ill health in Australia is reflected internationally.

Unlike memberships, which peaked in 1998, the dollar value of imports of golf clubs to Australia — the thing needed to play the game — peaked in 2014 and has declined since.

The sales data allows a view beyond memberships, looking at the proclivities of latent golfers who might play a few games a year with their own set of clubs.

The data suggests the decline in golf spending is being felt internationally, with global imports peaking in 2012 at $US2.8bn.

Total imports of golf clubs to Australia peaked at $US46.8m, declining to $US30.2m in 2017 — the last year captured by the data.

Golf Management Australia’s Paul Vardy said it was unclear if people were falling out of love with golf, or if life was getting in the way. “There’s a strong life cycle of when people play golf because of the time it takes. I’ve formed the view that people like the game, but they don’t have the time it takes to play.”