But now Australia’s golf courses are being eyed off, particularly in our inner-city areas. Hmm, just look at all that manicured green of disquieting sterility, fertilised with its chemicals and watered to unnatural verdancy in the midst of a parched continent, waiting for the favoured few who can afford their exorbitant fees. Meanwhile, just look at all the jostly kids living on the edges, with nowhere close to run and jump and get proper grubby like they should. Kids growing ever fatter because studies continually lecture us on this, kids increasingly short-sighted as they curl like commas on their couches over their luminous little rectangles. Meanwhile, where do the children play?
Sydney’s Lord Mayor, Clover Moore, has gone into battle over this. She wants to halve the number of holes in the expansive, inner-city Moore Park Golf Course from 18 to nine. The course currently covers 45ha of public land, some of which might be given over to parkland for everyone. It feels like Moore is tapping into a growing sentiment that’s looking at the golf courses in our crowded cities, and the dwindling numbers of people using them, and thinking, hmm, something is amiss.
The Scottish sport is falling victim to the whims of fashion and right now, the headwinds are not in its favour. In Australia, participation rates have dropped from 8.2 per cent in 2001 to 5.2 per cent in 2020. The sport is expensive; it just doesn’t feel inclusive or diverse in an increasingly diverse nation. It reminds me of sailing – and who really cared that the Sydney to Hobart was cancelled last year, beyond those directly vested in the race? I’m not calling for golf’s abolition, just a reclaiming of its precious land in our inner cities for the many who’ll directly benefit. The more economical mini-golf is in the ascendant anyway, as evidenced by the reality TV game show Holey Moley.
So I say have the larger courses in outer suburbs and country areas, by all means, where there’s less competition for the gift of nature. Because if you can afford the club fees and clobber, you’ve got the means to travel. The golfing fraternity have normalised land unfairness for years – and we’ve all drunk the Kool-Aid.
Golf now feels like an aggressively elitist feat of enclosure in our densely populated urban areas. Re-wild these spaces, I say; gift the people these repairing lungs of green. As with so much in Australia now, it feels like victory in battle lies with how connected and proactive the lobby group is. But good on Clover Moore for thinking of the thousands of residents on Moore Park’s doorstep. Golf feels like the ultimate expression of man’s desire to tame and control nature. As the children in their high-rise apartments look on enviously at the almost-empty green, and watch wildlife programs on their screens.
Too big for anywhere other than Texas
The American truck invasion continues with the introduction of the genuinely huge 2.5-tonne, eight-seat GMC Denali Yukon. The only thing bigger than the car is its price.
Is America off your bucket list? Here’s a case for why you should visit
The case for America’s greatness is compelling, even allowing for its foibles. It has every type of landscape you care to name, from deserts to mountains, forests, everglades, geysers and glaciers.
The worst thing to ever happen to golf was quite possibly Donald Trump. His regular and wilful withdrawals to the solace of the wide verdant green constantly reminded us, as Malcolm Gladwell so charmingly put it, that the sport is “crack cocaine for old white guys”. The brain tends to think, ah, so they’re hiding away on those vast expanses when they should perhaps be doing other things, and my, just look at all that land. So much of it. So bizarrely empty. Waiting. Devoid of wildness. Or children. Or messy mucky life. Poised in its scarily tamed perfection in the middle of our crammed cities that are crying out for the great lungs of green, for exercise and dogs and dirt and the wonder of urban wildlife and the squeals and shouts of happy kids. Yet these fenced off expanses wait eternally, in somewhat selfish readiness, for what?