Victoria Golf Club

Victoria Golf Club has benefited from a dedicated programme of renewal and refurbishment. The elegant green and white pavilion that sits handsomely at the end of a tree-lined drive is a well-designed, comfortable facility much in demand with the club’s 2,000 members. Mike Clayton’s recent course enhancements have focused on the restoration of bunkers that had been grassed over and the regeneration of trees.

Victoria’s golfing bloodlines run deep. It has won the Victoria Golf Association’s Division One pennant more than any club in the state. It is the home club of five times Open Champion Peter Thomson and British Amateur Champion Doug Bachli and the club has hosted the Australian Open three times.

The front nine runs along the north and west extent of the property, while the back nine fills the central part and extends to the southern and easternmost limit of the land. Several of the holes are laid out in pairs alongside one another so the golfer is reversed.

The club has twelve double bedrooms on the top tier of the clubhouse and welcomes visitors to stay. Some out of state golfers have been returning to the Victoria Golf Club for 30 years. Whereas devotees of the wonderful golfing lands of Melbourne’s Sandbelt will find all the themes at Victoria familiar, there is clearly something about the place that renders it even better than the sum of its very impressive parts.

Peter Thomson, the most decorated member of the Victoria Golf Club wrote: “Some clubs have a special character that sets them apart. It is not necessarily the quality of the course or the accommodations of the building that distinguishes them. It is more essentially the membership, past and present and the file of achievement over a period of decades that creates at tradition.”

The above passage on the Victoria Golf Club is an extract from The Finest Golf Courses of Asia and Australasia by James Spence. Reproduced with kind permission.

The Australian Masters was hosted at Victoria in 2010 and Tiger Woods headlined the event – defending the Masters title he won at Kingston Heath in 2009 – but the 2010 title went to Stuart Appleby, with Woods finishing fourth. Ian Poulter lifted the Australian Masters title in 2011, winning by three shots from Marcus Fraser.