Barnbougle Dreamin': They built it, they came, they're still coming - Courses and Travel - Features - FOGOLF

Mat Goggin’s Seven Mile Beach in Hobart will wow the world. Think: New Zealand’s beauties at Te Arai Links and Tara Iti. Rankings are subjective (and watch this space) but “7MB” is expected to be instant top-10 with a bullet. Goggin’s other one at nearby Five Mile Beach – what they’re going to call the “North Course” – is unlikely to be Bungendore-by-the-sea.

Consider the island state’s island, King Island. A rural region with three village hubs and fairly scant infrastructure which is home to the wonderful and fun Ocean Dunes and the extraordinary, even jaw-dropping Cape Wickham.

And there, on the north-east tip of the state, 70 minutes from Launceston, on the dunes on the coast of a potato and Angus beef cattle property, is the inspiration for them all, Barnbougle, which is actually three courses, but known by just one, as we might know Pele and Rory and DKLillee.

Barnbougle, or more accurately, the original 18-hole links called Barnbougle Dunes, is the beauty that begat Tasmania’s – Australia’s – “build it and they will come” movement. When a team featuring 24-year-old Greg Ramsay convinced non-golfer and “spud farmer” Richard Sattler that the non-arable dunes land that bordered his property could be a course on par with the famous links of Ireland and Scotland, what people thought possible changed forever.

Our architecture man, Mike Clayton, who co-designed Barnbougle Dunes with Tom Doak and co-designed, with his CDP partner Mike DeVries, the Goggin’s “South Course” at Seven Mile Beach, once said that building great golf courses in areas considered remote was “unimaginable 25 years ago.”

“It makes Richard Sattler one of the most significant figures in Australian golf. People forget everyone told him he was mad to build in Bridport,” according to Clayton.

But build Sattler did, and come they have, from everywhere. Barnbougle Dunes’ immediate insertion high into world Top-100 course rankings meant that those time-rich dandies who notch top golf courses as bird-watchers add new “lifers” to their “life list”, discovered that Tasmania wasn’t a country and booked flights to Launceston. And the fishing town of Bridport was never the same. Today Barnbougle is the region’s largest employer.

Greg Norman was among the sceptics. Even after it was built he wasn’t that great a fan. It takes 70 minutes from Launceston? There is no airstrip or helicopter pad? Things can get bitchy at the business end of the architecture and design game, particularly after it was revealed in court that Ramsay had once mooted that Norman’s design company get the gig.

The funky and fun, Bougle Run. PHOTO: Brendan James / Snaphook Media

Clayton and Doak were given the task, however – though they never thought they would not, according to Clayton.

“What was wild was Greg Ramsay assured us we had the job, and Tom had flown out from the US to see the site. There was never any question, in our mind, we were doing it,” Clayton says.

“Then [Norman’s then partner] Bob Harrison told me he’d been down there – and it came out later in the court case that Greg [Norman] was potentially going to be involved. But Richard always seemed committed to us.

“In fairness to [Norman], almost no-one thought it’d work. Not anyone I spoke to. But they had no idea how good the course was going to be. I always thought it’d work and so did Tom. But it took [course developer] Mike Keiser to convince Richard. Mike took Richard to Bandon [in Oregon] and showed him how to do it: more than one course and accommodation.”

Thus, today, Barnbougle has three golf courses and fine accommodation. There is the Dunes, there is Lost Farm – 18 holes plus two very fun, ever-playable “spares” – and there is Bougle Run, a funky 14-holer with 12 par-3s and two par-4s. Because why not?

Lost Farm. Glad they found it, right? PHOTO: Brendan James / Snaphook Media

They’ve also built an airstrip and certain-sized planes may land and whisk golfers off to King Island to play Cape Wickham and eat crayfish in Currie in a restaurant that’s a hut on the rocks that doesn’t have staff. True story.

Barnbougle’s three courses … we won’t describe every hole. Google images is your friend. There’s so much theatre in the whole shebang. So much fun. The ball rolls and rolls, and rolls.

Many professionals, with their cynical, hard eyes focused only on the potential for a hole to make them money, don’t like that, necessarily. Don’t like the par-3 13th on the Dunes with its Himalayas-style green, for instance. But who cares? They don’t own golf. Punters love it. It’s a cracking, super-fun hole.

There are show-stoppers all over the Dunes. The short par-4 fourth on the Dunes with a fairway bunker the size of a sperm whale. The par-3 seventh known as “Tom’s Little Devil” could be wedge or four-iron, depending on the wind. I like the short par-4 12th – up and over a ridge, slight dog-leg right; you can bomb driver for glory or hit hybrid to a hundred out.

Over on Lost Farm, I like the run of three through seven which is: fun, short par-4; “easy”, picturesque par-3; long, strong, index-one par-4 around a mighty hillock; quality par-3 to undulating green; strong par-4 over or around a mid-fairway hump the shape of Uluru (because, again, why not?) which then bends right and up to a back-to-front-sloping green.

Eight and nine are crackers, too, and the back nine is Luna Park: upwards, downwards, sideways; fairways like polo fields; complex greens; bunkers more strategic than Rommel. Maybe not Rommel. But pretty strategic bunkering.

The town of Bridport has never been the same since Barnbougle turned up. PHOTO: Brendan James / Snaphook Media

Regardless, there is, honestly, 38 cracking, fun holes on the two “major” courses, Dunes and Lost Farm. And Bougle Run is like a sticky dessert wine after a pair of “big” cab-savs.

But you be the judge. Google Bougle, if you will. Check out the photos. The courses photograph quite beautifully, even sensually in “golden hour” light. Our former Editor Brendan James does things with his drone that you could describe as borderline art. Scratch “borderline”. You could frame these babies, hang them in the pool room, and gaze wistfully.

Yet it’s the whole experience that sets Barnbougle apart from other Australian “destination” courses. For a golf trip with a crew, it is best-practice in this country, in my opinion, on a number of levels.

For one, it’s world class and affordable at about $150 per round, depending on the season. The same course in Oregon, Florida or the Monterey Peninsula, even Scotland and Ireland since Americans have flooded the market with their dollars, could be – true story – one thousand Australian dollars.

And if it’s a public course and the public – read: Australians for whom top-class golf is not just a hobby for elites – is your major market, it makes sense not to alienate them with tariffs framed at those carrying muscular US and Euro currencies. Mr Sattler and his family know where they come from. They know their people. They are no mugs.

The Sports Bar at Lost Farm is a magnificent 19th hole. So is the clubhouse at the Dunes. Both are understated, comfortable, fit-for-purpose. Both are – and this can be a thing lost on some courses – welcoming. Barnbougle is a public-facility without members and competitions. The ethos of private, member-only, “country club” affectation would never wash in these parts – culturally or commercially.

The accommodation is fine and functional, and again, great value. Both restaurants do magnificent rib-eye steak, scallops, oysters. There is local cold-climate pinot noir. There is a view from the restaurant over Anderson Bay and Bass Strait, and the downhill par-3 15th hole at Lost Farm that would rank among the world’s greatest pre-golf breakfast views.

But we’ve waxed lyrically enough. Bottom line is this: if you haven’t been, you should go. And if you have been, I know I don’t need to tell you, you should go again. They didn’t build it for nothing.