Royal Charter
“Fifty years from now, people will work out it’s a really good course.” – Wayne Grady.
I always feel Royal Queensland’s ‘New Course’, opened for play in 2007, is constantly in need of defending, so let this be both a defence and an explanation.
John Sloan, Bruce Grant and I won the commission to build the members a new course, (necessitated by the Queensland Government building a second multi-lane bridge crossing above the old 12th and 17th fairways) based on our vision of spacious golf where players had the chance to make interesting choices. It was hardly a revolutionary idea but choices – and how they might vary in different conditions - make for thought-provoking, and enduringly interesting, golf.
It is a somewhat unusual course by Australian standards and quite different from the golf many architects would have created.
Fortunately, the club had enough spare land to make a full-sized replacement course, something impossible to imagine any other 18-hole club in the country contemplating after the loss of a third of their course.
The site offered up no big or dramatic contours and aside from the incredible old fig trees, no obvious natural features.
