The scenery is postcard quality. There is a feast of great food and wine to be sampled and the golf courses are simply terrific. The New South Wales South Coast might just be one of Australia’s great golf road trip destinations.
Lying between the Great Dividing Range and the Tasman Sea, the 233km stretch of coastline between Mollymook and Pambula is magnificent in its diversity. The Princes Highway (Route A1) winds its way through the region, while skirting the edge of beautiful national parks and offering glimpses through the tall timbers of scenic beaches, rivers, mountains and rolling pastures.
Beyond the obvious natural and cultural attractions, there are the quality golf courses. It seems even the smallest towns along the highway have a course – ranging from ‘must play’ nationally ranked beauties, like Narooma, to nine-holers you may not have heard of, like Tathra and Tuross Head.
But perhaps the best thing about playing golf on the NSW South Coast is the great value for money, accessibility and mild climate, which makes it the ideal year-round golf getaway for travelling golfers from Sydney, Canberra or Melbourne.
It is a getaway I have enjoyed many times during the past three decades, and like the joyous familiarity of slipping into your favourite pair of jeans, I always start my journey south at Mollymook Golf Club’s Hilltop Course.
Mollymook is a beachside paradise, about three hours’ drive from Sydney, and is home to two courses belonging to the same club. There’s the nine-holer, called the Beachside Course, where the 1st tee is a pitching wedge from the southern tip of beautiful Mollymook Beach and ambles across easy-walking terrain around Collers Beach inlet.
Residential expansion started to take off in Mollymook during the 1970s and a developer donated a parcel of land – a few kilometres north of the Beachside course – to the club for the construction of what is now known as the Hilltop Course.
The club commissioned its course superintendent Bill Andriske and golf professional Ken McKay Snr to oversee the design of the layout, which was carved from a thick eucalypt forest. The layout opened for play in 1977 and rarely has it looked in better shape, a fact that didn’t escape our Top-100 Public Access Courses judges, one of whom declared that Hilltop’s kikuyu fairways are “easily the equal of what
