28 APRIL 2018 | golf australia
COMMON SENSE PREVAILS
PHOTO:GARY LISBONTHE
WANDERING
GOLFER BY BRENDAN MOLONEY | GOLF AUSTRALIA COLUMNISTPLUS ça change, plus c’est la même chose
at Albert Park
French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr
(1808–1890) wasn’t thinking of the proposal to
cut Melbourne’s Albert Park public course in
half when he lamented that nothing ever really
changes, but he could have been.
And just when you think that semi-
government initiatives can’t get any dumber,
they do.
Parks Victoria, the quasi-autonomous
non-governmental organisation responsible
for the course, late last year fl oated a plan to
reduce the iconic layout on the city’s edge from
18 holes to nine.
Imagine what would happen if such an
organisation proposed cutting the Melbourne
Cricket Ground, or the SCG, in half. Or told us
the Melbourne Cup would be
run over four laps of a course
reduced to 400 metres? The
notion is ludicrous and after the
public outcry, those behind this
quango tomfoolery would
be quietly told to seek
employment elsewhere.
This is not the fi rst attempt
to shaft golfers at Albert Park.
The course was built at the
beginning of last century by
keen players including J.M.
Bruce, the club’s fi rst president and father of
a future Prime Minister. The land at the time
was a rubbish dump, which Royal Melbourne
had considered and rejected for its fi rst course,
and the grandly named “lake” was what was
left when they drained the swamp. In reality, it
is now an over-sized puddle of less than half a
square kilometre but a number of people get a
good deal of enjoyment from sailing and rowing
on it in view of the CBD.
As well as building the course, the members
found the money to erect a clubhouse
designed by Arthur Purnell, who also did the
Northern Stand at the MCG. This clubhouse
was later used as a press centre during the
1956 Olympic Games.
In 1947 the state Labor government revoked
the club’s lease with little notice or ceremony
because it wanted Albert Park to become a
public course. The minister in charge was Pat
Kennelly who stuttered and was universally
referred to by my parents’ generation as P-p-
pat K-k-kennelly. Although stopping short of
calling the move an act of bastardry, golf writer
Jack Dillon summed up the injustice of evicting
without a penny’s compensation to the people
who had beautifi ed an eyesore and had been
playing there for nearly half a century.
“If there is not a right to legal compensation
... the letter of the law can kill and the moral
justifi cation of such a killing could hardly leavean easy conscience,” he predicted in the
Sporting Globe on May 3, 1947. In November he
reported that the club had been kicked out and
the government’s offi cial notice to this effect
was delivered by the postman the same day.
The members, to their credit, rolled with this
kick in the guts, found and bought some land
further out and started all over again as the
Keysborough Golf Club. The man put in charge
of the Albert Park Trust was Bill Cox, a
jockey-sized public servant who fought in World
War I and also rode racehorses while stationed
in France.
I got to know him in retirement because
he lived nearby and I used to visit him to
be regaled by his marvellous stories. He
campaigned unsuccessfully to have the course
redesigned so that the holes did not run
parallel to Queen’s Road
which was hard against the
east boundary and, naturally,
out of bounds. If you broke
your car windscreen anywhere
in Melbourne, he said, you
drove straight to Albert Park to
claim compensation.
When the Grand Prix was
run around the lake in the
1950s there was a royal
commission into public safety
and Cox was called to give
evidence. Visiting Melbourne at the time was
English actress-model Sabrina, who boasted
the vital statistics of 41-18-36. Spike Milligan
said memorably of the 41: “Wonderful things
in themselves but no earthly good in a fi ght.”
Under examination Cox was unable to give his
view on the safety of the race, prompting the
exasperated judge to ask him if he’d actually
attended. “I did, your honour,” he replied, “but I
was sitting next to Sabrina.”
The Parks Victoria proposal came in the
form of a slick internet presentation, which
claimed to be “seeking public help in shaping
the future”. Such weasel wording is regrettably
common these days. It reminds me of the
time in 1984 when the children of Victoria, my
daughter included, were given the chance to
name the new baby gorilla at the zoo. The kids
were allowed to call it anything they liked, as
long as the name appeared on a short list of
fi ve foisted upon them. “Mzuri” got the nod
and he died in distant France last year, far
from the town of his birth and the affection
of a generation who had taken him into
their hearts.
The apparatchiks dishonestly created an
illusion that that cutting a golf course in half
is a desirable thing. In return for the nine
holes they offered walking and riding tracks,
a putt-putt course for children, shaded picnic
and barbecue areas and boardwalks over thewetlands (here read, weeds growing at the
edges of the puddle). These “wetlands” in turn
would be designed to “reduce wave refraction”.
It is hard to image much of a wave getting up
on less than half a square kilometre of shallow
water unless there was an earthquake.
The implication of the preposterous proposal
was that tying up land for golf so close to the
city centre – two kilometres away as the crow
fl ies – was a bad thing. Most comparable cities
around the world would give their eye teeth
for this. It is an incredible asset in a city famed
for world class courses. Over the years Walter
Hagen, Joe Kirkwood and movie star BobIT IS AN
INCREDIBLE
ASSET IN A
CITY FAMED
FOR WORLD
CLASS
COURSES.