On the edge of the Simpson Desert, an old man drags the teeth of black steel rake around a hole in the earth and shuffles outward in concentric sweeps.
Then the man stops. He turns the head of the rake to its cylindrical side and retraces his steps, smoothing a perfect circle of marmalade-coloured sand.
This is not the ritual of a zen monk but a member of Australia’s newest golf club, deep in the heart of the outback.
Swatting away a gathering army of flies, grazier David Brook dons a mesh net on his head and strolls towards his ball, which is somewhere among the buck bush, whose whimsical local names also include ‘roly-poly’ and ‘windy weed’.
“Watch out for snakes dear!” his wife, Nell, calls after him.
And David would do well to watch his step – snake tracks wind their way through the sand fairways with alarming regularity. What species might they be?
“Brown snakes, western taipans,” Nell says, casually listing the two most venomous snakes on Earth. “King browns.”
Welcome to the Birdsville Dunes golf club, where players not only contend with deadly snakes and swarms of flies, but extreme heat, dust storms and a rat plague that pockmarked the dunes with golf-ball sized holes.
But for all these perils and pitfalls there’s one particularly devilish pest bothering the good golfers of Birdsville. And it’s an apt one, given the town’s name.
A murder of crows lurks among the spinifex and saltbush, swooping down to pluck balls from the fairway and disappear with them into the desert.
Nell, president and driving force behind the more than 25-year effort it took to create the course, recommends golfers bring extra balls – the crows normally lose interest after about three.
But it’s not the only adaptation made for the game born upon Scottish pasture but taken root in the dune and gibber rock of this faraway land.
Bottle caps as tees
Balls can be placed atop bottle caps, so that every stroke does not require a wedge.
And instead of greens, Birdsville golfers putt on oiled sand brought 160 kilometres down from the ephemeral Lake Machattie. The Machattie sand doesn’t go rock-hard under diesel like the local stuff, David explains. One becomes something of a connoisseur of sand, it seems, living out in channel country.
The 18-hole course is not only full of quirks. It’s uncommonly beautiful. In the crepuscular hours, it is awash in crimson and Tyrian purple. Emus roam the plains beyond. For its grand opening, hosting the finale of the outback Queensland Masters last July, it was carpeted in wildflowers.
“It’s a special course,” Nell says. “Unique.”
Golf Australia’s Queensland and Northern Territory manager Luke Bates agrees.
“I’ve been working in golf for 18 years on courses all around the world, and playing for longer,” he says. “I can safely say I’ve never been anywhere like Birdsville … it’s just so different from your typical golfing experience.”
As well as experiencing the “rite of passage” of having his first ball pinched by a crow, Bates says the landscape and design of the course is like no other.
And the latter, at least, did not come about by accident. In fact, it took retired Queensland University of Technology associate professor, landscape architect and keen golfer Glenn Thomas 26 years to create something “uniquely Birdsville”– not to mention untold hours of effort from local volunteers to make his design a reality. Though it was a “labour of love”, Glenn says, it was also marked by tragedy.
The landscape architect first surveyed the 75 hectare site in 1996 from an open cockpit Robinson mustering helicopter flown by Nell and David’s son, Deon.
Just two weeks later, 21-year-old Deon crashed his chopper in isolated country, a fatal accident that devastated the community and derailed its golf club plans.
Death would again delay the course’s construction when Glenn’s wife of 39 years, Robin, died unexpectedly in 2006, sending the academic into retirement.
Then three years later, death resurfaced to design the course anew. After a storm exposed a Wangkangurru Yarluyandi grave site near what was to be the sixth tee, Glenn had to start his plans again from scratch.
The redesign was worth it – Glenn says it ended up his best effort by far. And it’s not the only way in which life rose from death.
“After Deon died, an eagle came straight away into our lives,” Nell says. “He’s always been coming back, but always in the form of an eagle, whenever we don’t expect it.”
A wedge-tailed eagle is the symbol of the club.
And Luke Bates reckons that, once word of the Birdsville golf club spreads, it is soon to soar.
“I think once that takes off, it’s gonna be one of those bucket-list items,” he says.
