Adelaide crowd turns out in 1870 to watch the 'swells' play golf in park lands on maybe Australia's first course
South Australian governor James Fergusson, a Scot, encouraged a golf course being marked out during 1869-70 in the southeastern Adelaide city park lands.
Fergusson image courtesy State Library of South Australia
Adelaide had one of the first – if not the first – golf courses in Australia. But, although The Guinness Book of Golf Facts listed: “1870: The formation of the (Royal) Adelaide Golf Club, the first in Australia,” no proof remains of the first golf course laid out in the southeast parklands near the later Victoria Park racecourse.
In 1869, two Scottish devotees of the game from South Australia’s “gentry”, governor James Fergusson and David Murray, a member of the Legislative Council, had the help of another Scotsman to lay out the course for Adelaide’s first golf club. Murray was elected captain and John Gordon as secretary/treasurer with committeemen James Hall, John Lindsay and J.T. Turnbull.
On Saturday, May 15 1870, the course was ready with seven small greens 20 feet square, fairways 50 yards wide with the longest longest hole about 120 yards. A round of golf was declared to be twice round the course. Clubs and "feathery" balls were imported from Scotland by Cunningham's Emporium in Rundle Street, Adelaide.
On opening day, 20 foundation club members "of status and wealth", all in traditional red coats, joined an assortment of Adelaide citizenry who had turned up "to see the fun” of so-called "swells missing a ball – or laughing even when they did. The galley soon went but fore caddies engaged by the players couldn’t stop many expensive “feathery" balls being stolen by boys. A greater handicap was the presence of cows in the days when parklands were an unfenced commonage where many city families turned their cows loose.
After governor Ferguson left the colony, interest in golf waned. Harsh Australian summers cracked the expensive clubs with their beechwood heads and ash shafts, while breakages and other damage meant they had to be sent back on the long trip to Scotland for repairs or replacement. By 1875, the club had disbanded only to be revived in 1892 on a rough-and-ready course on the north parklands bounded by Robe, Kingston and LeFevre terraces, North Adelaide.
Adelaide Golf Club amalgamated in 1896 with the Glenelg club that started in 1894 on land roughly to the south-east of of later Glenelg course opened 1927. But the search for a first-class course to nurture the state's more talented players led to Adelaide Golf Club setting up links at Seaton in 1904 with a gala occasion when a special train brought guests to a station near the clubhouse.
This became the Royal Adelaide Golf Course but a change had started in the 1890s when golf was no longer exclusively played by the “swells”.
