Phones on silent. No untucked shirts or striped socks. Check the length of those skirts … Royal Sydney Golf Club puttered along for decades as an enclave from modern life. Then redevelopment plans, including the felling of hundreds of trees, split the club – and teed off many locals.
Australian golfer John Senden at the 2006 Australian Open, held at the Royal Sydney Golf Club. The elite club has fewer than 6000 members and costs $26,500 to join.Credit:Getty Images
One mild Saturday evening last October, about a thousand people gathered at Royal Sydney Golf Club, in the city’s eastern suburbs, for a cocktail party to celebrate the clubhouse’s 100th anniversary. The event, which had been billed a “once-in-a-lifetime gala extravaganza”, kicked off at 6.30pm, when members and guests began arriving, the great and good of Sydney’s WASP establishment, the retired stockbrokers and gentleman farmers, investment bankers and corporate lawyers, the men in dinner suits, the women in cap-sleeved cocktail dresses, some with pearl earrings and silvery bouffants.
But the real star was, of course, the clubhouse itself, a stately late-Federation Arts and Crafts landmark, elegant but austere and visible, like a church, from miles around, with gables and bay windows and turret-like spires topped with flags. The land here alone is thought to be worth $1 billion. The clubhouse sits atop it all, like a cherry on a very expensive cake.
The party, which is described to me by one attendee as “lavish” and “Gatsbyesque”, had a round-the-world theme, with different rooms transformed into a series of international destinations. There was a Parisian room, liberally accoutred in pink, with high-tea stands of petit fours; an American room, where guests grazed on hot dogs and sliders. There was an “Irish pub”, a Dolly Parton cover act, and everywhere, at every turn, heaped bouquets and eager wait-staff. Outside, meanwhile, on the terrace overlooking the lawn tennis courts and just around the corner from the croquet greens, was a marquee done up as a Bavarian beer hall, with trestle tables and an oompah band. “They’d really done a good job,” says the member I speak to. “The club was looking a million bucks.”
Royal Sydney is one of Australia’s most exclusive clubs. “It’s the bluest of blue-blood clubs in Australia,” Mike Clayton, a professional golfer and course architect, told the Inside the Ropes podcast in 2020. “It makes Royal Melbourne look like a public course.”
There are fewer than 6000 members and it costs $26,500 to join, with a yearly subscription of $5300. The club brings about $20 million in fees in a year, much of which goes toward the upkeep of the facilities, including 18 tennis courts along with bowling greens, croquet lawns, squash courts, a gym, two pools and, of course, the 18-hole championship golf course and nine-hole short course. There is a bar, a cafe and private accommodation, rooms for playing bridge and billiards, reading lounges; artworks on the walls, and 195 staff. In the main hallway – lambently lit, whisper-quiet – is a vitrine containing a collection of antique golf clubs and balls from Scotland which, rumour has it, is so rare that it’s uninsurable.
“It’s a very clubby club,” one elderly member tells me, on the condition of anonymity. “Members of my husband’s family have been here for 50 or 60 years.”
Like many such clubs, Royal Sydney has a strict dress code (golf skirts no shorter than mid-thigh, plain white socks/sockettes for men – never striped, collars always, etc) and is governed by a seemingly endless series of injunctions: no untucked shirts, no stone-washed fabric, no posting photography online. Mobile phones are tolerated but must be on silent at all times. Business is not to be conducted on club grounds. iPods in the gym only. And if you’re parking in the car park’s outer bays, never do so with the rear of your vehicle to the wall (the exhaust fumes stain the paint). Rule-breakers are brought to book by pursed lips and scorching little stares, or by an open rebuke from a club patriarch. In 2005, an official reportedly marched onto the fairway with a tape measure to check the length of a woman’s skirt.
Long-established trees make Royal Sydney’s course “an ark”, says one redevelopment opponent. “There’s a lot of habitat in there that supports the remnant wildlife.” Credit:Brook Mitchell
Many people wish to join Royal Sydney; most don’t make it. Prospective members must have a proposer and a seconder, both of the same gender as their nominee, and three referees. (The proposer and seconder must have known the applicant for seven years, the referees for five, with “ideally no business connection”.)
The candidate is then vetted by the club’s nominations committee – a kind of Star Chamber in plus-fours – whose decisions are final. As the club’s guidelines make clear, those gauche enough to be found canvassing for nomination “will not be considered”. (Prime ministers gain automatic membership: as PM Anthony Albanese pointed out recently, “it was probably the only way I was gonna get into it.” )
Of course, the rules are part of the appeal. They are boundaries, and like all boundaries they provide comfort and security, while underpinning the club’s sense of itself as a special place, quarantined from the demands and indignities of modern life. For most of its 129 years, that exceptionalism has served Royal Sydney well. But it was perhaps only a matter of time before it ran up against reality. “It’s awfully sad, what’s happened,” the elderly member tells me. “The whole business with the redevelopment, it’s divided the club. Lots of people don’t like it, but you’re not supposed to speak out. You’re told it’ll bring ill repute to the club.”
As one former member puts it: “These people come from a different way of thinking.”
Royal Sydney’s Championship Course was laid out in 1922, and built on top of what had been mostly marshland and sand dunes. (Its southern border is less than a kilometre from Bondi Beach). Over the years, it has evolved into a “parkland” course, with undulating fairways lined on either side with paperbarks, hoop pines and Moreton Bay figs. Golf Select website describes the course as “old-fashioned … heavily bunkered, [a] tough test of golf, especially in any wind”. It has regularly hosted the Australian Open, and seen some memorable moments, including in 2008, when golf’s raging bull, John Daly, smashed a spectator’s camera into a tree after he got too close taking photos. (Daly offered to buy him a new one.)
According to the club, however, the course has been in need of an overhaul for some time. The drainage and irrigation systems are old, and trees are crowding the fairways. The bunkers, meanwhile, have become too steep to be properly maintained; some of the older members have trouble climbing in and out of them. Tellingly, the course’s Australian Golf Digest ranking has tanked, from fourth in 1991 to 52nd in 2022.
In 2019, the club announced plans for a $17.5 million redevelopment. The project, four years in the making, was enormous, a comprehensive “reimagining” as president Chris Chapman put it at the time, of the landscape, ecology and infrastructure, everything from the type of turf to the sand in the bunkers. In order to provide firmer greens, the club would install the latest SubAir Systems technology, which uses a sprawling grid of pipes and blowers underneath the grass to drain and ventilate the surface.
The most controversial part of the plan was the intended removal of 595 trees, including some of the majestic Moreton Bay figs.
The club commissioned American golf course architect Gil Hanse, who’d designed several courses for Donald Trump, as well as a course for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. The redevelopment was “an incredible opportunity”, Chapman wrote to members, to build a course that would be “contemporary, playable and sustainable”. (Good Weekend approached Chapman for an interview. He declined, but agreed to fact-check this story via email.)
But when the plans became public, there was an outcry. The revamp would require poisoning some 17.8 hectares of grass, run-off from which could flow into nearby Rose Bay, home to endangered species of seagrass and seahorses. Construction would involve 910 truck movements – more than 1800 trips in and out – the tailings from which could likewise end up in local watercourses, including protected wetlands.
But the most controversial part of the plan was the intended removal of 595 trees, including some of the majestic Moreton Bay figs, paperbarks and critically endangered eastern suburbs banksia scrub. Also up for the chop were hollow-bearing trees that can take 100 years to form, and provide important denning and breeding habitat for local and migratory birds.
The club proposed to plant 703 new shrubs and trees, but even so, it was estimated that the canopy would take up to 50 years to return. According to the club, many of the trees, which had been planted 70 years ago, were reaching the end of their lives. Their roots were also encroaching on the fairways, and their canopies had created heavy shade and restricted airflows. The club had over the years been thinning out these trees, and attempting to renew habitat.
Part of the club’s plans in 2019 involved the removal of 595 trees, highlighted here in red.
“They’d done it fairly responsibly,” says local Tanya Excell, a director of Green Roofs Australasia, which consults on sustainable building projects. “Slowly and in small patches.” But the new plan was a step up, both in the scope and speed of the removal, amounting to what critics regarded as a wholesale clear-felling. “They wanted to chop down a small urban forest,” says urban planner Sebastian Pfautsch, from Western Sydney University. “It was very, very sad.”
“I remember when I first heard about it,” says Jeff Angel, executive director of the Total Environment Centre lobby group. “I felt despair that such valued natural assets are so easily able to be destroyed.”
The plans met with fierce opposition from locals: when the Liberal-dominated Woollahra Council asked for community feedback, there were 284 submissions, only five of which were in support. Pfautsch told The Sydney Morning Herald that some areas with 30 per cent canopy cover experienced fewer heatwaves, and that without the trees, the golf course would lose some of its capacity as “a natural airconditioning system”.
Ecologists pointed out that the course was home to countless animals, including the threatened grey-headed flying-fox, the Little Bent-wing bat and the Eastern Bent-wing bat, as well as the iconic yellow-tailed black cockatoo. There were also concerns about flooding and air quality. “Lots of studies have shown that particulate pollution from cars goes through the roof where there are no trees,” says Excell. “There are 35,000 cars a day on the northern side of the course, and the trees are cleaning all that at the moment.”
“I wanted to keep the trees, but it became very aggressive. If you mentioned it, you were shunned.”
But the club pressed ahead. In mid-2020 it recruited friends, members and allies to lobby the council. Australian golf’s governing body, the Royal and Ancient at St Andrews in Scotland, voiced its support. Rod McGeoch, the head of Sydney’s bid for the 2000 Olympic Games and a prominent club member, wrote to the council saying the upgrade would have “significant benefits” to the state, by attracting more international tournaments such as the Presidents Cup.
Botanist Tim Entwisle, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, wrote that the club would “reap great environmental benefits” and create “one of the world’s most stunning and attractive golf courses”. (Entwisle later tells me that he hadn’t seen the course, known the age of the trees or what condition they were in.) Mike Clayton, the professional golfer, seemed baffled as to why people were discussing the trees in the first place. As he wrote to the council, “There is a universal acceptance among knowledgeable critics, players and architects (both past and present) that trees have a limited role to play in golf.”
At the club itself, matters became heated. The club said 80 per cent of members had voted in favour of the development at an extraordinary general meeting in September 2019; it later emerged only 1400 members had attended the vote. (Postal votes were not allowed.)
Those opposed to the development clashed with those in support. “It was horrible,” says one woman, who resigned from the club in protest over the plans. “It caused a lot of harm to people who didn’t kowtow to what the [planning] committee wanted.”
One member, who I’ll call Joan, tells me that it became hard to have an open discussion about it. “I wanted to keep the trees, but it became very aggressive. If you mentioned it, you were shunned. When you brought it up, people would just slap you down and walk away.”
Joan is that rarest of things at Royal Sydney: a Labor voter. Despite that, she had never “got the vibe that people thought they were superior. They used to be very friendly.” And she loved the club. “It was heaven on earth.” But the redevelopment plans changed all that. “No one has given any real thought to the impact [of the redevelopment] on the environment or the neighbours.”
Local resident and Greens councillor Nicola Grieve called the proposed redevelopment a “vanity project”.Credit:Oscar Colman
“It’s this born-to-rule ethos,” says local Greens councillor Nicola Grieve, when I meet her at her home, opposite the course, one morning in early spring. Grieve, who has blue eyes and long, ash-grey hair (“I can’t be arsed dyeing it any more”), started a group called Save the Trees in 2019, and has led the opposition ever since. She takes me for a stroll around the course’s mesh fence, which is topped with barbed wire and lined with fig trees, their aerial roots, knotted and warty, dangling around us like vines.
“It’s a vanity project,” she argues. “They want to turn it into a links course, because once you’re a links course you can attract international competition.” It’s thought removing trees will provide better sight lines for TV coverage. “It’s a prestige thing.”
Grieve grew up on Sydney’s northern beaches in the 1970s. Her parents were members of the Avalon Preservation Trust, which had stopped the local sand dunes from being mined for cement in the 1960s. She went on to work in the fashion and food industries before becoming a Greens staffer in NSW parliament. She entered politics herself in 2008, when she was elected to Woollahra Council.
Being a Greens councillor in a state as pro-development as NSW is, she gives me to understand, like holding back a bulldozer with sticky tape. “What they do to this land,” she tells me, pointing through the fence at the golf course, “has an impact on the whole community, not just their club. The air quality, the heat, the animals. They seem to think they own those trees. But what they don’t realise is that they’re just custodians.”
Golf wasn’t always an establishment game. In Scotland, where the modern game is thought to have originated around the mid-16th century, golf had a bucolic, egalitarian mythos, with all types of people playing in open land, sometimes among herds of sheep. But by the time it arrived in Australia in the 1820s, golf was viewed mostly in its English context, as a game for gentlemen, a civilising pastime for the wealthy, well-born and white. Many of Australia’s top courses, including Royal Sydney, did not allow Jewish members until the 1980s, so much so that Jewish communities had, by the 1950s, started their own golf clubs.
These days, the game’s role in the community is more nuanced. Because of their sheer acreage, courses are sometimes welcomed as a bulwark against development. How else would that much land be locked away, in something approaching a state of nature? Royal Sydney sits on 58 hectares in one of Sydney’s most densely populated areas. “It’s an ark,” Grieve says. “There’s a lot of habitat in there that supports the remnant wildlife.”
Courses like Royal Sydney also keep people active. “There are lots of mental-health benefits from outdoor activities like golf,” a former member tells me. “Clubs form an important function.”
But history is catching up with golf, in more ways than one. As the climate crisis worsens, golf courses are seen by some as wasteful, guzzling water and fertiliser for the benefit of a small minority. In August this year, climate activists in southern France, which has been gripped by drought, targeted two golf clubs that had been granted exemptions from water restrictions, pouring
cement into their holes and ripping up the greens. They later posted a photo on Twitter of a cement-filled hole, with the caption: “This hole is drinking 277,000 litres. Do you drink that much?” (Royal Sydney uses more than 365 million litres a year, which it accesses through a WaterNSW aquifer licence.)
French climate activism group Extinction Rebellion Toulouse posted photos of themselves ripping up greens and pouring cement in holes.Credit:Twitter via Extinction Rebellion Toulouse
In Australia, there is now a growing push to have public golf courses turned over to parkland. During lockdown in Melbourne, in 2020, when playing golf was banned, locals living near Northcote public golf club began cutting open the fence surrounding the course so they could wander the fairways and picnic beneath the trees. No sooner would the fence be mended than it would be cut open again. In the end, the local council gave in, and opened the course to the public.
“There’s no doubt that golf courses will become more multi-use over time.”
Similar measures were taken at courses in Albert Park, Malvern and Cheltenham. Golf Australia supported the move: spokesman David Gallichio described it as “a great opportunity for people to enjoy the green space”. (The policy ended after lockdown.) In Sydney, meanwhile, Lord Mayor Clover Moore has suggested Moore Park Golf Course, a public course near the city centre, be reduced from 18 holes to nine, to provide more parkland for residents. “There’s no doubt that golf courses will become more multi-use over time,” Tim Entwisle tells me. “They are large open spaces that are used by a relatively small number of people in cities where such spaces are precious.”
But the challenge for such clubs is also cultural. In a post #MeToo era, people are more suspicious than ever of power and privilege. Royal Sydney has, in this regard, made itself an easy target. In 2020 it claimed $2.8 million in JobKeeper payments, boosting its after-tax surplus to $3.5 million, compared to $961,000 in 2019. (The club went on to claim a further $800,000 in JobSaver payments in 2021.)
The club’s general manager Michael Solomons told The Sydney Morning Herald that the money had been used to support 140 of the club’s then 160 staff. There were calls for the club to return the money, which the government had intended to prop up struggling businesses; some large companies that had profited from JobKeeper, including Cochlear, Domino’s and Adairs, had subsequently repaid some or all of their share. Royal Sydney declined to do so.
The club made headlines again in 2021, when, in the depths of Sydney’s COVID-19 lockdown, president Chris Chapman wrote to members in the well-heeled suburb of Mosman, just across the harbour from Royal Sydney, suggesting they would not breach the five-kilometre travel restriction if they got a water taxi to the club instead of driving. The message was retracted shortly after. Chapman then issued another statement, saying he wanted to make it “crystal clear” that he wasn’t encouraging members to break the rules. “The club’s reputation and its regard for the spirit of compliance will always come first.”
Greens MP David Shoebridge, centre, and Nicola Grieve, to his left, led protests against the plans.
In the face of opposition from the council and locals, Royal Sydney scrapped its initial development plans in September 2020, and went back to the drawing board. In April 2021, after what Chapman described to The Sydney Morning Herald as a period of “vigorous introspection”, it submitted its revised plans. It now proposed to replace the 595 trees due for the chop with 500,000 native plants and shrubs, together with 1888 new trees. It also claimed that the redevelopment would result in a 20 per cent reduction in water usage, saving 73 million litres a year.
Locals remained sceptical, however, and submitted a petition with 1227 signatures opposing the new plans. “We knew we were being sold a lie,” says Grieve, who organised a protest outside the club in December 2021, with a 25-metre-long banner reading “Save the 595 trees”. “The club sent two guys to come down and stare at us from across the street,” she contends. (Chapman would neither deny nor confirm this.) Then state and now federal Greens MP David Shoebridge showed up, describing the club’s proposal as “a climate crime”.
In April 2022, after a year of deliberation and further requests for information from the club, the council issued its response. It was bad news for the club. According to the council, Royal Sydney hadn’t completed any water-quality modelling or looked at the potential impacts on wetlands. It hadn’t assessed the development’s effects on the local microbats or the seagrass and seahorses in Sydney Harbour, or indeed considered the potential for serious and irreversible impacts on other critically endangered flora and fauna. As for the 1888 new trees, it turned out that many would be short-lived and not as tall as those they replaced. Moreover, the club had, according to the council, “inaccurately represented” the project’s impact on the existing vegetation and consistently put course design ahead of the environment, even in areas of high biodiversity. The plans were unanimously refused.
In May, then, the club appealed to the NSW Land and Environment Court. As part of the court process, the club was obligated to enter conciliation with the council. The first meeting took place at the council chambers in July. Grieve and others addressed the council: one of those who spoke was local music teacher Nicolette Boaz. “There’s a great photo I have of the meeting,” Boaz tells me, “of all the men from the golf club wearing suits, and then a group of us middle-aged women in our civvies.”
But it also signalled the end of the road for the club’s opponents, who were barred from any further meetings between the club and the council. “It’s all
behind closed doors now,” says Grieve.
The club said that if conciliation didn’t work, it’d proceed to trial in the Land and Environment Court. In the end, it didn’t have to. In early December, the court upheld the club’s appeal and Woollahra Council approved the plans. The club had made significant concessions: 595 trees would still be chopped down but another 2187 native trees would be planted, and 14 hectares of turf would be replaced with native grasslands. Compliance would also be beefed up. “This will ensure increased biodiversity benefits,” the council said.
A club press release trumpeted that the new plans would “more than triple the Club’s current floral diversity with over 100 different native species, as well as increase the total number of trees on-site by nearly 1600” and that annual water usage would drop by 20 per cent. President Chris Chapman said while the process had been lengthy, the result was “the most exhaustively detailed golf course renovation plans in Australian history”, at more than 1000 pages, and that “all the environmental benefits promised by the restoration will be delivered”. Work is due to begin in early 2024.
Others weren’t so sure. “It’s a greenwash,” says Jeff Angel, from the Total Environment Centre. “The club is playing a numbers game. They are knocking down mature trees which already form part of important wildlife habitat and replacing them with lots of little shrubs. Mature trees play an important role in urban landscape. They were planted by previous generations as an investment for the future, and here we are, just trashing them.”
Grieve agrees. “This is nothing but an accounting trick. The club has fiddled around with the numbers, added to the total trees but the result is the same. We’re still losing 595 large mature trees with all their embedded carbon and environmental benefits.” The larger problem, according to Grieve, is the planning system. “Developers can keep coming back and coming back until they get their plans approved. After a while, it becomes impossible for a council to fight it.”
Grieve is good at indignation: it’s a type of fuel for her. But at a certain point, indignation becomes exhaustion. When I talk to her on the phone in early December, she sounds as if she’s been in the ring with an 800-pound gorilla with a giant golf club in its hand. But she’s also philosophical. “I tell my staff, we have to be proud. We forced the club to address climate change, to consider the trees and the endangered animals.” She sighs lightly, then her voice perks up a notch. “In a way we won. We’ve shown that they, and other elite clubs, don’t have an inalienable right to destroy the environment.”
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