Bella Vista

For so long the golf courses of Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula have existed in the shadow cast by the amazing layouts of the Mornington Peninsula, which is just a 40-minute ferry ride across Port Phillip Bay.

Chatting to some local Bellarine golfers you will hear them sometimes refer to the Mornington as “the other side” in a geographical reference, but also one with a tone of rivalry.

The Bellarine has closed the gap on its bayside neighbour with four courses entrenched in Golf Australia magazine’s Top-100 Courses ranking, and a fifth likely to join them when the next list is published in January 2022. There are also acclaimed public access layouts and nine-hole courses in the region to help scratch your golfing itch when holidaying in the region.

For mine, the ease of accessibility for visiting golfers and value for money of a round are the Bellarine’s greatest assets.

Adding to the growing hype about the Bellarine is the addition of the Lonsdale Links course.

Lonsdale Golf Club dates back a century but the course that now lies across fantastic golfing terrain at Point Lonsdale is the newest on the Peninsula, having reopened last December – following an extensive rebuild by the design team of Ogilvy, Cocking & Mead (OCM – Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead).

The club’s previous incarnation was a good course but the rough diamond that it was, has been polished, buffed and polished again to produce a layout that is destined to propel the club into the Top-100 Courses ranking at the start of 2022.

The OCM design ebbs and flows across gently undulating coastal dunes, while holes on the lower reaches sit alongside salt marshes and wetlands near Lake Victoria. It is a short par-70 of just 5,505-metres from the tips but the links aspects of the course will test better players, while allowing the rest of us to simply have fun. If having fun was the sole underlying purpose behind Lonsdale’s new design, then OCM has hit the nail on the head, especially those holes that have been inspired by some of the world’s best holes.

In the early 1900s, famed course architects CB Macdonald and Seth Raynor created a series of template designs, based