Lake Karrinyup Country Club

Lake Karrinyup was founded in 1928 and its course laid out by Alex Russell, the 1924 Australian Open champion who had worked with Alister MacKenzie on Royal Melbourne and who was, by then, the leading architect in the country.

He was given rolling sandy ground north of Perth wrapped around a natural wetland lake, and the routing uses both: holes rise and fall across the dunes and the lake sits at the centre of the property rather than at its edge. The club has held the Australian Open and, more recently, tour events on both the men’s and women’s circuits.

What it asks of you

A par 72 of 6,531 metres over ground with real elevation change, which is rare in Australian championship golf and gives Russell’s design its character: uphill approaches to raised greens, downhill tee shots that run out, and stances that are seldom level.

The greens are quick, and reviewers who have played them in summer describe them as slippery. The course plays dry and fast in the second half of the season, when water allocation limits what can be put on it, and that changes the golf considerably from what a spring visitor experiences.

Magnificent eucalypts frame the corridors, the lake holds more than seventy bird species, and kangaroos are on the fairways every day. That is not a marketing line; it is what visitors report.

What players say about it

Play is by membership or a member’s invitation, so the review record comes from guests. The notes below summarise recurring themes across specialist golf sites, traveller review pages and player discussion threads. They are other people’s opinions, not ours: we have not played the course, and we do not name or quote individual reviewers.

What comes up in its favour

• It is consistently rated the best course in Western Australia, and reviewers who have played the rest of the state agree.
• The setting draws comment from everybody: eucalypts, the lake, the birdlife and the kangaroos on the fairways.
• Conditioning and the clubhouse are both praised, and the food comes up almost as often as the golf.
• From the back tees it is a genuinely strong championship test, which visitors who play them confirm.

What comes up against

• Access is closed. There is no visitor tee sheet, and a golfer without a member’s invitation will not play it.
• Guest green fees are described as steep even by people who enjoyed the round.
• Late-season dryness under water restrictions makes the course play very hard and fast, and not every visitor enjoys that.
• The hilly routing is a real walk, and reviewers who took it on foot in the heat say so.

Getting there and when to go

Karrinyup is around twenty minutes north of central Perth and twenty-five from the airport, near the coast at Trigg and Scarborough.

The course plays all year. Spring gives the greenest and softest conditions, autumn the firmest and fastest. Perth summers are hot and dry, and the golf is best early in the day. Guest play is arranged through a member.

Green fees

Guest conditions and rates are set by the club. See the club’s own site.

How this page was made

The factual frame comes from public sources: OpenStreetMap for the location, Wikipedia and published architecture and tournament coverage for the history and the design, and the club’s own site for access. The opinion section summarises public reviews and guest accounts read in September 2026; we report recurring themes rather than individual voices, and we do not reproduce or attribute quotes.

We have not played this course, and nothing here is a substitute for that. The club has not paid for this page, has not seen it before publication and has no say in what it says. If you know the course and something here is wrong or out of date, write to us and we will correct it.