Royal Canberra Golf Club

Royal Canberra started in 1913 on a site near what is now the city centre. In 1962 that ground was due to disappear under Lake Burley Griffin, so the club moved to Westbourne Woods, an arboretum planted decades earlier and nearly lost to the drought of 1941 to 1944.

It was Dr Max Jacobs, principal of the nearby Forestry School, who proposed in January 1945 that a permanent golf course be built through the arboretum, as a way of saving the trees. Sydney professional James Scott drew a 27-hole layout after the war; the plans sat in a drawer for almost twenty years until Commander John Harris took them out and routed eighteen holes through the woods.

What it asks of you

The Westbourne course is a par 72 of about 5,850 metres, which is short by modern championship standards and beside the point. The arboretum is the course. Specimen trees planted for botanical reasons, not golfing ones, stand where an architect would never have put them, and the holes have to work around that.

What that produces is a driving test rather than a distance test. The line off the tee is dictated by trees that have been there longer than the golf, and there is no version of the hole where you overpower them.

The club has 27 holes and plays composite eighteens, so the course a visitor gets is not always the same one. Published yardages vary between sources for that reason.

What players say about it

This is a private club, well covered in the Australian rankings. The points below summarise what recurs. These are other people’s opinions, not ours: we have not played the course, and we name and quote no one.

What comes up in its favor

• The arboretum setting is named in every account, and reviewers call it the most beautiful course in the country as often as not.
• Conditioning is consistently reported as excellent.
• The story of a course built to save the trees, rather than by clearing them, interests people who know it.
• The routing through mature specimen planting gives each hole its own room.
• The clubhouse and the welcome are well regarded.

What comes up against

• Access is restricted, and a visitor needs a member or a club introduction.
• It is short, and low handicaps say the trees do more of the defending than the design.
• Canberra winters are cold and the course plays soft.
• The composite eighteens make it hard to know in advance which holes you will play.

Getting there and when to go

The club is at Yarralumla, on the western side of Lake Burley Griffin, about ten minutes from the centre of Canberra and twenty from the airport.

The course plays all year. October to April gives the firmest ground and the best of the arboretum. Visitor access is arranged in advance.

Green fees

Visitor conditions 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, the club’s published history and encyclopaedic entries for the 1913 founding, the 1962 move, Max Jacobs’s 1945 proposal and the Scott and Harris routings, and public course records for par and length. Published lengths differ between sources, partly because the club plays composite eighteens from 27 holes, so we give an approximate figure. The opinion section summarises public reviews read in September 2026; we report recurring themes rather than individual voices, and we reproduce no quotations.

We have not played this course, and this page is no substitute for a round. The club has not paid for this page, has not seen it before publication and has no say over its content. If you know the course and something here is wrong or out of date, write to us and we will correct it.