The Lakes Golf Club

The Lakes was founded in 1928 on sandy country at Eastlakes, between the airport and the city, on the same dune system that gives Sydney its handful of genuinely sandy courses. The club lost land to the construction of Southern Cross Drive in the 1960s and rebuilt holes to compensate, taking on a water-heavy routing by Bruce Devlin and Robert von Hagge.

The course was reworked substantially by the Australian architect and former tour professional Mike Clayton, completed in 2009. He kept the Devlin and von Hagge routing and reimagined the strategy on top of it, clearing decades of trees and scrub that had hidden most of the property. From some tees the Sydney skyline is now visible. It has staged the Australian Open on many occasions.

What it asks of you

A par 72 in which the water is the signature and the sand is the substance. Lakes are in play on several holes and they photograph well, but the course is decided on the sandy, rolling stretches where the strategy lives.

The clearing widened the playing lines, which means a mis-hit is no longer swallowed by scrub and the player has to decide what to do with a recovery rather than simply drop. In exchange, Clayton built some of the boldest putting surfaces in Australian golf: multiple ridges, split tiers, and shelves that can be used as hole locations.

The result is a course where professionals do not automatically reach for a driver on every tee, and where a birdie and a double bogey are available from the same position depending on the decision taken.

What players say about it

Visitor and society times are limited and by arrangement, so the review record is moderate. 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

• The Clayton redesign is very well received, and reviewers frequently say the course has never been better in its history.
• Conditioning is described as immaculate and consistently so.
• The strategic interest is the most praised quality: the course asks questions on every tee rather than demanding length.
• It is judged demanding for a good player and still enjoyable for a higher handicapper, which is a difficult balance on a championship course.

What comes up against

• The greens divide opinion. Some reviewers, and reportedly some members, think Clayton went too far on the most extreme surfaces.
• Parts of the redesign were controversial at the time and that memory persists in accounts of the course.
• The setting between the airport and a motorway is functional rather than beautiful, and aircraft noise is constant.
• Visitor access is limited, and the review record is thinner than for a public course of similar standing.

Getting there and when to go

Eastlakes is around fifteen minutes from central Sydney and five from the airport. The Australian is ten minutes away and New South Wales Golf Club twenty, which makes a three-course Sydney trip easy to organise.

The course plays all year on sand that drains. Spring and autumn give the most reliable weather. Visitor and society times are limited and by arrangement.

Green fees

Rates and 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, Wikipedia and published architecture coverage for the history, the motorway land loss and the 2009 redesign, and the club’s own site for access. The opinion section summarises public reviews, guest accounts and architecture writing 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.