From the air, the Seven Mile Beach peninsula looks something like a dolphin, gracefully arching its body as it divides Tiger Head Bay from a turquoise-water lagoon. The spit of land is readily visible on the final descent into the airport of Tasmania’s capital city, Hobart, and in this well-developed region it stands out as a strange and unlikely bit of wilderness.
Tour professional Mathew Goggin grew up learning the game nearby, on the other side of the airport runway at Royal Hobart Golf Club, as part of a prominent golf family (his mother, Lindy, reached the finals of the 1981 U.S. Women’s Amateur only to be stopped by future Hall of Famer Juli Inkster). Goggin has been exploring this piney, beachy district, sensing its potential for great golf, since his youth.
“Tassie’s a small place. When you grow up there it’s easy to think there’s no opportunity,” said Goggin, 46, who now lives in Charlotte, N.C. “But that has really changed.”
He is now a partner in a group that has, after a decade of fits and starts, obtained a 99-year lease from the state government to develop a golf facility at Seven Mile Beach. Construction is slated to begin in earnest in 2022, with a possible opening in 2023.
Grassy sand dunes dot the landscape at Seven Mile Beach in Tasmania, where approval has been granted for a new golf course. (Courtesy of Clayton, DeVries and Pont)
“Mat was telling me about this project back when he was 21, 22,” said Mike Clayton, the former European Tour mainstay who is now one-third of the firm Clayton, DeVries and Pont, which has been commissioned to design the golf course. Working with Tom Doak, the Melbourne-based Clayton co-designed the course that put Tasmanian golf on the map – Barnbougle Dunes – so his enthusiasm for Seven Mile Beach speaks volumes.
“The natural site might be even better than Barnbougle,” Clayton said in a phone interview. “There are some big dunes, some smaller ones, and it’s wide – there’s lots of space to get down to the beach and then away from it. No getting stuck in corners. No matter where you go, there’s a great hole. On a site like this, there should never be a bad hole or a long walk [from green to tee].”
Clayton added that the climate and sandy soil would be amenable to the fine fescue turf essential to proper links golf.
A property with such potential presents what might be called the Sand Hills Conundrum – a golf architect’s version of FOMO, in which so many intriguing possibilities exist that the idea of choosing just eighteen holes can almost induce paralysis.
“The problem,” Clayton said, “is if we’ll ever really know if we have the best routing.”
Pine trees have anchored steep dunes at Seven Mile Beach site in Tasmania, where development of a new golf course has been approved. (Courtesy of Clayton, DeVries and Pont)
Goggin agreed, though he pointed out that unlike at the Nebraska classic, “The water is there as an anchor.” In other words, the architects know that how their routing seeks out then interacts with the beach and bay will be a significant part of the Seven Mile Beach story.
Goggin has played the game at the highest level – fans might recall he was a contender late in the final round at the 2009 British Open at Turnberry – but his interest lies in making a course that’s great for everyone.
“Being a pro golfer, you see the game differently,” he said, adding that he’d taken buddy trips to places like Barnbougle and Bandon Dunes in Oregon to get a feel for what his amateur friends love about those golf meccas.
“What Mike Clayton opened my eyes to was just how important the walk is,” he said. “When a site goes from zero to 60 feet in elevation, you can hike up a hill to get a dramatic view [for a tee shot] – if you really want. But you have to be careful with things like that. His routing is so much more compact and communal. There’s an area where three greens and two tees come together – you can watch people stuff up the same hole you just did and have a laugh. But you never feel like you’re cramped or hitting into people.”
Mathew Goggin grew up near the approved site of a new course at Seven Mile Beach in Tasmania. (Golfweek files)
Early last year, CDP dramatically altered the course routing that had been in place for much of the 2010s. Mike DeVries, whose 2015 design at Cape Wickham on neighboring King Island garnered wide acclaim, spent a week on site studying the original routing by OCCM, Clayton’s previous firm, flying out just days before the COVID-19 pandemic began closing borders. The Michigan-based architect determined that moving the proposed clubhouse location would unlock enough acreage to the north for a second eighteen-hole course on the peninsula’s lagoon side, which is known as Five Mile Beach.
While the bay side features choppy dunes clad in marram grass – a non-native species that nevertheless produced classic linksland – the lagoon side was a commercial pine plantation, which created a different kind of topography. Clayton compared the landscape on the north side of the peninsula to that of the London heathlands.
“Seedlings would blow into the dunes and germinate,” Goggin said. “Marram and native grasses couldn’t live under the pines. It created steep, unusual dunes, but they’re not choppy.”
While permissions for a second eighteen are dependent on the profitability of Seven Mile Beach, the team is betting on success. Its confidence is built on a public-access model and a central location, 10 minutes from the airport and half an hour from historic Hobart.
A stretch of land on the north side of Seven Mile Beach in Tasmania was a pine farm, and seedlings have germinated. The north side could feature a second course in addition to the 18 approved on the south side of the area. (Courtesy of Clayton, DeVries and Pont)
Goggin and friends hope Seven Mile Beach changes the flow of golf tourism in the state. In the past, globetrotting golfers might have flown in, spent a couple of days at Barnbougle Dunes in the island’s remote north, then retraced their steps to fly back to Sydney or Melbourne.
“Hobart’s a really cool city and a major tourist destination,” Goggin said. “Its hotels operate at near 100-percent capacity. And Tassie is an easy state to drive around. It would be great to turn a two-day trip [for international visitors] into a four- or five-day trip.”
How did a 900-acre property capable of yielding world-class golf within minutes of a major city fly beneath the radar for so many years? The secret, Goggin explained, lay in the sand itself.
“In the 1980s, the land was owned by a Japanese company during their economic bubble,” he said. “Their plan was a pie graph of mixed-use development that covered every inch of the peninsula.”
This ownership group and others were stymied, however, by a government sand-mining lease on the site. In remote Tasmania, quality local sand has great value to the concrete industry, and Seven Mile was (and is) the second-closest sand mine to Hobart. Based on the government extraction lease, Goggin said, “It was clear where they’re going to mine, and the landforms are really flat in that area.” It was not difficult, therefore, for the team to avoid routing golf holes through this portion of the site.
What’s next for Seven Mile Beach? Everything that should have happened in the tumultuous year of 2020 – clearing the pines from the site and beginning construction. “After ten years, we just have to wait a little longer,” Goggin said, adding that he hoped to return to Hobart later in 2021 to participate in the course’s creation.
As for Mike Clayton, his response was characteristically to the point: “Vaccinate Mike [DeVries] and get him down here to build it.”