Perth sits on sand, which should be the most exciting sentence in Australian golf. Sand is what made the Melbourne Sandbelt possible: it drains, it firms, it lets an architect shape a green complex with a spade rather than a bulldozer, and it rewards the golfer who reads the ground over the one who merely reads the yardage. The Swan Coastal Plain has acres of the stuff, laid over limestone and shaded by tuart, and for most of the twentieth century Perth did remarkably little with it. The fairways went to kikuyu, the corridors went to trees, and the city's golf became pleasant in the way a well-kept suburban park is pleasant.
That is changing, and quickly. Restorations at the private clubs, a run of serious coastal designs to the south and a renovation at Mount Lawley that would not look out of place in Cheltenham have made Perth worth a proper argument. This is mine. A ranking is only an opinion with numbers attached, so here is the criterion behind the numbers: I have ranked these courses on the quality of the questions they ask. Not difficulty, not length, not views, and certainly not the clubhouse.
1. Lake Karrinyup Country Club
Lake Karrinyup Country Club is the best golf course in Western Australia, and it is not especially close. The routing is Alex Russell's, the same mind behind Royal Melbourne East and Yarra Yarra, and his gift here is the way he uses broad, rolling hills: tee shots climb blind over a ridge, and the reward for finding the right side of it is a downhill second into a properly built green complex. The eye wants to bomb it over the top; the percentages want the shoulder that opens the angle. That is strategic design in a sentence.
What lifts it to first is the 2007–08 work by Mike Clayton, John Sloan and Bruce Grant, who rebuilt the bunkers and reimagined several greens that had drifted a long way from Russell's intent. Restoration done well is an act of humility, and this was done well. The course has the championship pedigree to match (four Australian Opens between 1954 and 1974, and the co-sanctioned Perth International four times between 2012 and 2016) but the pedigree is the least interesting thing about it. It is a private club: visitors play as a member's guest, through a reciprocal club or with management's prior approval, so plan ahead.
2. The Cut Golf Course
Strictly, The Cut Golf Course is not in Perth; it sits at Dawesville, south of Mandurah, on a strip of dunes between the Indian Ocean and the Peel Inlet. I have included it anyway, because anyone serious about golf in this city drives south for it, and because it is the most natural golf on the coast. James Wilcher, who spent more than a decade on Greg Norman's design team, opened it in 2005 as his first full eighteen, and you can feel a young architect being brave with good ground.
The short par 4s are the heart of it. The 11th sends you at a blind green perched on a dune above the sea; the 17th, at 293 metres, is the cleverest hole on the property, asking you to decide how far to lay up to a saddle in the fairway rather than whether you can reach the green. That is a question well asked. The 12th, from a tee above the beach, is the postcard, but it is the 17th you will still be thinking about at dinner. It is public access, and it is genuinely hard in a southerly, which is not the same thing as being good, though here it happens to be both.
3. Joondalup Resort
Robert Trent Jones Jr opened Joondalup Resort in 1985 with the stated aim of maximising a spectacular landscape, and for once the landscape is the argument. Of the three nines (Quarry, Dune and Lake), the Quarry is the one people travel for: its opening stretch wraps around the walls of a disused limestone quarry, and the 3rd, at around 136 metres from the championship markers, asks for a carry over the pit to a green on the far rim. The 5th is the better hole, a 370-metre par 4 whose fairway zig-zags along the quarry edge, forcing a decision about how much of the void you are prepared to bite off.
My reservation is the one I hold about most resort golf: it is a course of moments rather than a sustained examination, and the Lake nine in particular rarely rises to the standard the Quarry sets. But when the moments are this strong, the reservation is a footnote. Open to the public seven days a week, about half an hour north of the city; the Quarry–Dune combination is the one to book.
4. Mount Lawley Golf Club
The most encouraging thing to happen to Perth golf in years is what OCM did at Mount Lawley Golf Club. The renovation rebuilt the green complexes and fairway bunkering and opened the course up with sandy waste areas, and the result reads, for the first time, like a Perth course that understands what Perth sand is for. It is the closest thing the city has to a Sandbelt course, which from me is not faint praise.
The new greens are the point: they now have shape that matters, fall-aways that punish the careless approach and slopes that reward the player who thinks about where to miss. Mount Lawley hosted the WA Open in 2025 on the new layout, and I suspect it will climb this list as it matures. It is a private club, so check the visitor policy with the club before you go.
5. Secret Harbour Golf Links
Secret Harbour Golf Links is the course of the moment: from 15 to 18 October it hosts the WA Open for the first time, the first time the championship has gone to the City of Rockingham at all. Graham Marsh built it in two stages, the Links nine in 1994 and the Dunes nine in 1998, and the two halves are different courses in spirit. The Dunes holes, running through raw sand hills with glimpses of the ocean, are the real thing; the 5th, plunging downhill to a small, heavily bunkered green, is the best of them. The Links holes are more consistent but hemmed in by housing.
Honest criticism: the kikuyu rough has grown heavy over the years, and the firm, bouncing ground game a links promises is not always there to be played. Firm fairways still reward an iron off the tee, and the bunkering is genuinely penal. Watch how the professionals handle the 5th; it will tell you most of what you need to know about the course. Public access, under an hour south of the CBD.
6. Cottesloe Golf Club
Cottesloe Golf Club began life in 1908 as nine holes on land now occupied by its neighbour Sea View, and the course you play today owes most to Graham Marsh, whose masterplan was largely completed for the club's centenary in 2008. It sits on a rolling site between the city and the ocean, with holes falling down and climbing back up the slope, and the sea breeze does the rest.
It is a parkland course with the bones of something more coastal, and I wish it leaned into those bones harder. Where the ground is allowed to move and the white bunkers sit into the slope rather than on top of it, Cottesloe is very good indeed. A former WA Open venue and a fixture in national rankings, it is private; contact the club about visitor play.
7. Royal Fremantle Golf Club
History earns Royal Fremantle Golf Club its place before a ball is struck. It is the oldest eighteen-hole course in Western Australia: the first nine was laid out in 1906 by the club's first captain, Arthur Oliphant, and the Scot Peter Anderson, reportedly in a single afternoon, with the builders blasting through limestone cap rock beneath the sand. The Royal prefix came in 1930, the WA Opens have numbered more than twenty, and the honour board runs from Craig Parry to Min Woo Lee and Minjee Lee.
Architecturally it is a more conservative proposition. Almost every hole doglegs, most are framed by trees, and the kikuyu means your drive stops where it lands. The 16th, the hardest hole on the course, has no bunkers at all and needs none; it is a hole defined by angle and wind, and I admire it a great deal. Michael Coate rebuilt the greens in the early 2000s and Richard Chamberlain has since been at work on the putting surfaces. A private club, though interstate visitors can contact the office to request a tee time.
8. Sun City Country Club
Sun City Country Club at Yanchep is the most instructive course in Perth, because it is two courses at once. The original 1974 layout was by Bob Green and Murray Dawson; in 2016 the OCCM team of Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Clayton, Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead rebuilt roughly half of it, three holes on the front nine and the first six on the back. Play it and you can feel the join. On the old holes the hazards are mostly in the air: trees, carries, things to fly over. On the new holes the interest moves to ground level, to bigger, cleverer greens and natural sandy wastes that expose the bones of the site.
The 2nd, a 275-metre par 4 from the tips, is a risk-reward hole of real wit, and the 13th, tumbling downhill across a sandy gully, shows what this ground could be everywhere. At last report the remaining holes were still awaiting their turn. Finish the job and Sun City would sit much higher on this list. Public access.
9. Meadow Springs Golf & Country Club
Robert Trent Jones Jr's second appearance on this list, Meadow Springs Golf & Country Club opened in 1987 on the edge of Mandurah and is, against the odds, a course that hides its suburb completely. Tall bush and old tuarts, some of them around two centuries old, screen a tight figure-of-eight routing from the housing around it, so that for most of the round you might be in a national park.
The greens are the story: big, multi-tiered and closely mown at the edges, so that a miss on the wrong side runs away into swales rather than settling in rough. The 13th is a short par 4 that a long hitter can reach and probably should not try; the 18th, a par 5 with a long bunker across the front of the green, sends you home with one last decision to make. It is narrower than I like, but the narrowness is honest. Open to the public seven days a week.
10. The Vines Golf & Country Club
The Vines Golf & Country Club in the Swan Valley hosted the Heineken Classic from 1993 to 2001, which for a generation of Australian golfers made it the most famous course in the state. The fairways are wide and the greens large, and width, as I never tire of saying, is the raw material of strategy. The difficulty is that too often here the width is simply room rather than a question: there is a safe side and a less safe side, but rarely a side that opens the green.
It earns tenth because it is easy to get on, pleasant to play and a fine introduction to golf in the Valley, with wineries close at hand for the post-mortem. Public access; fees vary with the time and the package, so treat any quoted rate as a guide and check with the course.
The ones that didn't make it
Three omissions need defending. Links Kennedy Bay, the pot-bunkered links by Michael Coate and Roger Mackay with Ian Baker-Finch near Port Kennedy, is the hardest omission: it misses out only because the ten above ask marginally better questions, and on a windy afternoon I might reverse that. Royal Perth is in the final stage of a three-stage course transformation and is targeting an early 2027 reopening; judge it then, not now. And Wembley, the city's busy 36-hole public complex, keeps an Old Course that has barely changed since 1932, which is either a virtue or an indictment depending on your mood; a master plan has been in the works for some time.
Perth has always had the ground. What it is only now acquiring is the nerve to let the ground do the talking. The best courses here ask you to think; the rest merely ask you to hit it straight.
