Welaregang Country Golf Club

Welaregang sits in the upper Murray River country of southern New South Wales, close to the Victorian border in a stretch of high country that most Australians have never visited. The town itself is tiny — little more than a handful of properties in the foothills east of Corryong — and the golf club here is very much a product of that remoteness: a small, community-run layout that exists because the people who live and farm in this valley decided they wanted one.

Courses like this one are a distinctly Australian institution. The bush golf club — often with treated sand scrapes instead of grass greens, a honesty-box green fee, and a membership that doubles as the local social fabric — is as much a part of rural New South Wales as the pub or the showground. Expect native eucalyptus framing the fairways, wildlife that has no intention of yielding the right of way, and a layout shaped more by the natural contours of the land than by any design brief.

If you're passing through on the Great Alpine Road corridor or exploring the Snowy Mountains fringe, a round here is less about the golf on the card and more about the experience of playing where almost nobody does.