Salmon Gums Golf Club

Salmon Gums Golf Club sits in one of the more remote corners of Western Australia's vast Goldfields-Esperance region, a stretch of country where the horizon goes on forever and the native salmon gum trees — with their distinctive salmon-pink and grey bark — define the landscape as much as anything else. The town of Salmon Gums itself is little more than a farming community on the Coolgardie-Esperance Highway, roughly midway between Norseman and Esperance, and the golf club here is very much a product of that rural, self-sufficient spirit.

Like most outback WA golf clubs, this is almost certainly a sand-scrape layout, where fairways give way to compacted sand greens — or "browns" — maintained by the members themselves and typical of the Australian bush golf tradition. It's the kind of course where the score matters far less than the company, and where wildlife encounters, including kangaroos and an enormous variety of birdlife, are part of every round.

Playing here is genuinely off the beaten track. For travelling golfers who collect unusual experiences rather than championship venues, a round at Salmon Gums offers something no resort can replicate: golf stripped back to its essentials, played under a wide southern sky.