Tooleybuc Sporting Club Golf Course

Tooleybuc sits on the Murray River in the far southwest of New South Wales, right on the Victorian border — a stretch of country defined by red gum flats, irrigation channels, and the slow, brown pace of the river itself. The town is tiny, the kind of place you pass through on the Sturt Highway between Swan Hill and Balranald, and the golf course reflects that honest, no-frills character entirely.

Like most bush clubs in this corner of Australia, the Tooleybuc Sporting Club course is a community affair — maintained by volunteers, kept alive by locals who take their Saturday competitions seriously. Golfers here play on sand scrapes rather than grass greens, a common and entirely practical adaptation to the hot, dry inland climate, and the course rewards a low, running game over anything aerial and ambitious. The surrounding red gums and native scrub make for a genuinely Australian setting that manicured resort layouts simply cannot replicate.

For travellers making their way along the Murray, or keen golfers ticking off the remote bush tracks of the Riverina, this is the kind of stop worth making — genuine, unpretentious, and rooted in the region's agricultural heartland.