Nannup Pineridge Golf Club

Nannup sits in the tall timber country of Western Australia's Southwest, a quiet dairy and forestry town on the Blackwood River roughly 270 kilometres south of Perth. The surrounding landscape — jarrah and karri forests, rolling green hills, river valleys — gives this corner of the state a character quite unlike the coastal courses that dominate WA golf. It is genuinely rural, and the golf here reflects that.

Pineridge is a community club in the truest sense: a volunteer-maintained course where local members keep the game alive in a town of only a few hundred people. The name points to the pine plantations that have historically defined the district's economy and, almost certainly, the tree-lined corridors that shape play on the course. Layouts of this type in the WA hinterland tend to be compact, sociable, and forgiving — places where the handicap range at any Saturday morning competition runs from scratch to 36, and nobody minds.

For visiting golfers, the appeal is the change of pace and scenery. A round here is an excuse to be in a beautiful, unhurried part of the Southwest, somewhere well off the resort trail.