Cleve Golf Club

Cleve sits in the heart of South Australia's Eyre Peninsula, a vast agricultural region where wheat and barley paddocks roll out toward the Spencer Gulf. The town itself is a quiet service hub for the surrounding farming country — the kind of place where the golf club is genuinely central to community life, and a round on a weekend morning draws most of the regulars in town.

Like many outback South Australian clubs, Cleve Golf Club almost certainly plays on sand scrapes rather than grass greens, a format born of necessity in a semi-arid climate where maintaining bent grass through a dry summer is simply not viable. Sand scrape golf has its own rhythm and etiquette — carry your piece of carpet, smooth your line, replace it just so — and newcomers quickly learn to read a scraped surface with surprising precision.

The Eyre Peninsula's wide skies and persistent winds off the gulf mean that a par 72 can play very differently from one day to the next. Bring something extra off the tee when it blows.