Badgingarra Golf Club

Badgingarra is a small farming community roughly 180 kilometres north of Perth, sitting in the wheat-belt transition zone where Western Australia's coastal plain gives way to drier inland scrub. The area is best known for Badgingarra National Park, a wildflower reserve that draws visitors each spring when the sandplains erupt in spectacular displays of banksias, grevilleas, and everlastings. Golf here exists on entirely different terms than you'd find along the coast — this is rural, unhurried, and thoroughly unpretentious.

The Badgingarra Golf Club is the kind of club that sustains small-town sporting life in regional Australia: volunteer-run, community-owned, and welcoming to any traveller who pulls off the Brand Highway looking for a round. Courses like this across the Western Australian wheatbelt typically feature sand greens — locally called "scrapes" — which require players to carry a small rake and smooth a putting line before each putt, a tradition that's as much a part of bush golf as the kangaroos patrolling the fairways.

Playing a course like this is less about the scorecard and more about the experience of rural WA — wide skies, eucalypt scrub, and the genuine hospitality that regional clubs extend to visitors. It's a long way from the resort fairways of Joondalup or the Vines, and that's entirely the point.