ROAD TO 100 - GOING OUTTABOUNDS DOWN UNDER
Previously on Chapter I and II,
- 07/01/2025 Forest City Golf
- 07/01/2025 Horizon Hills
- 10/01/2025 Mandurah
- 12/01/2025 The Cut
- 14/01/2025 Meadow Springs
- 15/01/2025 Kwinana Golf Club
- 24/01/2025 Margaret River Golf Club
- 26/01/2025 Denmark Golf Club
- 27/01/2025 Albany Golf Club
- 29/01/2025 Esperance Golf Club
- 10/02/2025 Whaleback
- 11/02/2025 Hillview
- 13/02/2025 Wave Rock
- 14/02/2025 Kalgoorlie
- 24/08/2025 Carnarvon
- 28/08/2025 Exmouth
- 01/09/2025 Hartfield
- 03/09/2025 Royal Freemantle
- 04/09/2025 El Caballo
VIII. The Nullarbor Crossing
From Kalgoorlie, Ronnie took us west, and almost immediately, everything changed. The cities disappeared, then the trees, and eventually even time itself began to feel different, with nothing ahead but the Eyre Highway, one of the longest straight roads in the world, running more than 146 kilometers without a single turn. First, it feels like freedom: no traffic, no decisions to make, no noise. But the further you travel, the more the landscape begins to take over. Cliffs dropping straight into the Southern Ocean, empty desert stretching in every direction, road trains passing as the only other sign of life. It stopped feeling like a road trip somewhere along the way and became something closer to a crossing.
Along that stretch runs the Nullarbor Links, officially the world's longest golf course. Par 72, spread across more than 1,365 kilometers of the Nullarbor Plain. Rather than eighteen holes in one place, you play a single hole in each town along the highway: Kalgoorlie, Kambalda, Norseman, Balladonia, Caiguna, Cocklebiddy, Madura, Mundrabilla, Eucla, Nullarbor Roadhouse, Penong, and finally Ceduna. Some holes are little more than a flag planted in red dirt. Some sit beside fuel stations. Some are surrounded by nothing at all, no crowd, no noise, no expectations, just the wind and a scoreboard moving slowly across the country. Out there, golf stops being a game in any conventional sense and becomes, instead, a way of measuring distance.
Silence does something to you after enough hours of it. There is no signal, no distraction, nothing pulling at your attention and yet the mind refuses to slow down simply because the world around it has. We found ourselves thinking, more than we expected to, about what came next, where we were headed after this stretch ended, what would happen once it did, what might go wrong if we hadn't figured it out. Somewhere between Kalgoorlie and the ocean, the thought finally settled: it is difficult to enjoy a moment fully when part of you is already living in the next one.
- 24/09/2025 - 27/09/2025 Nullarbor
IX King Island
Sitting alone in Bass Strait, between the Australian mainland and Tasmania, King Island is home to barely 1,500 people. There is one roundabout, no traffic lights, three stop signs, and hundreds of thousands of wallabies. In King Island life slows down. Strangers waved as they passed on the road. The staff at the grocery store knew my name, and I knew theirs. In a world where everyone always seems too busy, King Island was a reminder of what a community feels like when nobody is in a hurry. It is a community immersed and deeply connected with nature and relies on its local products. Beef, sheep, deer, cheese, crayfish, salmon, squid, abalone, honey, gin…
A particular thank you belongs here to Sukma, and the Jones family, who welcomed me like family and gave me an Australian Christmas I will never forget. They didn't simply offer a place to spend Christmas, they gave me a home on the far side of the world and for that I will always be grateful.
The island holds three golf courses in total. King Island Golf & Bowling Club, built by the local community in 1928 and still largely run by volunteers, makes do with just twelve greens to create eighteen holes. Proof that luxury was never a requirement for building something unforgettable. Ocean Dunes is wilder and rawer still, threaded through enormous sand dunes with the ocean almost crashing against the fairways on some holes, and is consistently ranked among Australia's finest modern links courses. And above them both, on the island's northern tip, stands Cape Wickham.
- 12/10/2025 Cape Wickham
- 22/10/2025 Ocean Dunes
- 01/10/2025 King Island Local
X. Cape Wickham’s Wild Links
Perched on the northern tip of King Island beneath Australia's tallest lighthouse, Cape Wickham has watched over Bass Strait for more than 160 years. The lighthouse was built in 1861 after the wreck of the Cataraqui, one of Australia's worst maritime disasters, and it still stands watch today. Opened in 2015 and ranked thirteenth in the world, Cape Wickham is widely regarded as one of the finest links courses built outside the British Isles. Ocean views every hole, the wind deciding how the round will go, the eighteenth wrapping around Victoria Cove where, at low tide, the beach itself comes into play. I spent six months working there.
For most golfers it's a bucket-list course; for me, it was work, mowing fairways in sideways rain, chasing consistency through wind strong enough to knock you off balance, learning that on an island this remote, every breakdown becomes its own small crisis. Golfers see perfectly striped fairways without ever seeing what it takes to produce them. It isn't the machinery that makes a course like this. It's a small team refusing to let the elements win, morning after morning. In the middle of those six months, a story from home caught up with us in the most unexpected way.
Growing up, there was a kid Carlos, and I used to “compete” against on the Portuguese junior circuit, Daniel Rodrigues, a genuine talent already then. That year, Daniel earned his card on the DP World Tour, and when he posted that he'd be playing in Australia, I texted to congratulate him and asked, half out of curiosity, whether his schedule would bring him to Royal Melbourne. It did. He did not have the time to come to Cape Wickham but instead, in a turn none of us saw coming, he asked Carlos to caddy for him. Carlos carried the bag all week, I flew over to watch, unwilling to miss it from a distance. Royal Melbourne has a mystic among golfers all around Australia and there was no better way to get to know it.
While we were on the mainland, a golfer I met at the King Island Open invited us to play The National, one of Australia's most prestigious clubs, one more reminder that this whole trip had been shaped by people, not plans. Then it was back to King Island, to finish what I had started and Carlos would soon join me for 4 months that marked the end of a journey that had carried us across deserts and endless highways, through remote courses and communities that welcomed two strangers from Portugal as though we had always belonged there. If I could recommend a single place to every golfer on earth, it would be this one.
- 06/12/2025 Spring Park
- 08/12/2025 The National Gunnamatta
Next: A Long Way Home. Final Chapter
