A quiet redesign at Long Island golf course has produced something rare in Australian golf: three distinct courses woven into one ever-changing layout.
The revamped Long Island course at The National is shaping up as one of the more thoughtful redesigns in Australian golf, and not just because of its Sandbelt setting.
What OCM Golf (Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead) have created isn’t simply a refreshed 18, but something more imaginative – a “course within a course”, or more specifically, three courses within a course. The redesign allows three different 18-hole layouts to be played across the same piece of land.
In the early stages, the designers have spoken about those familiar moments when you stand on a fairway and can’t help but imagine a different green as the target – a more interesting angle, or a better use of the land. That line of thinking quickly became a bit of fun: what if you actually did play to that other green?
Before long, they had half a dozen holes mapped out with alternate routings, and from there it snowballed into something much bigger.
At the heart of it now is a clever routing philosophy that uses around 20 greens, shared fairways, and alternate tees to produce three distinct courses, typically referred to as The Original, The Farm, and The Track.
Each routing mixes and matches holes in different sequences, sometimes approaching greens from entirely different directions, meaning the experience can shift quite dramatically from one round to the next. It’s not quite a traditional “composite course” in the Royal Melbourne sense, but it borrows the same spirit, just taken a step further.
The result is three very different personalities on the same site.
The Original leans into Gordon Oliver’s 1938 design, restored and opened up to better reflect classic Sandbelt strategy. The Farm introduces alternate lines and a different rhythm, while The Track tightens things up for a more exacting, strategic test. It’s effectively three golf experiences layered over the same ground, but without feeling forced or over-designed.
There’s something quietly compelling about it all. Golf doesn’t always need more length or more difficulty — sometimes it just needs more imagination.
Long Island feels like a project that trusts golfers to enjoy variety, to notice angles, to think their way around. And the longer you think about it, the more it feels like the kind of idea the game could use more of.