Ellerston

Overview: Ellerston is a private 18-hole, par-72 course in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales, set within a large rural property far from the dense urban coast. Greg Norman and Bob Harrison shaped the course around the Australian landscape, using the site’s scale, native bush, creek corridors, changing elevations and broad views to create a demanding modern layout. The long championship routing is not built as a series of isolated target holes: the sequence moves between open ground, sharper rises and creek-side approaches, with the slopes around the greens adding as much interest as the fairway lines. Its remote setting is part of the course’s identity, but the design itself is the reason Ellerston remains prominent in Australian course discussions.

History: The project was commissioned by media proprietor Kerry Packer in the late 1990s and opened in 2001. Bob Harrison’s account of the work describes a brief for a very demanding course on the Ellerston property, which gave the design team freedom to use difficult ground and dramatic changes of scale. Harrison had joined Greg Norman Golf Course Design in 1988 and lists Ellerston among his major projects. The result was a rare private course built for a single estate rather than a conventional public resort, and later course commentary continues to identify the Norman–Harrison partnership as central to its design history.

Did You Know? Ellerston’s design brief was unusually direct: in Bob Harrison’s account, the recurring question during the project was whether the course was hard enough. That instruction helped produce a layout where the challenge comes from the combination of length, demanding angles, creek-side decisions and sharply defended greens, not simply from adding distance to every hole.