Eric Apperly, not The Good Doctor, designed the stunning par-three 6th hole at Australia’s New South Wales
Dr. Alister MacKenzie made his only visit to Australia in 1926, leaving his design imprint on a fistful of courses that populate The LINKS 100, including New South Wales Golf Club in suburban Sydney, ranked 66th in the world. Among his stellar creations on this wildly undulating, coastal headland site on the La Perouse peninsula are the 505-yard par-five 5th, which climbs to a crest then plunges 100 feet toward the sea, and the 339-yard par-four 14th, which demands a drive over a bushland-choked ravine to a heaving fairway, followed by an uphill pitch to an exposed, horizon green. Yet, the most celebrated hole at New South Wales—the over-the-ocean, 186-yard par-three 6th—did not emerge from the mind of MacKenzie, but rather owes its existence to little-known Eric Apperly. Here’s the backstory.
New South Wales Golf Club occupies hallowed ground for Australians, for it was here in late April of 1770 that Captain James Cook of the British Royal Navy sailed the Endeavour into Botany Bay, at a site where today’s 5th and 6th holes converge. Cook charted the waters and landmarks on the eastern coast of Australia and claimed the region for Great Britain.
As British influence spread in Australia, so did the game of golf. It wasn’t until MacKenzie’s whirlwind tour, however, that world-class courses materialized. While Royal Melbourne West would be his Southern Hemisphere chef d’oeuvre, he was understandably proud of what he had wrought next to Captain Cook’s discovery spot.
“At Sydney, I made an entirely new course for the New South Wales Golf Club at a place called La Perouse,” wrote MacKenzie in May 1927. “This is a sand-duned peninsula which overlooks Botany Bay and presents, I think, more spectacular views than any other place I know, with the possible exception of the new Cypress Point golf course I am doing on the Del Monte peninsula in California.”
Per the MacKenzie modus operandi at the time, he created detailed design plans for the club to follow and enlisted the most capable local associates to build the course to his specifications. MacKenzie’s New South Wales opened in 1928—as an unfinished layout. Ultimately, it fell to Eric Apperly to carry out MacKenzie’s routing sketches.
Apperly was hardly a neophyte. Not only was he a fine player who won the 1920 Australian Amateur, he also was the first Australian to be specifically trained as a golf course architect.
Since word was much slower to spread worldwide in the middle part of the 20th century, many observers who arrived in later years mistakenly attributed design features to MacKenzie that were actually the work of Apperly, who built MacKenzie’s bunkers and made significant course changes.
“Take the famous par-3 sixth hole, often cited as the forerunner to Dr. MacKenzie’s famous 16th hole at Cypress Point, with its tee out on the rocks of the Cape Banks,” wrote Tom Doak in 2018. “In truth, the sixth was not part of MacKenzie’s routing, which went right from the fifth green to the tee of today’s par-4 seventh. In fact, none of the quartet of par-3 holes at New South Wales is the good Doctor’s work. All four of them were built by Apperly, either in the 1930s or right after the Second World War.”
In 2018, New South Wales retained Doak to masterplan changes to the course and to rebuild the 6th green in a location closer to the sea to accommodate the construction of an expanded coastal walkway, the Cape Banks walking trail. Doak described the process of being tasked with stripping the turf off the iconic 6th green as “surreal.”
In 2022, the club engaged Tom Mackenzie & Martin Ebert to produce their own masterplan; work concluded early in 2025. With a half-dozen different architects orchestrating changes since Apperly’s additions, the primary intention was to tie together design aesthetics into a cohesive whole. Tom Mackenzie also introduced vegetation and course details to reflect a more seaside, links-like appearance and playability. Along with recontouring the greens, they effectively doubled the size of the putting surface at the 6th. At long last, the hole Alister MacKenzie never knew resembled an ideal Alister MacKenzie hole.
