DIY course a world-beater

Otago Daily Times

25-04-2025

When Queenstown Golf Club president John Grant's wife June teed off to officially open the Kelvin Heights course 50 years ago this month, it marked the completion of arguably the resort's biggest DIY project.
Their son Bill, the club's longest-serving member, joining in 1958, says his dad and fellow Skyline director Hylton Hensman had been at a board meeting at Skyline's Bob's Peak gondola complex.
"Hylton was looking out the window and he said to dad, 'that [peninsula] would be a great place to put a golf course, wouldn't it?'
"And that's how it all started."
In 1968, visiting English course designer Commander John Harris examined four sites for an 18-holer — the club already had a nine-holer in Frankton — and concluded Kelvin Peninsula, "from as thorough an inspection as the jungle permitted ... if it is possible to use this area for golf, I can say that it will become one of the most scenic golf courses in the world".
Bill says Harris "wanted, like, $10,000 to design the course, and they couldn't afford it".
Instead, Hensman designed the course using a contour map.
Building the course, Bill notes, was "a huge mission because of the terrain we were working with".
"The bracken and scrub was cleared and rocks were removed and dumped in the deep gullies before they were levelled and grassed," George Singleton's history of the peninsula states.
Some 50 to 60 truckloads of soil, for example, were dumped on top of beach gravel on the fifth fairway.
John Grant and Hensman did a lot of the work themselves, providing their own machinery, and Bill helped, between farming duties, for the princely sum of $1 an hour initially.
In one weekend, trucks from all over town carted gravel for the base of all the greens.
Many locals also cleared stones from fairways as construction neared completion.
According to a budget in 1969, the course build was estimated to cost $102,500, but by 1975 Mountain Scene reported it had cost about $300,000.
Club members raised about $50,000 in debentures, council gave $10,000 over five years and neighbour Frank Mee gifted a section which sold for $10,000.
To put it in perspective, club GM Andrew Bell says that $102,500 is $1.6million today, "which is one fairway at [Queenstown's] Jack's Point".
Bill: "One of the pubs wanted to give us $10,000 and take out naming rights but they said 'no'."
Bell says once the course opened the committee each month had a lucky draw to see whose debenture got paid — "John Grant got drawn out and he said, 'pay someone else"'.
The club leases the course off council which was vested the land by the Crown in 1929.
"The club, as custodians, has turned it into probably one of the best parks in New Zealand.
"We are actually the biggest park in Queenstown, and as Queenstown gets bigger and we want green space, this is one of the few protected green space areas."
And, just as the founders foresaw, it's become comfortably one of the resort's leading visitor attractions.
"Unlike an Auckland course that might be doing 70,000 rounds because they've got warm weather all year, we're sort of 30,000 to 35,000 rounds — 50/50 split between visitors and members."