Inside Australia’s First Purpose-Built 12-Hole Golf Course

He had spent years fighting to save a Club that was staring down administration, navigating a pandemic and overseeing a multi-million-dollar transformation. 

As a midweek golfer who played tennis on the weekends, Mr Hall-Watson could see what lifelong devotees couldn't — that the old model was broken, and something genuinely new was needed.

Newgreens Chatswood officially opened on 31 May on the site of the former 18-hole Chatswood Golf Club on Beaconsfield Road.

It is now the first purpose-built 12-hole golf course in Australia, but it did not start out that way. 

The project, which has been a decade in the making, began as a survival plan for a 78-year-old Club carrying debt, declining membership and a single revenue stream in a weather-dependent sport. 

"A golf club is a one-product, weather-dependent business," says Mr Hall-Watson. "That's a high-risk business."

The breakthrough idea was to excavate the old car park on the eastern edge of the course and build a retirement village on the escarpment.

With Board support and partnering with developer Watermark Retirement Living to own and build the retirement village, they built the brand-new clubhouse.

The course land itself was never touched but when architects reviewed the remaining layout, they delivered an uncomfortable truth.

The old 18-hole design had dangerous crossover holes which meant fairways intersected with each other. 

"They said they would not put their name to a course that had crossovers," Mr Hall-Watson says. "It's just too dangerous." 

So the solution? Twelve beautifully redesigned holes with history, somewhat accidentally made.

However, the traditionalists were not immediately charmed. 

"Golf is 18 holes, that's just not on," was a common refrain. But Mr Hall-Watson, a former IT consultant who had spent his career helping people embrace change, had a gift for bringing the unconvinced along for the ride. 

The clincher came when a long-serving Club professional reversed his position publicly. "He convinced so many of the diehards," says Mr Hall-Watson. "That was the cherry on top."

Then COVID arrived and, unexpectedly, made the case. During lockdown, Hall-Watson's mobile became the Club's only contact point. 

He remembers one call vividly: a young father who asked whether, if he teed off at 7am, he could play 12 holes and still get his kids to sport by 10:30. 

"That was a key moment," says Hall-Watson. "The older folk were saying they were too tired to play 18. The younger generation didn't have the time. Suddenly there was a market."

Managed by Clublinks, whose state manager Stephen Peverett describes it as "golf reimagined — accessible, social, and time well spent", the Newgreens precinct is now a community hub.

It has a retirement village, wellness centre, Dodici Italian restaurant, Tempo café and bistro, conference facilities and a golf course that residents can, quite literally, roll out of bed and walk onto. 

Mr Hall-Watson himself has moved in.

Asked what he grieves about the old Club, he pauses. He tells of an older woman who arrived one day to collect her clubs during the closure, her golf bag the only remnant of what had been, for years, her social world. 

"I suddenly realised that golf was just an excuse,” says Mr Hall-Watson. 

"It was really about the friendships." 

Those women, he notes with satisfaction, are back now playing cards in the new clubhouse.