Sydney just lost an entire forest for an elite golf course renovation

Machinery and diggers move around piles of rubble, dirt and sand at Royal Sydney Golf Course, 20 Janurary, 2024. Photo courtesy: Adriana Vaccari.

“Since 8 January, the sound of excavators and bulldozers has replaced the joyous bird song I used to wake up to,” Karin Vesk tells me, a long-time Rose Bay resident.

“A huge part of me doesn’t even want to live here anymore. My mornings are literally mourning.”

She’s talking about a mass tree-cull in her own neighbourhood.

Peer through the fence at the Royal Sydney Golf Club grounds today and you’ll discover an otherworldly scene. It’s as if a meteor has fallen and shattered the earth’s crust. All that remains as evidence is a puckered moonscape dotted with tree stumps.

Across the last couple of weeks, construction workers have begun to fell an entire urban forest – 595 trees in total – in Sydney’s ritzy eastern suburbs. They have ripped up the dirt at the meteor crash site with machinery like a hoard of zealous geologists excavating for scientific secrets. It’s all happened right under our noses, as we’ve flocked to bush retreats, beaches and air-conditioned family gatherings over the holiday season.

But that’s not to say there wasn’t warning. The tree removal is part of a golf course redesign for the Royal Sydney Golf Club (RSGC) in Rose Bay. The elite invitation-only golf club, which has made recent headlines as a bastion of old-wealth conservatism and nepotism, is clearing the fairways to enable better access for television crews and drones. This will increase the course’s usage for international tournaments. Australian Golfing Digest, the nation’s premiere golfing magazine, ranks the course as the 52nd best in the country. It’s hardly a glowing review for a course the magazine once ranked 4th.

The club has attempted to sell it as an environmentally-friendly return to coastal heathland. But to the sceptics it’s a vanity project designed to boost the club’s prestige – one that will cause havoc for a host of endangered species.

You won’t find any signs up on the fences around the Rose Bay golf course specifying which company is controlling and inspecting the site like you would with a bog-standard housing construction site. Why? There’s no private certifier, or any council certifier for that matter. This means there is no authority scrutinising the work at the golf course and ensuring it abides by planning requirements. Officially-speaking, what is happening on the golf course is landscaping work.

“It is gobsmacking that a $17.5 million development application is not worthy of a private certifier,” Nicola Grieve says, a Greens Councillor at Woollahra Council. “This is not landscaping.”

As a result, the public must take it in good faith that RSGC will stick to the conditions of consent attached to the development approval.

For some, it’s a big ask.

RSGC is where the crème de la crème go if they want to whack a small white ball down a fairway. Or play croquet. Or indulge in billiards. It costs $26,500 to join the golf club. The yearly subscription is $5,300. Prime Ministers automatically receive membership.

Perched on a hill overlooking the surrounding greens, the 100 year old clubhouse, somewhere between Hogwarts and a Victorian-era estate, is a domineering sight. Signs on the fences and entrances around the golf course warn of 24 hour security patrols and guard dogs. Pine trees, palms and immaculate hedges line the neighbouring streets, and there are just as many rows of tennis courts in Rose Bay as rows of hedges. The golf club alone accounts for 16 of the suburb’s tennis courts.

The Norwich Road entrance to the Royal Sydney Golf Club replete with signs warning of “security patrols” and “guard dogs”. Photo courtesy: Adriana Vaccari.

As a hub of wealth and privilege, the club has a history of stretching and probing the boundaries of law. In 2020, RSGC claimed $2.8 million in JobKeeper subsidy payments, lifting its after-tax surplus to $3.5 million. When the story went public, outrage ensued; the government had introduced the subsidy as a crutch for struggling businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, not as gem-encrusted lining for the coffers of ultra-exclusive institutions still raking in profits. The club, however, refused to return the money.

It soon found itself in hot water again. During the peak of a citywide lockdown in 2021, the club suggested in a circular email that members from Mosman, one of the city’s wealthiest postcodes, take a water taxi across the harbour to use the club’s facilities. In doing so, the club told members, they would avoid breaching the five-kilometre travel restriction then in place, which prevented members in the lower north shore from driving to the golf course.

The media had a field day.

*  *  *

Trees are a vital safety net that insulate us from, and lessen, climate change. As a form of natural air-conditioning, they prevent urban heat islands, improve air quality and reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a key greenhouse gas accelerating global warming.

Dr Sebastian Pfautsch, an urban planner from Western Sydney University, tells me that the tree cull will radically alter the microclimate inside and around the golf course.

“It will be warmer and drier,” he explains. “Increased stormwater runoff and soil erosion can be expected as well.”

On the Royal Sydney Golf Club website, the club spruiks the environmental benefits of the “Championship Course Project” and foregrounds the plan to increase the net tree count at RSGC to 1,592. PR copy highlights “the preservation and improvement of a habitat for native flora and fauna during, and beyond, the project”.

What the golf club does not want to admit, Dr Pfautsch points out, is that the planting of extra trees will not provide the same ecological benefits as the urban forest that is now being removed – an urban forest that contains towering old-growth trees such as Moreton Bay Figs. Over 70 percent of the trees earmarked for removal have a life expectancy of over 50 years.

“Removing hundreds of established trees and replacing them with spindly shrubs and small trees is not providing adequate impact mitigation,” says Dr Pfautsch, who has closely followed events at the RSGC and examined the redesign plans.

“It’s a sad, sad day.”

Accusing the golf club of “corporate greenwashing”, Karin stresses that it will take years, decades even, for the new shrubs and trees to reach full maturity. For a substantial interim period, the course will be barren. It raises questions about the safety of the threatened grey-headed flying-foxes that call the course home.

There is also a stormwater eco-corridor channel that runs through the Royal Sydney Golf Course and Woollahra Golf Course next door. Reclaimed by tufts of grass and duck families, thanks to urban bush regeneration, the stormwater drain leads to the harbour. Pesticide run-off from the redevelopment will therefore pollute Rose Bay which is home to endangered species of seagrass and seahorses, critics have long argued.

Indeed, environmental changes are already evident. While we’re yet to see consequences downstream, Karin sends me photographic evidence that the use of herbicides, intended to eradicate turf and weeds, is seeping beyond the boundaries of the golf course and poisoning surrounding grassland. 

But few seem to be taking note. Aside from one feature story in Good Weekend and the odd report in hyper-local newspapers, the press has rarely given the issue any attention. The prolonged community campaign to save the near 600 trees, led by Councillor Nicola Grieve, ultimately achieved little. When the development application received the green light in December 2022, activists conceded defeat. They dropped their campaign.

More recently, Karin and her husband Jim have tried to assemble a last-ditch rescue effort. Karin has come to the issue late, realistically too late. By the time she realised what was happening the redevelopment project had already received formal approval. She says that the community campaign to save the trees flew under the radar while people were stuck at home during COVID-19 lockdowns. But it hasn’t stopped her.

Karin is an amateur detective. She has started an Instagram page documenting the progress and dangers of the golf course makeover. She has made appeals to the public and media for aid. In recent months, she’s reached out to a range of local politicians such as NSW Liberal MP Kellie Sloane and teal Allegra Spender, whose electorates cover Rose Bay. Aside from interest and support from the Greens and the Animal Justice Party, however, her pleas have largely fallen on deaf ears.

“They recruit well-meaning but gullible volunteers on the back of their pseudo-green policies while really supporting the big end of town,” Karin says about her local parliamentary representatives.

*  *  *

On the phone, Nicola Grieve, a Greens Councillor on the Liberal-dominated Woollahra Council, speaks with a frantic staccato rhythm. She’s just seen the moonscape at the Royal Sydney golf course.

“It’s so out of touch with where the world is at,” she says.

“They have beasts of machines digging into what used to be Aboriginal law-making land. The Aboriginal heritage study [produced for the DA] said there is a near 100% chance that there will be more bones found. But there is no one there watching these huge machines plough into the ground.”

The RSGC commissioned Coast History and Heritage to produce a report on the site’s archaeological significance as part of the DA. That report confirmed what was largely already known: the golf course is an Aboriginal burial site and tribal punishment ground.

(Royal Sydney’s President Lucy Regan told No Filter, “For several years now Royal Sydney has been working with the La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council, who were actively involved with the assessment, test excavations and the development of management procedures for the Championship Course Project… With the project now underway, we are committed to ensuring that any potential Aboriginal heritage considerations are managed in exact accordance with these measures.”)

But it’s not just heritage and environmental concerns that have turned much of the public against golf as a sport. There is a cultural divide, a segment of the population that now views these elite water-guzzling institutions as relics of the past which lock up valuable land for their fee-paying members.

Across Australia, demands for authorities to open up golf courses to the public have escalated in recent years. During COVID-19 lockdowns, dog-walkers reclaimed courses. In Sydney and Melbourne, residents even cut holes in fences around golf greens to enable public access. Then, in October last year, the Minns government announced it will turn half of Moore Park Golf Course into a public park to balance rising urban density. A few days later a Sydney Morning Herald investigation revealed that golf courses in Sydney’s eastern suburbs – there are 13 of them – constitute 6.5 percent of the total area east of the Eastern Distributor.

Councillor Grieve is certainly no fan of golf. She led the original Save The Trees campaign against the RSGC, which led to the original proposal being scrapped by the club in September 2020 and reformulated. Despite obstruction from Woollahra Council and community condemnation – 1227 locals signed a petition opposing the updated plans – the campaign only managed to soften the hammer blow ever so slightly. RSGC agreed to plant more trees and native bushes, reduce annual water usage and jump through a maze of compliance loopholes and report writing. But the club received the go-ahead to chop down the 595 trees that had caused the furore in the first place. It was a gruelling process that cost Councillor Grieve friendships, and it’s clear from talking to her across the last few months that the campaign has exhausted her.

Councillor Nicola Grieve (second from left) and NSW Senator David Shoebridge (centre) at a roadside protest against the RSGC redevelopment plans in December 2021.

She recognises that the power of councils to intervene in planning matters has steadily eroded in recent decades. When Woollahra Council rejected RSGC’s reformulated DA in April 2022, the golf club appealed to the Land and Environment Court and brought in the heavies: Minter Ellison, one of the most prestigious law firms in Australia. In Sydney, money speaks.

Councillor Grieve is also pessimistic about the future of grassroots environmental activism in Sydney. For years, the Woollahra LGA has been losing foliage due to waterside mansion tree felling on private land where the council has little power.

It’s a point Karin makes when she provides an alternative spoken-word map of Woollahra marked by tree loss and anguish – “the Danny Avidan moonscape carved into Piper Piper”, “the unforgiveable destruction of magnificent trees and an apartment at 34 Kent Road, Rose Bay”, and so on.

“Every time we walk around the neighbourhood, we see yet another garden decimated – usually for a bigger, single-family dwelling, or a view. And where houses are replaced by (expensive) townhouses, the properties rise from scorched earth, built to within inches of their boundaries; huge trees replaced with twigs of cypress bought for 19 bucks a bucket at the local Bunnings,” she says.

“Hoardings with pictures of trees are more common than actual trees.”

In the last twelve months, Woollahra Council has introduced stricter planning rules around deep soil magnitudes and tree canopy cover for new private developments and committed substantial funding to boosting canopy cover in the local government area (LGA). The council wants the LGA to have tree canopy cover of 30 percent by 2050.

“We’re now 3.6 hectares behind where we were yesterday,” Councillor Grieve stresses in reference to the golf course decimation and the uphill battle to green Sydney’s eastern suburbs.

“I have no faith in the planning system if this DA could get through. There is no hope of protecting any other tree now because of the precedent set by this,” Councillor Grieve warns.

“How can our staff say no to the next DA that proposes clear felling their site?”

*  *  *

Karin’s husband Jim was at St Vincent’s Hospital a few weeks ago for an operation. While there, he got talking to a middle-aged man. They must have chatted quite a bit because Jim quickly learned that he was a RSGC member and he played golf regularly at the Rose Bay course. When Jim asked him what he thought of the redevelopment project for the course, this man told Jim that he approved.

When Jim pressed him about his views on the removal of almost 600 trees, he scoffed, stating “it’ll be double that mate”.

Jim has taken the assertion very seriously. He tells me over the phone that the man has a background in private development, so “he would know about this kind of thing”.

Enlisting the help of Councillor Nicola Grieve, Karin and Jim quickly informed Woollahra Council staff of a possible DA breach, worried that the club had already felled more trees than the agreed-to number.  

“Council is communicating with the Royal Sydney Golf Club and will continue to monitor compliance,” a council spokesperson told No Filter. “No evidence of breach of the conditions has been identified to date.”

So it was a false alarm. But closer monitoring of construction work is a step the council has taken thanks to Karin, Jim and Councillor Grieve – one that will make life hard for the club if the rumours start to become real.

Regardless, the words of the mystery RSGC member at St Vincent’s Hospital speaks to a pervasive pattern of behaviour among club members, an assured belief that no small-time tree-hugger can stand in the way of the club.

If continuing opposition in the local community is proof of anything, it’s evidence that people will never stop caring, even when the fight is supposedly already over.