The Cliffs at Kangaroo Island opened in late November 2024 as the first new Australian championship-grade golf course since Cape Wickham on King Island in 2015. The Darius Oliver design sits on a coastal heath site at Pennington Bay on the south side of Kangaroo Island, with eight of the eighteen holes playing along the Southern Ocean cliff edge.
The project received South Australian planning approval in 2019 after a five-year community-consultation process that included extensive environmental review of the impact on native Kangaroo Island vegetation. Construction was delayed by the 2019-20 Kangaroo Island bushfires — the site itself was not damaged, but logistics including freight access to the island were disrupted for over six months — and by subsequent COVID-19 restrictions that limited interstate construction crews from working on the site through most of 2020 and 2021.
Darius Oliver, the architect, is best known for his work as the Australian principal at the international firm of Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf and for his 2010 redesign of Cape Wickham. His brief at The Cliffs was a minimalist routing — minimal earthwork, native heath vegetation retained between play corridors, no shaping artifice. The result is a 6,261-metre par-72 layout that plays substantially shorter than its yardage suggests because of the prevailing Southern Ocean tailwind on the back nine.
The par-3 8th — 169 metres directly along the cliff edge to a green that drops away to the ocean on the right — has already become the most-photographed new Australian hole of the 2020s. Min Woo Lee played the hole during the November 2024 opening exhibition match and made birdie from 14 feet; the broadcast clip from that opening was the most-watched Australian golf social-media moment of 2024.
The accompanying 60-room resort opened in March 2025. Green fees for resort guests are AU$280 per round; non-resort visitors pay AU$420 with a 14-day advance booking requirement. The course is open year-round, with the November-to-March Australian summer the peak season.
The Cliffs is owned by the same investment consortium that operates Cape Wickham on King Island, and there has been speculation about a possible joint-membership offering between the two venues that would create an Australian equivalent of the Bandon Dunes multi-course resort model. No formal announcement has been made as of mid-2026.