Royal Melbourne, West Course

Alister MacKenzie came to Black Rock in 1926, walked the ground and set the routing, then went home. Alex Russell and the head greenkeeper Mick Morcom did the building, and the West was ready for play in 1931. Russell designed the East himself, finished in 1932, and Tom Doak carried out a renovation in 2015 and 2016. The club that hired MacKenzie had already moved twice. It started in 1891 as the Melbourne Golf Club, took the Royal prefix in 1895, gave up Caulfield to the growing city, opened a links at Sandringham in 1898, and planned the move to Black Rock in the mid-1920s. It is Australia's oldest continuously existing golf club.

The Presidents Cup came here in 1998, the first held outside the United States, and Peter Thomson's International side won it; it returned in 2011 and 2019. The West is par 72 over 6,077 metres and landlocked, so the work before 2011 was restoration plus only minor lengthening. As a second brake on the ball the fairway grass went to Legend Couch — a surface later judged inferior, and now oversown with Wintergreen Couch. When a championship comes, neither eighteen is quite the course the world watches. For the 1959 Canada Cup the club took twelve holes from the West and six from the East, all inside the main property — the paddock. Twenty-one different holes have gone into that Composite Course between 1959 and 2011.