The course & your visit
Two Wells: scrapes in Lewiston Park
Two Wells plays scrape golf in the Lewiston Park nature reserve — McPharlin Road, Lewiston — which the club puts about 45 kilometres north of Adelaide and five from the town itself. That sentence needs unpacking for the uninitiated: the putting surfaces here are scrapes, smoothed and raked by the players, a tradition the club traces to shell-grit days when every golfer carried a wooden scraper. It is eighteen holes of par 70 threaded through protected native bush, and one of the most distinctive rounds in the batch.
Sources: Two Wells — location · Two Wells — history
How scrape golf works here
Grass is limited and the club says so upfront: practice is capped at three balls a round to preserve it, and the eighteenth doubles as the practice fairway — no warming up on other holes on competition days. After putting, players rake the scrape for the group behind, take buggies around rather than across the surfaces and tee blocks, and clear the scrape before recording scores. Divots get filled, slow play gets no quarter.
The signature is the short opening par three, played blind over a large quarry ringed by what the course notes call deadly scrub — the No. 1 quarry hole that sat full of water for all of 1955 after the floods. The scorecard runs par 70 for both men’s and ladies’ layouts.
Sources: Two Wells — green fees & etiquette · Two Wells — course tour
Cows, crosscut saws and a kerosene fridge
The club was formed in 1931, playing nine holes on a council reserve in front of the Tavern Hotel — three of them in adjoining Buckland Park — where cows and horses were, the history notes, the main hazards in more ways than one. Sunday golf was a social occasion; Saturdays came after the war in 1946. In 1949 the club moved to the Hicks property, where Bill Anderson’s crew built nine holes with crosscut saws after the bakehouse finished its daily bread, opening play in 1951.
The Lewiston era brought a 50-year lease at ten pounds a year, conditional on controlling weeds and rabbits, plus a binding agreement with the Flora and Fauna Society: disturb the native trees and the golf ends. Two hundred tons of sand filled the hollows, stones left in wheelbarrows, and the first clubhouse was a brush shelter with the toilet in the scrub. Early players supplied their own wooden scrapers and BYO refreshments kept in a kerosene fridge; the clubhouse grew from a donated halved shed and a fifty-pound wartime house that cost eighty to transport.
Sources: Two Wells — history
Visiting and competing
Visitors are generally welcome any day the course isn’t reserved for member competitions, open days or interclub events — the noticeboard carries the reserved times. Competition golf runs Sundays from 8:30am and ladies’ Tuesdays from 9am, with Thursdays to be announced; handicapped visitors with AGU or ALGU handicaps can enter club competitions on equal terms except championships, monthly medals and honour-board events, including the weekly nearest-the-pin, birdie-hole and long-drive novelties.
The calendar keeps the country traditions: season opening day, men’s and ladies’ open days, sponsors’ day, presentation evening and even night golf. The club puts the Barossa and Lyndoch half an hour away for anyone making a weekend of it.
Sources: Two Wells — green fees & etiquette · Two Wells — competitions · Two Wells — location
Researched from the published sources linked above.