2016
The internet has a knack for turning even the simplest ideas into something divisive virality or mildly dangerous. No matter how edible Tide Pods might look. But the recent trend of sharing your digital footprint from ten years ago is one I can get behind. Mostly because it arrived at exactly the right moment.
Looking back at 2016 now, with a decade of distance, it becomes clear how much of what followed was quietly shaped that year. The sacrifices, the half-formed ideas, the chance conversations. At the time it all felt loose and temporary. In hindsight, it was anything but.
In 2016 I had been out of school for a few years and was working as a caddie at the exclusive and infamous Capital Golf Club. I had been looping there on and off for about six years, drifting without long-term commitments or a defined plan. I was looping ‘Australia’s Shadow Creek’, chauffeuring wealthy locals and international high rollers, trying to stay useful and invisible at the same time.
I roped in friends, family, and eventually my girlfriend to work there too. No arm twisting required. My girlfriend at the time, Lillie, was studying an environmental degree and juggling four jobs. We lived with two other girls, also studying, in a knock-over weatherboard house in Oakleigh South that is somehow still standing. Our neighbours were the local primary school, Metropolitan, and Huntingdale Golf Clubs. Hopefully the statute of limitations has passed, but we had what might have been the toughest par three on the Sandbelt playing from our driveway. Only one par was ever recorded. It was disputed.
The founding members of the (redacted) Street Golf Club. Home to the hardest Par 3 on the Sandbelt.
I was making good money for someone in their early twenties and had the kind of freedom that makes you reckless in the best way. Enough independence to chase curiosity wherever it wandered. At night, I fed that creative energy into music, working out of a spare room that barely qualified as a studio. In 2016 alone I made somewhere between five to six hundred music files. That included a full album produced exclusively for Lillie’s twenty-first birthday, featuring her friends absolutely destroying the vocals of her favourite songs with enthusiasm and very little accuracy.
Most days were indistinguishable from one another. Work hard, play hard, repeat. I had no degree, no real investments, unless you count a small and poorly timed crypto portfolio. What I did have was time, and a growing sense that the world was bigger than the loops I was walking. I would recommend that phase to anyone. Just not forever.
By 2016, Lillie could see it too. That my time drifting in the sun was nearing its end. We talked about long-term investments, mostly in yourself. Saving money. Learning your craft. Taking the thing you love seriously enough to risk it failing. Maybe, if you were lucky, turning it into a life.
I loved golf. But more than that, I had developed a rough, unpolished obsession with golf course architecture. It felt like a career from another era, something that disappeared along with milk deliveries and corner butchers. Except it had not. There were still a small number of people doing this work, shaping land with intent and restraint, and I was quietly convinced I could belong among them. It promised creativity, travel, and rewards that were directly tied to effort. The problem was obvious. How do you even begin?
The answer, it turns out, was not through a grand plan.
From the back tee on the 8th hole Par 3 at Capital Golf Club
At Capital, it was common for me to be on standby whenever the course owner, Lloyd Williams, decided to appear for a casual nine or eighteen. In 2016 there was a stretch where he frequently played with David Evans. Their rounds were filled with conversations about golf, but more specifically, about construction, maintenance, and the invisible work that makes great courses endure.
David owned a property past the Black Spur, winding its way toward Lake Eildon. His ambition was to build a course that belonged entirely to the Victorian landscape. That place would become Cathedral Lodge. Over weeks and months, David would provide updates to Lloyd as they walked Capital’s fairways.
They did not need a caddie. They certainly did not need me. But Lloyd knew about my primitive fascination with golf architecture and allowed me to hang around. I stayed quiet. I listened. I learned. Walking alongside those two men became one of the most influential classrooms of my life, whether any of us recognised it at the time or not.
Looking back at the 17th Green at the Cathedral Lodge, roughly 10 years ago.
Once Cathedral Lodge was built, I began caddying there on the odd occasion. For David, for members, for guests. On one of those days, Cathedral hosted a match against the newly opened Tara Iti. Walking those fairways was Tara Iti’s newly appointed superintendent, Brian Palmer.
We spoke about golf architecture with the enthusiasm of people who probably should have been paying attention to something else. Brian made the mistake of giving me his contact details. For nearly the next decade, I would make full use of them. Questions, ideas, observations, all fired his way. He became one of my most important and unofficial mentors, whether he agreed to the title or not.
That meeting with Brian would not have happened without the chance to caddy for David. That opportunity would not have existed without Lloyd Williams. And none of it would have happened if I had not been caddying at Capital in 2016, aimless but curious.
In 2026, it is easier to understand how fragile and random those moments were. How easily they could have been missed. One different roster. One skipped shift. One moment of choosing convenience over curiosity.
So when I think about 2036, I try to remember that lesson. That the most important doors rarely announce themselves. They arrive disguised as small talk, shared walks, borrowed time, and chance encounters that feel insignificant until they are not.
I have not yet achieved anything of note in the field of golf course architecture. But I am ready. I am paying attention. And I know now that the next decade will be shaped less by grand plans and more by showing up, staying curious, and recognising the quiet moments that might one day change everything.
Because that is what 2016 taught me.
Sun setting on the 18th hole at the Capital Golf Club.
