As I stop the car in the national park, wistfulness arrives. I’m in the Adelaide Hills for the park run event at the old Belair golf course.

The landscape’s changed. I’ve changed too.

On my previous visit around the change of millennium it was a lush and brilliant sea green and rightly respected as a golfing postcard. That day my leisure buddies were chaps I went to school with from our hometown of Kapunda.

Crackshot. Puggy. Bobby.

I love the pre-run buzz as clusters of runners collect and dissolve, collect and dissolve. Much anticipatory and animated chatter. At the bottom of a brown hill two hundred of us congregate on the parched apron.

Belair golf course was closed about a decade back. The clubhouse is also gone—replaced by the bumps and swooping curves of a BMX track. I recall post-round beers on its balcony overlooking the final hole and watching other groups approaching the green. We’d admire the parabola of a successful shot but also feel solidarity with those spraying into the foliage. Our conversation might’ve gone thus:

‘That’s a nice shot into the green. Just like yours, Puggy,’

‘Let’s hope he doesn’t three putt as well.’

‘Harsh. How many balls did you hit out of bounds today, Mickey?’

‘Careful. Whose buy?’

‘Crackshot’s.’

I remember playing the Friday after my graduation; a mild winter’s day in 1988. These were good times. My world was necessarily opening up, but the Belair golf course remained a comforting, occasional alcove.

*

Our 5k run begins with an alarmingly steep climb up the 18^th. The track’s loose with sandy rubble so I watch my feet. The Run Director had cautioned the throng: ‘It’s a trail and most weeks someone comes to grief.’ Despite this his briefing was generous and encouraged a cuddly sense of togetherness.

We then cut across half a dozen holes and it’s frequently 4WD terrain. Among the inclines and undulating gum forest we’re sheltered from the wind but it’s nonetheless demanding.

At the teardrop turn, we swivel and retrace our steps. As always, there’s a broken stream of elite runners who skate ahead and illuminate the way.

It was nostalgic and my old affection for the course surged. The golf holes remain and some of the greens are now home to frisbee golf buckets and nets. So, it’s still golf Jim, but not as I know it.

Kangaroos hop here and there or lounge about indifferently like (muscular) bogans in Bali. They still own the place.

Scampering across the ex-fairways, I was teleported back decades and considered The Great Gatsby. I appreciated those, ‘riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart’ and could almost hear the ghostly rifle crack of an errant Hot Dot clunking onto a gum tree trunk— accompanied by a groan and paddock language.

Pushing along beneath the trees and through the balmy shade, I wondered about the lost world of my youth. Where had it and the verdant fairways gone? Here I was in my new (parkrun) life but was there loss and also emergent reward?

Is the past really a distant, gaseous planet and we’re forever marooned on Earth? TS Eliot once wrote:

Time and the bell have buried the day,
the black cloud carries the sun away.

Perhaps he was right. Or perhaps the past never fully leaves us. No to all that, for my life (now) is radiant, kaleidoscopic, and rich.

I’d enjoyed peering into my youth on this parkrun which had masqueraded as a museum tour. Was I sad the old golf course was gone? Yes, but I was happy for the fun of playing there with childhood friends when a lazy afternoon could be gladly lost on the fairways.

Tumbling back down the final hole, I collapse through the finish gate. Hands on hips, I pull in some air and gaze about Saturday’s temperate, misty morning.

On my way back to the car I hear (I think) a percussive burst of spectral golf club on ball.

Photo credits: Belair National Park parkrun