Join the club, ladies: In this mini-golf game, you’ll come out swinging

A wise guy once recommended golf as the number one way to relax, focus, and plot one’s comeback. He ought to know. He made a very, very big comeback and owns an insurrection of golf courses. Very, very nice golf courses, in very, very nice spots, like Palm Beach, Los Angeles, Bali and Dubai, where he has miraculously turned the desert into lucrative valleys of green.

Of course, not everyone can afford to buy innumerable hectares of prime real estate and turn them into playing fields for the ridiculously rich. For some people even a simple round of golf on someone else’s nice green field may be prohibitive. This is where mini-golf comes in. It needs far less space, far less maintenance, and a good deal more humour.

For almost 160 years, long before our wise guy was born, mini-golf has offered light relief and sweet comeuppance to those who, for reasons of gender or class, have been historically excluded from maxi-golf. There are various origin stories for mini-golf, and one of them takes us back to 1867 Scotland, the home of golf, where women, incensed at being denied the chance to swing a club alongside their menfolk, staged a mini uprising.

Swinging a golf club was considered “unladylike”, as were many other sporting activities back then. But these 19th century Scottish ladies wanted to putt – lady-likeness be damned – and so they founded what is said to be the first mini-golf course, or at least its precursor, in St Andrews, Scotland. Their small nine-hole course, dubbed the “The Himalayas” for its bumpy surface, still exists and stands as testament to the women’s resolve.

Drawing on this spirit of playful rebellion, Rising festival curator and mini-golf obsessive Grace Herbert has enlisted nine marvellously inventive artists, among them Miranda July, Kaylene Whiskey and Pat Brassington, to devise a nine-hole mini golf course upstairs at Flinders Street Station. Herbert has dubbed the project Swingers, a neat little pun that alludes to the invention of mini-golf, and the bizarre notion that swinging a club would somehow warp a woman’s femininity, with the bonus of insinuating other types of non-conformity besides. As a title, Swingers is both political and tongue-in-cheek, a quality that carries through the exhibition.

“A lot of the conversations I’ve had with artists have been about joy and play and that while we kind of need that at the moment, that release can be a political act in and of itself,” Herbert says. “We’ve been calling it a playable art exhibition.”

It’s not the first time mini-golf has been co-opted by artists – American Doug Fishbone brought mini-golf to the 2015 Venice Biennale – as Herbert discovered while researching her idea.

Now Flinders Street Station, with its evocatively arched windows, pleasingly peeled walls, historic domed ballroom, and not a lawn in site, is poised for a mini-golf makeover. Rising’s team of fabricators, working in collaboration with uber exhibition designer Peter King, whose past feats have included Pharaoh at the National Gallery of Victoria and Molto Bello at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, have been busily bringing artists’ visions to life.

Swinging a golf club was considered “unladylike”.

In keeping with mini-golf’s dissident history, artists have come up with some curious obstacles: in Japanese artist Saeborg’s installation, players will putt with inflatable animal tails attached to their own tail-ends; for British-Romani artist Delaine Le Bas’ hole, they’ll putt with square balls; in Australian duo Soda Jerk’s course, players will swing the ball through a hole in a large video screen displaying a wacky psychedelic mash-up of golfing holes, doom scrolls, “K-holes”, and Teletubbies.

The game begins in a tartan-themed clubroom – “we’re leaning into the Scottish origins of the game”, says Herbert – where players will collect their clubs and balls before proceeding to the first hole.

That honour goes to the fabulously flamboyant Kaylene Whiskey, whose par-three hole, in the colours of the Aboriginal flag, loosely represents the road trip from Narrm/Melbourne to her home town of Indulkana, an Aboriginal community on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands of South Australia, where she paints at the Iwantja Arts centre.

Whiskey is known for her vibrant canvases combining Indigenous iconography with cartoon-like images of her favourite singers and comic-book characters. Her mini-golf course is similarly exuberant, peppered with her idols – Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, Cher, Cat Woman – and not least her sporting hero, Cathy Freeman, sprinting to victory at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

“Like in a lot of my paintings, I wanted to make it feel like a party,” Whiskey tells me via email. “There’s some of my favourite people there with you, and some of my favourite music to play and dance to as well. It’s like a mini-golf party in the desert!”

I ask Whiskey what Freeman symbolises for her.

“Cathy Freeman is another kungka kunpu (strong woman) and she’s done a lot of big things through her running and helping other people. She is a good role model for young girls and young people. I remember her Lycra bodysuit at the Olympic Games, she looked so good and was super-fast!”

Whiskey also features in her mini-golf hole, watching from the windows of the red Greyhound bus that forms the backdrop to her course. The bus is a staple of life on the APY Lands, necessary for the long drive to urban centres – for Whiskey it was trips to Adelaide, to visit family, or the beach, and once even a golf course.

“When I first saw a golf course, I thought wow! I loved the nice, lovely green grass! I played golf with school. It wasn’t a big competition, more relaxed,” Whiskey says.
She’s never played mini-golf though: “But I’ve seen it in the movies and on The Simpsons once.”

To complete the party feel, Whiskey has compiled a soundtrack featuring Aboriginal musicians including the Warumpi Band, Coloured Stone, and her cousin Jeremy Whiskey with the Iwantja Band.

“When we play this music at Iwantja Arts, it gets everyone smiling and singing along!” Whiskey writes. “I made the soundtrack thinking about the long trips we would take on the bus – you needed to make sure you had some good tapes for your Walkman to keep you smiling all the way there.”

Like Whiskey, Hobart artist Pat Brassington has never played a game of mini-golf in her life. She hasn’t even seen a mini-golf course. And so, initially, she declined Grace Herbert’s invitation to take part.

“And then I felt a bit mean,” Brassington tells me by phone from Hobart. “And I read the premise again and decided that, look, even though it seemed to be outside my ball court, that I should have a little adventure.”

The premise is not entirely outside her ball court – the acclaimed artist, now in her 80s, has long engaged with feminist themes in her surreal, digitally manipulated photographs and collages. The mood of her mini-golf course is quite a contrast to Whiskey’s, and characteristically mysterious.

Brassington has referenced her own work as well as that of fellow contemporary artist Mike Parr. She’s given a nod to Parr’s work The Tilted Stage, which was shown in the eerie Bond Store at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 2008, and involved Parr standing for as long as possible beneath a wooden tilted stage, his head protruding through a hole in the platform.

In Brassington’s mini-golf hole, a head will similarly poke above a slanted timber stage – in this case, an artificial head, more akin to the laughing clowns of vintage fairgrounds, and to her own works that often feature suggestive voids. Brassington’s lone head is female, boldly bald, with cavities for eyes and a wide, open, creepily receptive mouth.

Players will roll the ball along a plank on the tilted timber stage that leads to the back of the head. The ball will enter, dribble out of the woman’s mouth and down onto a carpeted area where players will then putt it into a central hole. Brassington says that she would like her mini-golf hole to engender a “a bit of enjoyment, a bit of wonder, a bit of questioning”.

American artist and author Miranda July, whose most recent book, the seditiously funny All Fours, about a perimenopausal narrator who ditches her dry domestic routine to live out her sexual fantasies in a motel room, leapt at the chance to design a hole for Swingers.

“I had just played mini-golf with my brother and nephews when this invitation came so the challenge was alive to me in a practical sense,” July says via email. “I like the holes where you lose sight of the ball and then it reappears, but thought maybe for a change it would be nice to not have to try to get it in the little hole, but still with some kind of meaningful outcome. Sports test my patience, but I have an endless appetite for oracles.”

July has designed the Wave of Fortune. It’s a two-metre-tall, theme-park-style wave. Players will putt their ball into the crest of the wave, and it will disappear into a system of grooves that will channel the ball into a hole with a flag attached to it. Each of the flags has a fortune on it, written by July.

Because she has the last hole, and the last word, she will send players off with a thought for the day. Her divinations are typically quirky and totally suited to the absurdity of the times. Here’s one of my favourites: “Don’t worry my dear, it is OK to feel blurry. In fact today is the perfect day for it. Bring nothing into focus.”

As a maniacal golfer pounds the world, for a day at least, you can stop worrying and drop the ball.

Swingers is at Flinders Street Station from June 4 to August 31 for the Rising festival. https://2025.rising.melbourne