i) Introduction: Golf comes to Queensland
The origins of the game of golf are obscure, but the sport in a form that we would recognise today was well established in Scotland by the 15th century. Within a hundred years, golf was a popular game and was even played by the king, James V of Scotland, on his private links in East Lothian. The ill-fated Mary Queen of Scots played golf at St Andrews, her clubs being carried by "cadets" - possibly the origin of the word caddie.
When James VI of Scotland became James I of England in 1603, he took his golf clubs with him and introduced the sport in England. The game was also spreading throughout Europe by this time, and golfers appear in several paintings by the Dutch masters. The clubs of those early days looked rather like modern clubs, but the balls, known as "featheries", were made of strips of hide stuffed with boiled goose feathers.
The first sporting club for golf appears to have been formed in 1744 in Edinburgh and clubs were common in England by the 1880s.
Golf came to Australia in the 1820s when a Scot named Alexander Reid played on farmland in Tasmania using clubs and "featheries". The land where this historic first game was played is now part of Ratho Course at Bothwell.
In 1869, the governor of South Australia, Sir James Fergusson, established the Adelaide Golf Club but it lapsed when he returned to his homeland after his term of office. Needless to say, the good governor was a Scot. The oldest existing club in Australia is The Australian Golf Club, formed in Sydney in 1882 by a group led by yet another Scot, Alexander Stuart. It went into recess from 1888 to 1895. The oldest continuous club is the Melbourne Golf Club (later the Royal Melbourne) which opened in 1891.
It took a few more years for the game to spread northwards. Townsville was the first club formed in Queensland in 1893 and Toowoomba formed a club in August 1896. Brisbane followed soon afterwards, officially opening in November 1896 on a 9-hole course at Chelmer.
The establishment of these Queensland clubs was reported in newspapers, particularly as the Governor of Queensland Lord Lamington was the founding president of the Brisbane Golf Club. With this social endorsement, golf obviously aroused considerable interest among sportsmen and in 1897, a group of enthusiasts in Ipswich began to discuss forming a golf club of their own.
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