Environmental Awareness Award Winners

The Clubs SA Clubs & Community Awards took place on Saturday, October 12th, where Glenelg Golf Club was awarded the Environmental Awareness.

Congratulations to Glenelg Golf Club for winning the Environmental Awareness award again! Three years in a row is an impressive achievement and a real testament to the dedication and effort from everyone involved. It’s great to see the club’s environmental initiatives being recognised like this!

Our work this year includes

• Green Adelaide Grant – as part of the habitat connectivity project with the other golf courses (Royal Adelaide, Grange and Kooyonga), over 9,000 indigenous plants – some conservation rated – have been planted this year.

• A Kaurna workshop and Trees for Life plant propagation workshop are still to be held.

• Kaurna consultation – local elder, Ivan Tiwi Copley, has met with some of our staff to talk about how his elders used the land on which Glenelg Golf Club sits. He spoke about their use of waterhole extant at the time and the use of our sandhill as a look out to the Glenelg Beach. Ivan has also developed a Welcome to Country specific to our Club.

• Weedy tree replacement – the removal of declared weed tree species such as Aleppo pines and Tamarisks and replacing them on a more than five-to-one basis with local plants. This year we will be planting over 100 Callitris gracilis (Native Pine) trees. These trees provide excellent habitat for small birds such as Yellow Rumped and Yellow Thornbills – whose numbers seem to be increasing at our course.

• We have also been planting Allocasuarina verticillata (Casuarinas) as they are a host food plant for the Yellow tailed black cockatoo which sometimes visits our course.

• Butterfly habitat – we have continued planting of Gahnia filum (Chaffy Saw Sedge) as habitat for the Yellowish Sedge Skipper and Adriana quadripartita (Bitterbush) as habitat for the Bitterbush blue butterfly.

• Aquifer Storage Recovery system maintenance – our club has invested almost $200,000 to desilt and remove overgrown reeds from the ASR. The reeds have overtaken the cells and are affecting the functioning of the system.

• Biodiversity Inventory on iNaturalist  – our biodiversity inventory on iNaturalist has captured over 150 observations of over 100 species – the vast majority of which are indigenous to our area. We have the second highest number of observations on an iNaturalist umbrella project on golf courses around Australia

• Carp removal – the three ASR cells were drained to undertake the works – carp were removed by hand.

• West Torrens Council – we have continued working with the West Torrens Council. We are planning on working on a joint grant and are donating surplus microbat boxes made by the Camden Men’s Shed. The council were also involved in the Urban Microbat Study and seven microbats were found .

• Managed Aquifer Recharge Users Group – We have continued our work with the Managed Aquifer Recharge Users Group – the only golf club to regularly attend meetings and work with the group.

• Compostable coffee cups – our Clubhouse now uses compostable coffee cups.

• Recycling of on-course rubbish – not mentioned in our previous submissions, greenkeeping staff (and a volunteer) manually remove container deposits from all of the bins around the golf course.

• Kitchen green waste – one of our chefs has been working hard in the kitchen to ensure the other chefs use our designated green bin which is collected weekly by Jeffries.

• Clubhouse and event floral displays – flowers for display in our Clubhouse (the office, member’s lounge and bar) as well as some events, are sourced from our course and are sometimes native plants. This reduces flower miles and use of plastics and helps to promote our plants on the course.