
British Women’s Amateur Championship by age 19, the career of Australian golf superstar Edwina Kennedy began at Wentworth Falls Country Club.
Wentworth Falls is where the Australian golf superstar, Edwina Kennedy, began her stellar career.
She was only 7 when she joined the club. It just so happened that her grandmother’s home was right next to the course, bordering what is now the third hole.
That was back in the mid 1960s.
“I can’t explain what interested me but I know that once I started, I loved it,” she recalls.
Womens golf was yet to take off so there were no female role models for a young Edwina.
“I remember clearly that Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player were the two names on everyone’s lips,”she says. “It was really weird for a young girl to be interested in golf. I was a real misfit, if you like, because very few were interested.”
Edwina played in her first junior state junior championship when she was eight. Her extraordinary ability, coupled with her dedication, saw her sweep all before her. She won her first national title, the Australian Foursomes, at age 16, and then went on to win the Australian junior title for four consecutive years, 1976 to 1979.
Her citation for Sports Australia’s Hall of Fame records that at the age of 19 she became the first Australian to win the British Women’s Amateur Championship. The same year, 1978, she was a member of the first Australian team to win the biennial Women’s World Amateur Teams Championship. She finished second in the individual results when defending the World Teams title in 1980.
Over a decade she went on to win the Canadian Amateur Championship and the New Zealand Amateur Championship. She won the Australian Amateur Championship in 1986, and was a finalist in 1979, 1984 and 1991. She won the individual title at the 1983 World Pairs Championship in Cali, Colombia.
She also represented Australia more than 30 times in over 20 countries between 1977 and 1991. She was a member of the winning Australian team in the 1983 Commonwealth Tournament, the Queen Sirikit Cup Asian Teams Championship in 1982, 1983, and 1986, and the Tasman Cup against New Zealand on three occasions.
She won four New South Wales Championships between 1979 and 1986 and represented NSW in interstate competition from 1977 to 1993, winning ten times.
In 1985, Kennedy was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for her services to golf.
By any measure Edwina Kennedy has been one of Australia’s greatest ever golfers. She considered turning professional and even competed in the US Open. But while she loved the pressure of the top flight, she says, she did not enjoy the constant moving around that comes with life on tour.
As her success grew Edwina Kennedy became a member of The Australian golf club where she has helped foster the careers of talented juniors from all over Sydney through the The Australian Golf Club Foundation which she chairs.
Edwina Kennedy recalls that regional courses like Wentworth Falls have provided the start for a number of Australian golfing stars. She reels off the names.
“Greg Norman started at Mount Isa. Peter O’Malley started in Bathurst. Bruce Devlin learned his golf in Goulburn. Karrie Webb started in far north Queensland,” she says. “Mark Leishman was in Warrnambool while Jason Day began at Beaudesert Golf Club.”
All these years on, one of Australia’s greats has a soft spot for the course where it all began. She remembers the calls of the currawongs and the black cockatoos “and so many other birds”, as well as the cold misty mornings and the tinder dry summers as she worked on perfecting her game.
“I owe an enormous debt to Wenty, and its wonderful members from the mid 1960’s to late 1970’s, for without them my passion for the game would have died before I was even allowed on a golf course,” she says.
Wentworth Falls Golf Course is located on Ngurra (Country) of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples.