‘Swingers: The Art of Mini Golf ‘ will take over an abandoned space above Melbourne train station as part of the city’s annual Rising Festival, which takes place in June.
July, who directed and starred in the films Me and You and Everyone We Know and whose latest novel, ‘All Fours’, became one of the most talked about books of 2024, is one of nine artists to have been selected by the festival’s organisers to create a hole on the nine-hole putting course.
Other creative talents who have been commissioned to design holes include the Aboriginal Australian artist Kaylene Whiskey, whose colourful works celebrate female pop culture figures such as Dolly Parton and Tina Turner; and Japanese artist Saeborg, who is renowned for featuring cartoon-style latex sculptures in her performance artworks.
Swingers’ curator, Grace Herbert, says she wants to celebrate the “surprisingly subversive” history of mini-golf, which originated in 19th-century Scotland after a group of women endured antagonism from male players and caddies while playing the Old Course at St Andrews.
Having had enough of being taunted by local caddies, the women decided they needed their own club and established the St Andrews Ladies Golf Club in 1867, with Mrs Robert Todd Boothby as president and Miss Ellen Boothby as vice-president. A nine-hole mini-golf course was constructed by Old Tom Morris on a piece of land out of view of the clubhouse. While the course initially required the use of a cleek and a putter, the roughly hewn layout was gradually smoothed out and extended to become an 18-hole putting course that, due to its severe slopes, earned the nickname of ‘The Himalayas’, a course which is still available to play to this day.
Herbert says the Swingers course in Melbourne will be family-friendly and will take roughly 45 minutes to an hour to complete.
“It’s a nine-hole mini-golf course, except that each hole is also an artwork,” Herbert says. “Every hole will be playable, though they may not be exactly what you would think playing a mini-golf hole will be like.”
While she wants to keep July’s work a secret, Herbert reveals it would be the final hole. “Usually the last hole of Mini-Golf course eats your ball so you don’t get it back. When you play Miranda’s golf hole, you’ll be able to take some words from Miranda home with you. It is a really generous work.”
Whiskey’s work will be the first hole, Herbert says, and will draw on her childhood experiences travelling from her home in Indulkana to play golf in Adelaide as a child. “Being Kaylene, of course we’ll have Dolly Parton there and you’ll have to putt through Cathy Freeman’s leg.”
Saeborg’s work will involve her trademark inflatable animal latex body suits and will require players to don a strap-on animal tail and use it to putt. “I guess you’ll become a human-animal hybrid to complete this course,” Herbert says.
Herbert says that although she played mini-golf as a child, she hadn’t known about its history as a women’s sport: “When we told the artists about the history, I think it excited them so much, because nobody knew about it either. And also because they’d be giving something a go that they wouldn’t normally do.”
“Each of the artists is responding to the history of mini-golf and has been prompted to think about things like obstacles and their removal – in both a literal sense and a metaphorical sense, in response to that surprisingly subversive history that that mini-golf has,” Herbert says. “Obviously people have fun, but it is also political, and I hope that people can also engage with those ideas and that history.”
The annual Rising Festival will run in Melbourne from June 4-15, with the Swingers mini-golf course open for an extended season until August 31.
