Dinner report – Wednesday 26th February – Metropolitan GC

The first GSA dinner event for 2025 was a fascinating conversation with a Melbourne woman who went back to top-level competitive golf after a 20-year break and is now the World Number 1 ranked senior women’s amateur in the world.

Nadene Gole held the audience spellbound as she told how she won the world’s two most prized senior women’s amateur events within the space of nine dramatic weeks in 2024.

The format for the dinner at Metropolitan Golf Club was a Q&A conversation between Nadene and Lyn Swinburne, former president of Royal Melbourne GC, in front of a dinner audience of more than 70 GSA members and guests.

Nadene is now 56 and recounted growing up in Traralgon in the Latrobe Valley and taking up golf while in high school. Golf tuition as a schoolgirl was just 50 cents a lesson. By her 20s, she was good enough to turn pro and she competed for several years on the Japanese and European tours, winning the Danish Women’s Open in 1996.

She took a 20-year break from top-level golf when children came along. (They are now aged 26 and 23). Nadene played little golf until deciding to join Victoria Golf Club in 2014, and regained her amateur status in 2019. She then began playing pennant golf, and in 2022 her competitive nature re-surfaced and she threw herself into a serious crack at senior (over-50) women’s amateur golf.

In 2023, Nadene swept the field in Australia, winning all six women’s senior amateur state titles and the Australian national senior title. In 2024, international invitations arrived, and she became the first Australian woman to win the R&A Senior Women’s and the USGA Senior Women’s amateur titles.

Her R&A Senior Women’s Amateur Championship victory came at Saunton GC in Devon, England, last July where she prevailed on the second hole of a playoff after 72 holes of stroke play. Her caddie was her husband Sam, who she also described as her “mental coach”.

Nadene stunned the audience by recounting how Sam suddenly became seriously ill about a week after arriving home in Melbourne from the UK. He went to hospital where sepsis was diagnosed, and he was within 12 to 18 hours of dying. Fortunately, Sam has almost fully recovered from his near-death experience.

In September, just nine weeks after her R&A victory, Nadene travelled to the US to compete in the US Senior Women’s Amateur at Broadmoor Golf Club in Seattle. It is a gruelling event involving 10 rounds of golf in 8 days to make the final. She won 3&2 on the 16th green in the final against Canadian Shelly Stouffer.

Nadene was asked about the most important attributes for her success, and she said the key for her was resilience, performance and belief. Her golf journey is continuing, and the latest milestone is being selected to represent Australia in the Women’s Amateur Asia-Pacific championship. Nadene at 56 is the oldest competitor among 95 women who will tee up at Hoiana Shores Golf Club in Vietnam.

“My two children didn’t even know that I played pro golf. And now their Mum has been picked to play for Australia, they think it’s pretty cool,” Nadene laughed.

The Golf Society thanks Nadene Gole and Lyn Swinburne for their time in a delightful dinner conversation, and the staff at Metropolitan GC for the presentation of the evening.