WHEN he was just eight, Anthony Quayle’s parents bundled him into the family car, drove for 12 hours over dusty dirt roads across the very top of Australia, and introduced him to a man who was about to change his life.
Quayle, who grew up in tiny Nhulunbuy, on the Gove Peninsula in the Northern Territory, had been playing golf since his mum and dad gave him a set of Looney Tunes kids’ clubs for his seventh birthday, and was showing so much promise he’d been invited to a week-long golf clinic at Palmerston, near Darwin.
“You were supposed to be 10, but Palmerston head pro Tony Albon, who organised the clinic, was impressed by my enthusiasm, at least, and broke the rules for me,” Quayle recalls.
Attending the event – which comprised a three-day clinic followed by two days of competitive golf – was legendary golf coach Charlie Earp, the man who shaped the career of Greg Norman, and Quayle was spellbound.
“I listened to every word he said,” Quayle remembers. “He was the man who inspired me to take up golf seriously, and I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for him.”
The two men – one an icon of Australian golf; the other on the verge of taking his game to Europe – were reunited last month when they were invited to a function at Nudgee Golf Club, where the PGA Tour of Australasia announced its tournament schedule for 2025-26.
Charlie Earp (left) checks the putting style of Anthony Quayle at Queensland’s Nudgee Golf Club.
One of the first tournaments on the circuit will be the Northern Territory PGA Championship, which will be played at the end of August at that same Palmerston course, and the significance was not lost on Earp and Quayle.
“You’ve grown some since those days,” said the diminutive Earp as he looked up at the 193cm Quayle, 30, who finished third in last year’s Order of Merit, earning him playing rights on next season’s DP World Tour.
“I went up to Palmerston for about five years in a row to help Tony Albon with those clinics,” Earp, 87, said. “Some people asked me why I bothered, but they don’t get much assistance in those remote areas and I thought I might be able to help.”
Quayle knows how much Earp’s input meant to those budding young NT players.
“That first clinic was one of the best things I ever did,” he said. “I remember Charlie doing a chipping clinic – it can be difficult to chip on that carpet grass in the NT.
“One of the kids had brought along a chipping club – like a putter but with a bit of loft. Charlie took one look at it and said, ‘what the bloody hell is that? You’ve got to learn to chip properly, son.’
“I was sure glad it wasn’t me with the chipper,” Quayle said, “and I’ve never used one since.”
Quayle, who represented the NT at junior national level, moved to Brisbane when he was 14 to attend Hills International College at Jimboomba.
He enjoyed a stellar amateur career, winning the Tasmanian Open in 2015 and the Pacific Northwest Amateur in the US. He was runner-up in the Queensland Amateur Championship at the age of 19, and was beaten in a playoff in the 2016 Papua New Guinea Open.
He turned professional in January 2017, and the following year joined the Japan Tour, where he campaigned consistently for five years without winning.
Anthony Quayle earned a card on the DP World Tour for 2026 courtesy of a third place finish on the 2024-2025 Australasian Tour Order of Merit.
Perhaps his best effort was losing the 2022 Mizuno Open in a playoff to Scott Vincent, a performance which earned him a start in Cameron Smith’s Open Championship at St Andrews, where he finished an excellent 15th.
Quayle has won twice on the Australian tour – the 2020 Queensland Open at Pelican Waters, and the 2022 Queensland PGA Championship at Nudgee.
In December he was responsible for an astonishing performance in the Victorian PGA Championship at Moonah Links. In the first round, he’d been mistakenly told that preferred lies were in place on every hole when, in fact, it was only for the third hole.
Quayle was penalised seven shots – one for every time he lifted and cleaned his ball on the other holes – and his first round 66 became a one-over-par 73.
Despite that blow, he went on to finish third in the tournament, and continue a sustained run of consistent form that saw him finish third in the season-long standings and win a priceless card on next season’s DP World Tour.
The tour’s first event will be the Australian PGA Championship at Royal Queensland, and Quayle is already counting down the days.
“It’s very exciting,” he said. “Every professional golfer wants to test his game against the very best players, and I’ll be doing that every week.
“It’s thrilling and intimidating at the same time,” he said.
The post Bound for Europe, Quayle catches up with an old mentor first appeared on Inside Golf. Australia's Most-Read Golf Magazine as named by Australian Golfers - FREE.