The Australian Open: A Complete History

The australian open history is not a story of steady growth. It is a story of a tournament that spent eighty years being ignored, made one enormous decision in the middle of the 1980s, and became the best-attended event in its sport within a generation. No other major has a shape like it.

The first three majors were established institutions before this one existed. Wimbledon had been running since 1877, the US Championships since 1881, the French since 1891. When the Australasian Championships were first played in November 1905, at a suburban cricket ground in Melbourne, seventeen men entered and the winner was a local. For most of the century that followed, the tournament's problem was not organisation or facilities. It was geography, calendar and money, in that order, and none of the three could be fixed by trying harder.

What follows is the whole arc: the invented championship of 1905, the decades of rotating between cities and even countries, the scheduling experiments that included a year with two tournaments and a year with none, the long stretch when the best players in the world simply did not enter, and the rebuild that turned all of it around. The venue itself is covered separately on the Rod Laver Arena page, and the reasons for leaving the old home are set out on Kooyong to Melbourne Park.

1905: a championship for a continent that could not travel

The Australasian Lawn Tennis Association was formed in 1904, and its first act of consequence was to create a championship. The 1905 event was staged at the Warehouseman's Cricket Ground in Melbourne, a club ground rather than a purpose-built tennis venue, on grass courts laid over a cricket outfield. Seventeen men entered the singles. Rodney Heath won it.

The scale is worth sitting with. Seventeen entrants is a club competition by modern standards, and the tournament was created not because there was demand from an international circuit but because Australia and New Zealand wanted a title of their own. There was no realistic expectation of European entries. In the 1920s the sea passage from Europe took around forty-five days each way, which meant a player travelling for the Australasian Championships was committing a third of a year to one tournament.

That is the founding condition, and it explains almost everything about the tournament's first eight decades. The event was not competing with Wimbledon for the world's best players. It was serving a domestic and regional constituency, and its prestige rested on the fact that Australia happened to produce an extraordinary number of very good tennis players.

The Australasian years and the two New Zealand editions

For its first twenty-two years the tournament was a joint championship of two countries, and it behaved like one. The 1906 edition was played at Hagley Park in Christchurch. Of a field of ten, only two Australians made the trip, and a New Zealander won. The 1912 edition was played at the Hastings Lawn Tennis Club on New Zealand's North Island.

Those two years are often treated as a curiosity. They are better understood as the logical consequence of the name. If the championship belonged to Australasia rather than to Australia, New Zealand had a claim on hosting it, and the association honoured that claim twice before the arrangement dissolved. New Zealand established its own association, and from 1927 the event was renamed the Australian Championships.

The rotation between Australian cities continued regardless, and for a very specific reason: each state association wanted the tournament, and the national body kept them in line by giving it to each in turn. That is a governance decision, not a sporting one, and it had sporting costs the association did not fully reckon with until the 1970s.

The travelling tournament: seven cities, ten venues

Between 1905 and 1971 the championship moved constantly. Melbourne got it most often, but Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth all had long runs of hosting, and the venues within those cities changed too. The 1909 tournament was played at Perth Zoo. Adelaide Oval, better known now as a cricket ground, hosted in 1910 and 1920 before the tennis moved to Memorial Drive. Brisbane used Auchenflower and then Milton Courts. Sydney used the cricket ground area and Double Bay before settling at White City.

City	Venues used	Editions hosted
Melbourne	Warehouseman's Cricket Ground, Kooyong, Melbourne Park	Most of any city, continuous since 1972
Sydney	Sydney Cricket Ground area, Double Bay, White City	Regular host to 1971
Adelaide	Adelaide Oval, Memorial Drive	Regular host to 1967
Brisbane	Auchenflower, Milton Courts	Regular host to 1969
Perth	Perth Zoo, Kitchener Park	Three editions, 1909, 1913, 1921
Christchurch	Hagley Park	1906
Hastings	Hastings Lawn Tennis Club	1912

The rotation was fair to the states and terrible for the tournament. A championship that changes city every year cannot build a stadium, cannot build a crowd habit, cannot build a broadcast relationship and cannot promise a visiting player consistent conditions. Each host had to reassemble the event from scratch, and standards varied enormously.

It ended in 1972, when the tournament settled permanently at Kooyong in Melbourne. That decision is usually described as choosing Melbourne. It is more accurately described as choosing to stop moving, which is the more important half of it.

1922 and the women's championship

There was no women's singles championship for the first seventeen years. The event was added in 1922 and won by Margaret Molesworth, who beat Esna Boyd 6-3, 10-8 in the final and defended the title in 1923.

The women's event grew quickly in domestic significance through the 1920s, largely because of Daphne Akhurst, who won five Australian titles between 1925 and 1930 and whose name is now on the women's singles trophy. Akhurst died in 1933 at 29, and the memorial cup was created shortly afterwards. The men's trophy, the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup, honours the Wimbledon champion of 1907 who then ran Australian tennis for decades as an administrator.

Both trophies date from an era when the tournament's international standing was marginal and its domestic standing was enormous, which is a useful reminder that the Australian championship mattered a great deal in Australia long before it mattered anywhere else.

1969: the open era arrives, and nobody comes

Tennis went open in 1968, and the Australian championship admitted professionals from 1969, becoming the Australian Open. Rod Laver won it that year on his way to the calendar Grand Slam, the second of his career.

The reasonable expectation was that opening the tournament to professionals would raise its status. The opposite happened over the following decade. Professionals had schedules, contracts and appearance guarantees, and a professional weighing up a trip to Melbourne in late December found the maths worse than an amateur had. The prize money at the Australian Open was a fraction of what the US Open paid. The ranking points were fewer. The travel was the same three-day exercise it had always been.

The result is one of the strangest records in tennis. Bjorn Borg, who won eleven majors, played the Australian Open once, in 1974, at seventeen. Jimmy Connors played it twice and won it once, in 1974, at a tournament most of the top ten skipped. John McEnroe played five Australian Opens, three of them from 1989 onwards, in what was effectively a different tournament from the one he had ignored a decade earlier.

Bjorn Borg1

Jimmy Connors2

John McEnroe5

Counts main-draw singles appearances across each player's career. It is a measure of participation, not of results, and is included to show how routinely leading players of the period declined to enter. McEnroe's total includes appearances from 1989 onwards, after the move to Melbourne Park had changed the tournament.

Show the numbers

Career Australian Open appearances by three players of the 1970s and 80s

Item	Australian Opens entered
Bjorn Borg	1
Jimmy Connors	2
John McEnroe	5

A major that the best players decline is a major in name only. By the early 1980s there was open discussion within the sport about whether the Australian Open should retain Grand Slam status at all, and the association knew it.

The scheduling problem that lasted eighty years

The calendar was the second half of the problem and it took even longer to solve. Early editions moved around the year with the weather and with whichever association was hosting. The 1919 tournament was played in January 1920. The 1923 tournament in Brisbane was staged in August, on the reasoning that Brisbane in August is neither too hot nor too wet, which was correct and completely unhelpful to anyone trying to build a circuit.

Through the middle of the century the event generally sat in January, then drifted to December. From 1982 to 1985 it was played in mid-December, finishing within days of Christmas. That is close to the worst possible date. It asked players to fly to Australia immediately after the US indoor season, compete through the week before Christmas, and then either stay for a fortnight or fly home again.

1977: the year with two Australian Opens

The most revealing scheduling episode is 1977, when two tournaments were staged and both counted. The first ran from late December 1976 into January 1977. The second finished on 31 December 1977. The intention was to shift the event permanently to the end of the calendar year in one motion rather than skipping a year.

It failed on its own terms. The December edition drew no stronger a field than the January one had. The exercise demonstrated that the date was not really the binding constraint by itself — the tournament's problem was the combination of date, distance and money, and moving one of the three did nothing.

Nine years later the association tried the other version of the same manoeuvre, and this time it worked because the rest of the package had changed. The 1985 edition was played in December, no tournament was held in 1986, and the 1987 event was played in January. That January slot has held ever since, with the single exception of 2021, when the tournament was pushed to February for pandemic quarantine.

1. 1Drifting dateThrough the first half of the century the championship moved with the host city and the weather, including an August edition in Brisbane in 1923 and a 1919 tournament played in January 1920.
2. 2December experimentThe 1977 calendar year contained two tournaments, one finishing in January and one finishing on 31 December, an attempt to relocate the event to the end of the year that attracted no stronger a field.
3. 3Mid-December runFrom 1982 to 1985 the tournament was played in mid-December, finishing days before Christmas, which suited neither players nor Australian domestic audiences.
4. 4The 1986 gapNo tournament was staged in 1986. The year was deliberately skipped to allow the event to be repositioned in mid-January without running two editions in twelve months.
5. 5January permanentFrom 1987 the Australian Open has been played in January, ahead of the European clay season, and has become the anchor of the Australian summer sporting calendar.

A sequence of scheduling decisions rather than a measurement. Each step is drawn from the tournament's published record. The 1977 double edition and the 1986 gap are both consequences of attempts to move the event within the calendar year.

The turning point: 1983 to 1988

Two things changed in the mid-1980s, and they changed together.

The first was money and field quality. In 1983 Ivan Lendl, John McEnroe and Mats Wilander all entered the same Australian Open, which had not happened in the open era. Prize money had risen enough to make the trip defensible, and the tournament's own promoters had worked the players' agents hard. Wilander won it, and won it again in 1984. For the first time in fifteen years the champion was somebody the rest of the tennis world had watched.

The second was the venue decision. Kooyong was a good club that had outgrown its usefulness as a Grand Slam site: capacity around twelve thousand at squeeze, no land to expand into, grass courts that were unreliable by late January, and no possibility of playing through rain or extreme heat. Talks about upgrading it to Grand Slam standard collapsed. The executive director of the national association said publicly that Australia had fallen behind the rest of the world and was at risk of losing its Grand Slam status.

The Victorian government funded a new precinct on state-controlled railway land beside the Yarra, at a cost of 94 million dollars. It was called Flinders Park, and it opened for the 1988 tournament with a centre court that had a roof that opened — the first at any Grand Slam show court, and the single feature that separated it from everything else in the sport for the next twenty-one years.

1988: what the move actually did

The last Kooyong tournament in 1987 drew about 140,000 people across the fortnight. The first Flinders Park tournament in 1988 drew 266,436. That is not growth, it is a different event, and it happened in twelve months.

Announced tournament attendance for the years shown. The tournament has reported on slightly different bases over time — some totals include qualifying week and some do not — so these are indicative of scale rather than precisely comparable. The 1987 figure is the last at Kooyong; 1988 is the first at Flinders Park.

Show the numbers

Australian Open attendance at key points

Item	Value
1987	140000
1988	266436
2020	812174
2023	839192
2024	1020763
2025	1218831

The move did three things at once that no single change could have done separately. It gave the tournament a venue that could hold a crowd, which fixed the revenue. It gave it a roof, which fixed the scheduling risk that had made television wary. And it replaced grass with hard court, which put the Australian Open on the same surface family as the US Open and made it a sensible tournament for the modern professional to prepare for.

Players noticed the last point immediately. A grass court major in January, six months from Wimbledon and on the opposite side of the season from every other grass event, was a strange thing to train for. A hard court major in January is the natural opening to a hard court season.

The blue era and the arms race with the other majors

For two decades after 1988, Melbourne held a technological lead nobody contested. Then the other majors caught up: Wimbledon covered Centre Court in 2009, the US Open covered Arthur Ashe Stadium in 2016, Roland-Garros covered Philippe-Chatrier in 2020.

Melbourne's answer was to keep building. A 972 million dollar redevelopment of Melbourne Park ran across three stages from 2010. Stage one, at 366 million dollars, delivered a roof over Margaret Court Arena for the 2015 tournament, making the Australian Open the first major with three roofed show courts. Stage two, at 338 million dollars, rebuilt Rod Laver Arena and was completed for 2020. Stage three, at 271.5 million dollars, added a sunken 5,000-seat show court and a central logistics hub. Melbourne Park is contracted as the home of the tournament into the 2040s.

The court colour changed too. The surface went from green to blue in 2008, a television decision about ball visibility, and the blue has become the tournament's visual signature to the point where it is now the thing people picture when the Australian Open is mentioned.

Who has actually won it

The record books split cleanly at the 1980s.

Margaret Court's 11 Australian singles titles, seven of them consecutive, were won between 1960 and 1973, when the draw was thin and many of the best players in the world were not there. That does not make the titles less real, but it does make them incomparable with what came after. On the men's side, Roy Emerson won six between 1961 and 1967 in similar conditions.

The open-era-with-everybody-present record is different. Novak Djokovic has won 10, the most by any man, across three decades of the tournament. Serena Williams won seven. Roger Federer won six and gave the tournament the nickname that stuck to it. Rafael Nadal won two, in 2009 and 2022, the second from two sets down in the second-longest major final on record.

• 11Margaret Court
• 10Novak Djokovic
• 7Serena Williams
• 6Roy Emerson
• 6Roger Federer

Total singles titles, combining amateur and open era, which is the convention the tournament uses. Court and Emerson won most of their titles before 1983, when leading international players routinely did not enter; Djokovic, Williams and Federer won theirs against full modern draws.

The home drought, and the day it ended

There is a particular Australian strand to this history that the international record tends to skip. For most of the tournament's first seventy years, an Australian winning it was ordinary. Roy Emerson won six in the 1960s. Margaret Court won eleven. Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, John Newcombe, Lew Hoad and Frank Sedgman all took the title. In the golden era of Australian tennis the home championship was, more often than not, an internal contest.

Then it stopped. Mark Edmondson won the men's title in 1976, ranked outside the world's top two hundred at the time, in what remains one of the great upsets in the tournament's records. No Australian man has won it since. Chris O'Neil won the women's title in 1978, in a draw depleted by the tournament's unattractiveness to overseas players, and no Australian woman won it for the next forty-three years.

The drought is the mirror image of the tournament's rise. The same changes that made the Australian Open a genuine major — the money, the venue, the January date, the hard courts, the full draws — also removed the conditions under which home players had been quietly accumulating titles. A tournament that everybody enters is a tournament that locals rarely win. The two facts are the same fact.

It ended on 29 January 2022, when Ash Barty beat Danielle Collins in the final on Rod Laver Arena, the first home women's champion since O'Neil and the first Australian singles champion of either sex since Edmondson. Barty retired two months later, at 25, as world number one. The men's drought continues, and every January it is discussed as though it were a scandal rather than the predictable arithmetic of a 128-player draw.

Two things follow from that. The first is that the tournament's Australian identity now rests on the crowd, the calendar and the ownership rather than on the names on the trophies, which is a stable enough foundation but a different one from the 1960s. The second is that the Australian summer's pathway question — how a country of Australia's size produces contenders in a global sport — is now a development conversation rather than a scheduling one, and it is argued out every January in the same fortnight the tournament is being celebrated.

Three difficult years: 2020, 2021, 2022

The tournament's modern confidence was tested three years running.

In January 2020 bushfire smoke drifted over Melbourne during qualifying week, with air quality readings that stopped play and drew heavy criticism of the tournament's initial response. A formal air quality policy followed, sitting alongside the heat policy as the second environmental protocol the event runs.

In 2021 the tournament was pushed back three weeks to February. Players arrived on charter flights into fourteen days of hotel quarantine, with a proportion of them confined to their rooms without practice access after positive cases on their flights. Crowds were capped, and then removed entirely for five days when Victoria entered a snap lockdown mid-tournament.

In 2022 Novak Djokovic, the defending champion, arrived with a medical exemption from vaccination requirements, had his visa cancelled on arrival, won an appeal, had the visa cancelled again by ministerial discretion, and was deported before the tournament began. It dominated the fortnight's coverage and left an unresolved argument about the relationship between a Grand Slam tournament and the country that hosts it.

What the Australian Open is now

It is, by attendance, the largest tennis tournament in the world. The 2024 edition became the first Grand Slam to pass a million spectators, at 1,020,763. The 2025 edition drew 1,218,831. The event has expanded from a fortnight to effectively three weeks, with qualifying, a pre-tournament programme and an opening weekend that now functions as part of the main draw.

Its economics have followed. The 2026 tournament carried a prize pool of A$111.5 million, with singles champions receiving A$4,150,000, and the state government has valued the event's annual contribution to Victoria in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It anchors a summer that also includes the Boxing Day Test a few hundred metres away, the Big Bash across January, and the Formula 1 weekend at Albert Park in March.

The lead-in tournaments, the qualifying structure, the ticketing tiers and the heat protocol are each large enough to warrant their own treatment. What matters for the history is that all of them exist because of one decision taken in the mid-1980s by a national association that had run out of ways to fix a tournament in the venue it already had.

A chronology

• 1904 — The Australasian Lawn Tennis Association is formed.
• November 1905 — The first Australasian Championships, at the Warehouseman's Cricket Ground, Melbourne. Rodney Heath wins a 17-man draw.
• 1906 — Christchurch hosts, the first of two New Zealand editions.
• 1912 — Hastings hosts the second New Zealand edition.
• 1922 — A women's singles championship is added; Margaret Molesworth wins it.
• 1927 — Renamed the Australian Championships. Kooyong hosts for the first time.
• 1969 — Professionals admitted; the tournament becomes the Australian Open. Rod Laver wins on the way to his second calendar Grand Slam.
• 1972 — Melbourne becomes the permanent home, at Kooyong.
• 1977 — Two tournaments staged in the same calendar year.
• 1982 to 1985 — The event is played in mid-December.
• 1983 — Lendl, McEnroe and Wilander all enter; Wilander wins.
• 1986 — No tournament, to allow the move back to January.
• 1987 — The last Australian Open on grass, at Kooyong.
• January 1988 — First tournament at Flinders Park, on Rebound Ace, under the first roof at any Grand Slam show court. Attendance 266,436.
• 1996 — Flinders Park is renamed Melbourne Park.
• 2000 — The arena now called John Cain Arena opens with its own roof.
• 2008 — Plexicushion replaces Rebound Ace; the court turns blue.
• 2015 — Margaret Court Arena reopens with a roof; three roofed show courts.
• 2020 — GreenSet becomes the surface. Bushfire smoke disrupts qualifying.
• 2021 — Tournament delayed to February; players quarantined; crowds suspended mid-event.
• 2022 — Djokovic deported before the tournament; Nadal wins from two sets down.
• 2024 — First Grand Slam to exceed one million spectators.
• 2025 — Attendance 1,218,831.

Numbers worth carrying

• First played: November 1905, Melbourne, 17 men in the draw.
• Women's championship added: 1922.
• Host cities: seven, across two countries.
• Years on grass: 1905 to 1987.
• Attendance jump on moving venue: roughly 140,000 to 266,436 in one year.
• Most singles titles: Margaret Court 11, Novak Djokovic 10.
• First Grand Slam past a million spectators: 2024.
• 2026 prize pool: A$111.5 million.

For how the tournament's four playing surfaces have differed and what each did to the way matches are won, see the Australian Open surface history. For the venue that the tournament left behind and the argument that produced the move, see Kooyong to Melbourne Park. The centre court itself is covered on the Rod Laver Arena page, and the rest of the sport sits under the tennis section. Other Australian venues and the events they hold across the year are indexed on the Australia hub and the wider sports index.