Ashes Series in Australia: Venues and Results

An Ashes series in Australia is a different event from an Ashes series in England, and not only because the results have been so lopsided. It runs across the Australian summer holidays rather than through a temperate northern season. It uses a ball that behaves nothing like the one used in county cricket. It puts England in front of crowds of eighty and ninety thousand at two of the five grounds. And it is played to a rhythm — Perth or Brisbane, then Adelaide, then Boxing Day, then New Year — that has barely changed in fifty years and which English touring sides have repeatedly failed to adapt to in time.

England have won two series in Australia in the last forty years. Australia have won three of them by five Tests to nil. The urn itself never travels: the original terracotta object stays in the MCC museum at Lord's, and the rule that the holder retains it on a drawn series means England arrive in Australia needing to win outright, which they have not managed since 2010-11.

The background to the contest and its nineteenth-century origins are covered at the Ashes and in the history of the Ashes. This page is about the Australian leg specifically: where it is played, what decides it, and what has actually happened.

The five-ground sequence, and how it settled

For most of the twentieth century a home Ashes moved between Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and — from 1970 — Perth, in an order that varied. The pattern that hardened from the 1990s onwards was Brisbane first, Adelaide second, Perth third, Melbourne on Boxing Day and Sydney in the new year.

Two of those slots are effectively immovable. The Melbourne Test begins on 26 December and the Sydney Test begins in the first week of January; both are civic events as much as cricket fixtures, described in the guides to the Boxing Day Test and the New Year Test at the SCG. The first three are negotiable, and have been renegotiated.

Perth's venue changed. Ashes Tests were played at the WACA Ground from 1970 until 2017-18, and Perth Stadium took over as the city's Test venue after that. England did not play in Western Australia at all in 2021-22 because of the state's pandemic border rules, which is why the 2025-26 match was the new ground's first Ashes Test — and why it opened the series rather than sitting third. The city's cricket is covered in cricket in Perth.

Brisbane's claim also loosened. The Gabba had the first Test of an Australian summer more often than any other ground, and in 2025-26 it took the second instead, played under lights with a pink ball. What that means for Queensland cricket is set out in cricket in Queensland.

And a Test has been moved outright. In January 2022 the fifth match was taken from Perth to Hobart at short notice, giving Bellerive Oval its first Ashes Test; that episode is described in cricket in Tasmania.

Bodyline, and why Adelaide is the flashpoint

The 1932-33 tour is the reason a home Ashes is capable of becoming a diplomatic problem. Douglas Jardine's England arrived with a plan to bowl fast and short at the body with the field packed on the leg side — the tourists called it fast leg theory, the Australian press called it Bodyline — and won the series 4-1.

The match at which it stopped being a tactical argument was the third Test at Adelaide Oval in January 1933. Harold Larwood struck the Australian captain Bill Woodfull above the heart. Bert Oldfield's skull was fractured later in the innings, off a top edge from a conventional ball, and Oldfield himself said the fault was his — but the crowd did not distinguish, and the ground came close to a riot. England won that Test by 338 runs and went 2-1 up. Cables were exchanged between the two boards in language no cricket administration would use today, and the laws were changed afterwards.

Adelaide has kept something of that reputation as the ground where a home Ashes turns, and its modern significance is different but no smaller: since 2015 the ground has been the home of day-night Test cricket, covered in the guide to the Adelaide day-night Test.

The years England won there

The list is short enough to give in full for the modern era.

Series	Result	Note
1932-33	England won 4-1	Bodyline; the laws changed as a result
1954-55	England won	Frank Tyson bowled quickly enough to decide it
1970-71	England won 2-0	Ray Illingworth's side; John Snow's series
1978-79	England won 5-1	Australia gutted by World Series Cricket defections
1986-87	England won 2-1	Mike Gatting's side, with a Test to spare
2010-11	England won 3-1	Three victories by an innings

Two of those come with heavy qualification. The 1978-79 series was played against an Australian side missing Greg Chappell, Dennis Lillee, Rod Marsh and most of its first-choice team, all of them contracted to Kerry Packer's breakaway competition; Graham Yallop captained Australia with eight Tests of experience. And 1970-71 was a two-nil win in a six-Test series in which four matches were drawn.

The one that stands without qualification is 2010-11. Andrew Strauss's side won three Tests by an innings, which no touring team had previously managed in Australia, and did it against a full-strength home side in transition. It was England's first series win in Australia in twenty-four years, and it remains their most recent.

Three whitewashes

Australia have won a home Ashes five-nil three times.

The first was 1920-21, Warwick Armstrong's side against an England team playing its first post-war tour. The second was 2006-07, which began with Ricky Ponting making 196 in Brisbane as Australia passed 600, and which was also the farewell series for Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Justin Langer.

The third, 2013-14, was the most complete. Mitchell Johnson took 37 wickets at under fourteen, bowling faster than anyone England had faced in a generation, and Australia took all 100 wickets available across the five Tests — the first time that had happened in a five-match Ashes series. England's batting order was dismantled rather than beaten, and several careers ended with it.

The near-whitewashes matter almost as much: 4-0 in 2017-18, 4-0 in 2021-22, and 4-1 in both 2002-03 and 2025-26. Australia's fast-bowling depth across those series is described in the guide to Australia's greatest fast bowlers.

What actually decides it

Four things recur in every English post-mortem, and they are not excuses so much as a description of the problem.

The ball is the first. Australian domestic and international cricket is played with a Kookaburra, which has a proud seam that flattens quickly. It offers movement for twenty-five or thirty overs and then very little, so a bowling attack drilled on the Dukes ball's forty overs of assistance runs out of ideas in the middle session. What the ball does and why is set out in the guide to the Kookaburra ball.

The second is pace and bounce. Perth and Brisbane reward a bowler who hits the pitch hard at speed and punish one who relies on movement off the seam at 78mph. England have historically toured with attacks selected for English conditions.

The third is the batting technique the surfaces demand. Balls that would be shoulder-high at Trent Bridge arrive at throat height in Perth, and the leaving of the ball outside off stump requires different judgement when it bounces more and holds its line longer.

The fourth is the schedule. A modern touring side arrives with two or three warm-up fixtures, none of them first-class matches of real quality, and starts a Test series inside a fortnight of landing. Sides in the 1950s played a dozen matches before the first Test. There is no realistic prospect of that returning while the calendar looks as it does, and the consequences for a series played under the World Test Championship cycle are simply absorbed.

2025-26: a series that barely lasted

The most recent home Ashes was the strangest in living memory. Australia won it 4-1, and won the first three Tests inside eleven days of playing time, equalling the fastest an Ashes series has been decided.

The opening Test at Perth Stadium was over in two days. Mitchell Starc took seven for 58, the best figures of his career, England were dismissed for 172 and 164, and Travis Head, promoted to open, made 123 from 83 balls with a hundred off 69 — the second-fastest in Ashes history. At Brisbane, under lights, Australia made 511 with every batter in the side reaching double figures and Michael Neser taking a maiden five-wicket haul; Joe Root's 138 not out was his first Test century in Australia at the fourteenth attempt. Adelaide went to Australia by 82 runs, with Head making 170 and Alex Carey a hundred, and the urn was retained with two to play.

England then won at the MCG, in front of a record opening-day crowd of more than 94,000, in a match that also finished inside two days: Australia were dismissed for 152 and 132, Josh Tongue took five for 45, and England chased 178 to end fourteen years without a Test win in Australia. It was the first Ashes series since 1888 to contain two matches completed in two days.

Sydney was the outlier — a high-scoring five-day Test with hundreds for Root, Head and Jacob Bethell, which Australia won by five wickets. Starc finished the series with 31 wickets at under twenty and took the Compton-Miller Medal. Steve Smith captained four of the five Tests with Pat Cummins injured, and passed Allan Border's Ashes run aggregate along the way.

Retention, and what England need

Because the holder keeps the urn on a drawn series, England's task in Australia is not to compete but to win three Tests out of five. Across the four tours from 2013-14 to 2025-26 they won one match in total. Australia have now retained the Ashes across five consecutive contests.

The pattern in the tours England did win is reasonably consistent. Each had a bowler capable of unsettling Australian batters with pace rather than movement — Larwood in 1932-33, Tyson in 1954-55, Snow in 1970-71 — or, in 2010-11, an attack led by James Anderson that got the old Kookaburra to reverse. Each also had two or three batters who converted starts into scores past 150 rather than into fifties, and a spinner who could hold an end for twenty-five overs in the heat while the quick bowlers recovered. Assembling all of that in the same six weeks has proved the hard part.

Following a home Ashes

Tickets for Melbourne and Sydney go on sale months in advance and the early days sell first. Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide are more available, and the day-night fixture's evening sessions are the ones that move. Travelling supporters cluster in particular bays at each ground and the atmosphere is loud rather than hostile.

The tour is more than the five Tests. England play a small number of lead-in fixtures, usually against state or state-second XI opposition, and a Prime Minister's XI match at Manuka Oval in Canberra has been a fixture of touring itineraries for decades — a one-day game with an invitational home side, treated as a serious workout by tourists who have not yet faced Australian conditions. A Twenty20 and one-day series against Australia normally follows the Tests, which is why an English winter tour can run from November into February.

The rest of the Australian game, including each state's programme and the domestic competitions that supply both sides' opponents, runs from the cricket in Australia hub.

Sources and method

This page draws on published Test scorecards and match reports for each series named, Cricket Australia's fixture and venue material, the National Museum of Australia's and South Australian Cricket Association's accounts of the 1932-33 Adelaide Test, and contemporary reporting on the relocation of the 2022 Hobart Test and on Perth Stadium's replacement of the WACA Ground. Where a historical scoreline is reported inconsistently, the result is stated without the margin. Series counts are given as they stood after the 2025-26 series rather than as running totals. No figure on this page is computed from our own datasets.