Australia v South Africa: Tests, Tours and Records

Australian cricketers, asked privately which opposition they least enjoy, tend not to say England. They say South Africa. The Ashes carry more history and vastly more noise, but the South African fixture has a different quality: two sides built on the same idea of cricket, both convinced that fast bowling and hard fielding decide matches, playing each other in conditions where those things actually do decide matches.

It is also the fixture in which Australia has been most thoroughly embarrassed in the modern era. Australia's lowest Test total in more than a century came against South Africa. Australia's most damaging off-field scandal happened on a South African tour. South Africa won three consecutive Test series in Australia across the late 2000s and 2010s, something no other visiting side has managed in that period.

That is the shape of the rivalry from the Australian end, and it is why the fixture is treated at home as a genuine measure rather than an entertainment.

Ten overs at Newlands

On the second afternoon of the first Test of the 2011-12 tour, Australia went to Cape Town needing to bat once more in a match they had a chance of winning. They were dismissed for 47.

It took a little over eighteen overs. Vernon Philander, playing his first Test, took five wickets for fifteen runs; Morne Morkel took three for nine. Australia's total was their lowest since 1902 and among the lowest in the history of Test cricket. South Africa won by eight wickets and the series ended level after Australia struck back at Johannesburg, which is the detail everybody forgets.

The day is worth dwelling on because of what happened around it. South Africa themselves were bowled out for 96 in the same match. Twenty-three wickets fell on the second day. The pitch was quick and the ball was moving, and neither side could work out how to bat on it. The lesson Australia took away was not that Newlands is unplayable — it is usually a good batting ground — but that against a South African attack of that quality, a session of indecision is a total of 47.

Philander's arrival mattered more broadly. He gave South Africa a third seamer of Test class alongside Dale Steyn and Morkel, and for the next five years Australia's batters faced the best pace attack in the world every time the fixture came round. Australia's own pace bowling culture had produced nothing comparable at that moment, and the imbalance shaped the decade.

Before the gap

Test cricket between the two countries began in 1902, when an Australian side returning from England stopped in South Africa, and for the next sixty years Australia won almost everything. South Africa's away record was poor, its home record respectable, and no series between them carried much competitive expectation.

That reversed sharply at the end of the 1960s. South Africa won a home series against Australia in 1966-67, the first time they had beaten Australia in a series. Then, in 1969-70, they won all four Tests. The side that did it — Barry Richards, Graeme Pollock, Mike Procter, Eddie Barlow — is the one South Africans still argue was the best team never allowed to prove it, because within months of that whitewash South Africa was excluded from international cricket and stayed out for more than twenty years.

Australia's part in that story is uncomfortable. A tour of South Africa was on the schedule and was cancelled. Several Australian players took money to play in the unofficial series of the 1980s and served bans for it. The isolation years are covered from the other side in the history of South African cricket.

The 1994 tour, and the five runs

South Africa's readmission produced a home series in Australia in 1993-94, and it produced one of the strangest Tests played at the SCG.

South Africa made 169. Australia made 292 and had them following on. Shane Warne took twelve wickets in the match. South Africa scrambled to 239 in their second innings and set Australia 117 to win, which on a fourth-day SCG surface was a formality.

Australia were bowled out for 111. Fanie de Villiers, in his second Test, took six for 43 and South Africa won by five runs. Australia lost their last five wickets for very few, and the innings has been used ever since as the standard Australian example of a chase mishandled by playing shots rather than accumulating.

The series finished level, and the pattern for the next thirty years was set: no result between these two ever looked settled until the last wicket.

Three summers South Africa took

The most damaging stretch, from an Australian perspective, ran across three of South Africa's visits.

In 2008-09, South Africa won the series 2-1. The defining passage was at the WACA, where they chased 414 in the fourth innings and won. Australia had not lost a home series to anyone for a very long time, and the loss came in the first summer after the retirements of Shane Warne, Glenn McGrath and Adam Gilchrist — which made it, in retrospect, the moment Australia discovered how much of its aura had been those three men.

In 2012-13 South Africa won 1-0, taking the Perth Test and holding on elsewhere. In 2016-17 they won 2-1, and the middle Test of that series produced the worst Australian batting performance of the modern era at home: 85 all out in Hobart, on a green surface, against Philander and Kyle Abbott. The Australian selectors responded by dropping several players and rebuilding the side mid-series, and Australia won the third Test in Adelaide under lights — an early instalment in the Adelaide day-night Test story.

Series in Australia	Result	The passage that decided it
1993-94	Drawn 1-1	Australia 111 chasing 117 at the SCG
2008-09	South Africa 2-1	414 chased at the WACA
2012-13	South Africa 1-0	Perth; the other two drawn
2016-17	South Africa 2-1	Australia 85 in Hobart
2022-23	Australia 2-0	South Africa bowled out cheaply in Brisbane

Australia ended the run in 2022-23, winning 2-0 with the Sydney Test drawn. It was Australia's first series win over South Africa in either country since 2014, and the margin flattered nobody: Brisbane lasted two days on a pitch that drew heavy criticism from both dressing rooms.

Mitchell Johnson's series

The exception in that decade, and the one Australians remember fondly, was the 2014 tour of South Africa.

Australia arrived having just won an Ashes series 5-0 with Mitchell Johnson bowling as fast as anyone had in years, and the question was whether it would travel. It did. Johnson took 22 wickets across the three Tests. David Warner made 543 runs, including centuries in consecutive innings. Australia won the first Test heavily, lost the second, and won the third at Newlands after setting South Africa a target and bowling them out late on the final day, Ryan Harris breaking through when the light was going.

Australia took the series 2-1 and, with it, the informal status of best Test side in the world. It is the last Test series Australia has won in South Africa, and Johnson's spell at Centurion is the passage most often cited when Australians argue about the fastest bowling they have seen from one of their own — a debate covered further in the guide to Australia's greatest fast bowlers.

Newlands, 2018

Four years later Australia returned and the tour became the most consequential of the modern Australian era, for reasons that had almost nothing to do with cricket.

The series was hostile from the start. There was an altercation in a stairwell at Durban involving David Warner and Quinton de Kock. Kagiso Rabada was suspended for making contact with Steve Smith and had the ban overturned on appeal. Spectators at Port Elizabeth wore masks mocking Warner's family. Australian and South African officials traded public complaints.

At Cape Town, television cameras showed Cameron Bancroft working on the ball with a piece of sandpaper and then concealing it. Australia's initial explanation did not survive the day. Cricket Australia investigated, Smith and Warner were banned from international and state cricket for twelve months, Bancroft for nine, and the coach Darren Lehmann resigned. South Africa won the series 3-1, with Aiden Markram scoring heavily and Rabada taking 23 wickets.

What followed in Australia was a review of the culture of the national team, commissioned by the board, which concluded that winning had been pursued in ways the organisation could not defend. Australian cricket spent several years visibly recalibrating how its teams behaved on the field. Whether the change was deep or presentational is still argued, but the practical effects were real: a new captain in Tim Paine, then Pat Cummins, a permanent bar on Warner holding a leadership position, and a marked change in the volume of Australian sledging.

South Africans, reasonably, point out that their own side was not blameless in that series and that they were the better team in it regardless. Australians tend to accept both propositions. The full South African account of the same tour is set out in the guide to the South Africa and Australia rivalry.

The white-ball fixture, and the results that went the other way

In limited-overs cricket the balance has generally favoured Australia, and specifically in matches that eliminated people.

The 1999 World Cup semi-final at Edgbaston was tied, and Australia progressed on the basis of having finished above South Africa earlier in the tournament. Australia won the 2007 semi-final comfortably. In the 2023 World Cup semi-final at Eden Gardens, Australia won by three wickets in a low-scoring match after bowling South Africa out for a modest total, then went on to win the tournament.

The exception, and it is the most famous one-day international ever played, came at the Wanderers in March 2006. Australia made 434. South Africa made 438 for nine, with Herschelle Gibbs scoring 175. Australians who were there still describe it as the only occasion they had a total taken off them that they thought was impossible to lose.

Lord's, 2025

The most recent chapter is the one that hurt most, because it was for a trophy.

Australia reached the World Test Championship final at Lord's in June 2025 as defending champions. South Africa arrived carrying the label Australian players had helped attach to them — the side that could not win a knockout match. On a low-scoring pitch, Australia set a target in the fourth innings and South Africa chased it down for the loss of five wickets, Aiden Markram batting through the bulk of the chase for a century.

Australia had no complaint about the cricket. South Africa bowled better across four days and batted better when it mattered. The result ended the longest-running taunt in the fixture, and it did so in the format Australians care most about. The structure of the competition itself is explained in the guide to the World Test Championship.

Where the fixture stands

The two boards do not schedule each other often, which is the largest thing wrong with the rivalry. A three-Test series every four or five years in each direction is not enough for a contest that produces this quality of cricket, and the calendar pressure from franchise leagues has made the gaps longer rather than shorter.

What has not changed is the character of the contest. Both countries produce fast bowlers who like a hard surface, and both play at home on pitches that reward them — the state-by-state variation in Australia is set out in the guide to pitch conditions by state. Batting averages in this fixture are lower than in almost any other. Matches finish early. Sessions turn violently.

Australia's overall Test record against South Africa remains ahead, mostly on the strength of the pre-isolation decades, and the summary numbers sit alongside the rest of the Australian team's records. Since 1994 the two sides have been close to level, and in the period from 2008 to 2025 South Africa has had the better of it. The other fixture Australians measure themselves in, across the Tasman, is covered in the guide to the trans-Tasman rivalry, and the rest of the Australian game is on the cricket in Australia hub.

Sources and method

This page is built from published Test and one-day international scorecards for matches between the two countries, ICC records for the World Test Championship and World Cup fixtures described, Cricket Australia's own statements and published findings relating to the 2018 tour and the subsequent review of the men's team culture, and contemporaneous match reporting used to verify sequences of play. Series results and individual match figures are as published in the official scorecards. Aggregate head-to-head totals move with every series and are described here in general terms rather than as fixed counts. No figures on this page are computed from our own datasets.