One major in Oceania
The only Grand Slam tournament in Oceania is the Australian Open, which began in 1905 as the Australasian Championships. Women’s singles was added later, in the early 1920s, and records usually give Margaret Molesworth as the first women’s champion; the exact details of the earliest years are less well documented than the later ones, so they are best held with some caution.
The tournament has had several names. It was the Australasian Championships until the mid-1920s, then the Australian Championships, and it has been the Australian Open since the Open era began. In 1967, the last amateur year, Nancy Richey of the United States won the women’s title.
An unusual start
The event was a travelling one for much of its early history. The word “Australasia” in the name reflected the inclusion of New Zealand, and the tournament was held in New Zealand on two occasions in its first decade or so. In Australia it moved between the major cities, including Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth, rather than staying in one place.
The travel had a practical effect. Because of the distance, many of the best European and American players did not make the journey, which meant the field was weaker than at Wimbledon or Forest Hills in the early decades. The title was a national or regional honour more than a world title for much of the period.
The early Australian champions
Daphne Akhurst, from Sydney, was the dominant woman of the 1920s at home and won the title several times. The women’s trophy at the Australian Open is named for her, the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup. She died young, in 1933.
Through the middle of the twentieth century, the event was won mostly by Australians, with some visitors. The country’s tennis culture was strong, and the Davis Cup rivalry with the United States gave tennis a very large public profile. The men’s game produced a long line of champions, among them Roy Emerson, who won the men’s singles in 1967 and most of the other titles of the mid-1960s.
Margaret Court
Margaret Court, then Margaret Smith, is the most successful player in the tournament’s history. She won the Australian singles title eleven times, including seven in a row from 1960 to 1966, and again in 1969, 1970, 1971 and 1973. Over her whole career she won twenty-four Grand Slam singles titles, a record that stands in the record books. In 1970 she won all four majors in the same calendar year, the second woman to do so after Maureen Connolly in 1953.
Court stepped away from the game for a period in the mid-1960s and returned, so her career spanned both the amateur years and the early Open era. She was not the champion in 1967, when the Australian title went to Richey.
From Court to Barty
Evonne Goolagong, later Evonne Goolagong Cawley, was the next great Australian woman. She won the Australian Open several times in the 1970s and also took Wimbledon and the French Open. Chris O’Neil won the home title in 1978, which was the last time an Australian woman won it for more than four decades.
That run ended when Ashleigh Barty won the Australian Open in 2022, the first Australian woman to win it since O’Neil. Barty had already won the French Open in 2019 on clay and Wimbledon in 2021, and she retired in 2022 while ranked number one.
Where the tournament sits today
The Australian Open used to be played on grass at Kooyong in Melbourne, then moved in 1988 to a new complex now called Melbourne Park, with hard courts. It is held in January, at the start of the tennis calendar, and it has the Grand Slam singles format common to all four majors.
New Zealand’s part in the story is largely that of an early host. For the 1967 season and the Australian title, Richey, a Texan, was the winner; the record for the rest of the continent’s Grand Slam champions is mainly an Australian one.