Australian Open

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Australian Open did not begin at Melbourne Park, and for its first six decades it did not even stay in one city. The tournament started in 1905 as the Australasian Championships, and for the next several decades the event rotated among host cities across Australia and New Zealand, including Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Perth and Christchurch, reflecting the tournament's original character as a shared championship of the Australasian tennis region rather than a fixed national institution.

The rotation ended in 1972, when the tournament settled permanently in Melbourne at Kooyong Stadium, the home of Australian tennis since the 1920s. Kooyong hosted the championship for sixteen years, through the sport's transition into the Open Era, before the tournament outgrew the venue's capacity. In 1988 the Australian Open moved to a purpose built stadium complex then called Flinders Park, later renamed Melbourne Park, on the south bank of the Yarra River. The move also brought a change of surface, from grass to a hard court, which the tournament has played on ever since, unlike Wimbledon.

Melbourne Park has since been expanded repeatedly, adding retractable roofs over its two largest show courts so that play can continue through Melbourne's January heat, a problem the tournament's earlier grass court era did not face in the same way. The stadium complex today hosts more than just the championship fortnight; it is also Tennis Australia's national training headquarters, tying the tournament's modern home directly to the sport's institutional life in the country that first hosted it in 1905.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

When the Australasian Championships began in 1905, women were not permitted to enter. The men's singles title that first year went to Rodney Heath, and it was not until 1922, seventeen years later, that a women's championship was added to the event. The tournament's early name reflected its shared regional character: through the 1920s, entrants came from both Australia and New Zealand, and the championship rotated between the two countries' cities as much as it did between Australian states.

The tournament dropped Australasian for Australian in 1927, a naming change that outlasted the shared regional entry pool by decades; New Zealand interest and entries gradually declined through the twentieth century even as the name no longer described a joint championship. A second, larger change arrived in 1969, when the Australian Open adopted its current name and, along with the year's other three majors, opened its draw to professional players for the first time, ending the amateur only era that had defined the championship since 1905.

The Australian Open's distance from Europe and North America has shaped its history in ways the other three majors did not share: through much of the twentieth century, the tournament struggled to attract the world's top players away from the European season, a problem that eased only after the move to Melbourne Park and the tournament's rise to genuine parity with Wimbledon, the French Open and the US Open as a full commercial and sporting major.