Australian Open · History

The Australian Open is the tennis tournament run by Tennis Australia, formerly the Lawn Tennis Association of Australia, and the first of the four Grand Slam events on the calendar. It was first played in November 1905, is staged in January at Melbourne Park in Melbourne, and has been played on GreenSet hard courts since 2020. It includes men’s and women’s singles and doubles, plus mixed doubles.

Origins: the Australasian Championships

The first edition took place at the Warehouseman’s Cricket Ground in Melbourne, on grass, under the name Australasian Championships, since it brought together Australia and New Zealand. Rodney Heath was the first champion, beating Albert Curtis in the final. For decades the event moved from city to city: Melbourne hosted it 66 times, Sydney 17, Adelaide 15, Brisbane 7 and Perth 3, while New Zealand staged it twice, in Christchurch in 1906 and in Hastings in 1912. Women’s singles were added in 1922, when Margaret Molesworth beat Esna Boyd 6-3, 10-8. In 1927 the tournament was renamed the Australian Championships.

The arrival of the Open Era

In 1969 the event admitted professionals and took the name Australian Open. That edition was played at the Milton Courts in Brisbane and won by Rod Laver against Andrés Gimeno, on the way to the second calendar Grand Slam of his career. From 1972 the championships settled permanently at the Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club in Melbourne, still on grass. The distance and dates close to Christmas kept many overseas players away during those years. The scheduling produced two oddities: 1977 had two editions, one running from December 1976 into January 1977, won by Roscoe Tanner, and another ending on 31 December, won by Vitas Gerulaitis; and there was no tournament in 1986, as the event moved to January from 1987.

Flinders Park and hard courts

The big change came in 1988, when the tournament left Kooyong for the new Flinders Park complex, later renamed Melbourne Park. Grass gave way to hard courts: Rebound Ace from 1988 to 2007, Plexicushion from 2008 to 2019 and GreenSet since 2020. The main stadium, opened on 11 January 1988 as the National Tennis Centre, was the first tennis venue in the world with a retractable roof; it was called Centre Court from 1996 and became Rod Laver Arena on 16 January 2000. It seats 14,820 for tennis. The move sent attendance soaring, from about 140,000 at Kooyong in 1987 to 266,436 at the first Flinders Park edition, where Mats Wilander beat Pat Cash and Steffi Graf beat Chris Evert.

Singles records

On the women’s side, Margaret Court holds the record of 11 singles titles: 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1969, 1970, 1971 and 1973, the first seven under her maiden name, Margaret Smith. In the Open Era, Serena Williams won seven, in 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2015 and 2017. Among the men, Roy Emerson won six titles in the amateur era (1961 and from 1963 to 1967), and Novak Djokovic set the Open Era record with ten: 2008, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023. The Serb reached ten finals in Melbourne and won every one of them.

Rules and facilities

Three courts at the complex have retractable roofs, Margaret Court Arena among them. The roof over Rod Laver Arena was upgraded in a refurbishment completed in late December 2018, cutting closing time from 30 minutes to five. That same month Tennis Australia announced that the deciding set would be settled by a first-to-ten-points tiebreak at 6-6, rather than running on with no limit on games.

Recent editions

Jannik Sinner won the men’s title in 2024 and 2025. In 2026 he lost in the semi-finals to Djokovic, whose 103 match wins took him past Roger Federer as the player with the most victories at the tournament. The final on 1 February 2026 went to Carlos Alcaraz, 2-6, 6-2, 6-3, 7-5: his first Australian Open and seventh major, which completed his career Grand Slam, making him the ninth man to achieve it and the youngest. It was also Djokovic’s first defeat in a Melbourne final. In the women’s draw, Elena Rybakina beat Aryna Sabalenka 6-4, 4-6, 6-4. The 2026 edition drew more than 1,360,000 spectators, qualifying included.