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In just a couple of days, Melbourne will once again become the focus of the sporting world when the world's best tennis players descend on the gleaming, covered courts of Melbourne Park.
It's hard to imagine the Australian Open taking place anywhere else.
As recounted in the ABC documentary Australia's Open, the Australian Open has called Flinders Park — now known as Melbourne Park — home since 1988.
The move changed the fortunes of the entire tournament.
Grand slam tournaments took their time to settle down
The four grand slam tournaments — the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon and US Open — have only been considered majors since 1925, but were all held in a mix of guises well before then.
The Australian Open, known as the Australasian Championships when it was first played in 1905, has had a variety of homes over the years.
That's not unusual.
While Wimbledon has had just two venues in its history — and only then because the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club moved its premises across the eponymous south west London suburb in 1922 — the other three slams have moved all over the place, including internationally.
The French Open, incidentally the only one of the slams to have never been played on grass, has been held at Roland-Garros in western Paris since 1928.
The two tournaments that can both lay claim to being the modern iterations' precursor, the Championnat de France and the World Hard Court Championships, were previously held in a variety of venues across Paris and once each in Bordeaux and Brussels, Belgium respectively.
The US Open has also moved about a fair bit.
Its current location at the USTA National Tennis Centre at Flushing Meadows, Queens, has only been in use since 1978.
The first tournament in 1881 was held on grass courts at the Newport Casino in Rhode Island and was only open to men — the women's side of the competition was held in at the Philadelphia Cricket Club from 1887 — while the doubles took place everywhere from South Orange in New Jersey, the Staten Island Cricket Club in New York, to the St George Cricket Club in Chicago.
The tournament eventually shifted, as one, to the West Side Tennis Club in Queens in 1915, where it stayed until uprooting to its present Flushing Meadows site 62 years later.
None can match the variety of the Australian Open though, whose current home at Melbourne Park is the 14th place the tournament has called home in its existence.
The Kiwi champion at Perth Zoo
The Australian Open has taken place in seven cities across Australia and New Zealand, but has been held in Melbourne on every occasion since 1972.
Note, there has not been a championships held every year since 1972 — there was no tournament in 1986 because the tournament shifted from December to January — with tournaments held in December 1985 then January 1987. There were, however, two tournaments in 1977, in January and then December.
During its inaugural eight years the tournament was nomadic to say the least, with nine venues utilised in seven cities between 1905 and 1913.
That included Warehouseman's Cricket Ground in Melbourne, Hagley Park in Christchurch, New Zealand, the Sydney Cricket Ground, the Adelaide Oval and, somewhat bizarrely, Perth Zoo.
The Zoological Gardens Courts — which is now the Main Lawn — hosted the tournament in 1909 after South Australia withdrew.
Although the Association Cricket Ground, the Royal Agricultural Society Ground in Claremont and the Subiaco Courts were proposed, the Perth Zoo courts were, at the time, the best in the state and had the added advantage of being accessible and able to receive a large crowd.
The event was scheduled for a public holiday weekend in October to maximise attendance and, to preserve the courts for the occasion, the Zoo controversially withdrew the lease held by the South Perth Tennis Club.
That event was won by the extraordinary Anthony Wilding, arguably the greatest tennis player that you've never heard of and a man who could lay claim to being one of New Zealand's greatest ever athletes.
Wilding won six grand slam titles, including four in a row at Wimbledon — the next person to achieve that particular feat was a certain Björn Borg in the 70s.
The New Zealander, who was described in contemporary local press reports as "of magnificent physique … every inch the athlete", also won five grand slam doubles titles, four Davis Cups with Australasia and an Olympic bronze medal in the men's singles at the 1912 Stockholm Games.
He even won the equivalent of the first calendar grand slam by winning a hat-trick of World Championships in 1913: The World Hard Court Championship on clay in Paris, the World Grass Court Championships on grass at Wimbledon and the World Covered Court Championship indoors on a wooden court in Stockholm.
As well as his stellar tennis career, Wilding played first class cricket for Canterbury, won several motorcycle races and played rugby union at Cambridge University before being killed in action during the Great War in 1915 at Neuve-Chapelle aged just 31.
Upon his first visit to Perth in 1907, Wilding was incredibly complimentary of the courts at the Zoo, affording them the honour of being "one of the best he had ever played on and certainly equal to those at Wimbledon" according to a local newspaper report.
The next time the Australasian Championships headed to Perth, in 1913, the title was won by the defeated finalist from 1909, Ernie Parker.
That competition was held at the Western Australian Tennis Association grounds at Kitchener Park — then known as Mueller Park — where the tournament returned in 1921, the last time it ventured to the western side of the continent.
Sadly for budding sporting historians, the Kitchener Park courts, adjacent to Subiaco Oval, have gone the same way as that storied football stadium, with Bob Hawke College now sitting on the site.
A regular pattern emerges
After World War I the tournament settled into a more regular programme of tennis-specific venues, such as Memorial Drive in Adelaide, Brisbane's Milton Courts, the White City Tennis Club in Sydney and Kooyong in Melbourne.
Sydney hosted the first championships in which a women's champion was crowned in 1922, at the newly opened White City Tennis Club.
Maud Margaret 'Mall' Molesworth was that first women's singles champion in 1922 and she was the first to defend her title too, doing so in her home city of Brisbane in 1923.
The SCG and the Double Bay Grounds hosted the tournament in 1909 and 1919, making the Double Bay venue the third to host the tournament in Sydney.
The White City Tennis Courts would host the tournament 15 times, spanning each decade from the 20s to the 70s.
The earliest editions of the tournament that took place in the Sunshine State were held in the Brisbane suburb of Auchenflower in 1907 and 1915.
Those courts were opened amidst great fanfare in 1904, although the Telegraph of the day reported that although the "new courts are in splendid order … Jupiter Pluvius was not kind" — meaning rain curtailed their official opening.
The 1907 competition saw around 60 matches held on "sodden courts" at Auchenflower, where the appearance of two-time singles runner up Harry Parker "bought the spectators crowding around the court" according to the Brisbane Courier of August 21.
Parker seemed to like Brisbane, describing the Auchenflower courts as "fine" with a "fast and true" surface, albeit "rather bare" and Queenslanders as "a most hospitable lot" in an article entitled "Tennis throughout Australasia" in a 1908 edition of the Hobart Mercury.
It didn't help him win though — Horrie Rice claimed that first title at Auchenflower, becoming the first left-hander to win the men's singles title in Australia, and the last to win it wearing knickerbockers.
The Milton Courts, which were built in 1915, soon took over though, hosting five tournaments, the first of which took place in 1923.
The links to the present are very evident at events held in Milton. Rod Laver and Margaret Court, who both lend their name to show courts at Melbourne Park, won the first of their Australian Open crowns at Milton in 1960.
Those courts at Milton last hosted the tournament in 1969 — the first championships of the Open era (which were also won by Court and Laver, who claimed the women's and men's doubles titles respectively to boot).
The site hosted 16 Davis Cup ties — the last of which was against New Zealand in 1990 — as well as finals in 1958, 1962, and 1967 — with Australia winning on the latter two occasions.
The venue also hosted multiple music gigs and four boxing cards through the 1970s, but hosted its last world tour event in 1994 before the wooden grandstands were condemned. It is now a park, retaining a nod to its past.
Meanwhile, in South Australia, Adelaide Oval was used twice for the Australian Open, in 1910 and 1920.
Rodney Heath, who won the first Australasian Championships in 1905, claimed victory at the Adelaide Oval courts for the second of his two grand slam titles.
There was some consolation for the beaten finalist Horace Rice though, he beat Heath in the doubles final.
In the 1920 tournament, Pat O'Hara Wood won the first of his two Australasian Championship singles titles, beating his doubles partner Ronald Thomas in an epic five-setter in the final.
O'Hara Wood and Thomas did claim the doubles title at Adelaide Oval, their third grand slam doubles title to go with the previous year's Wimbledon and Australian Open crowns.
The tournament didn't have to shift far, with the South Australian Lawn Tennis Club site at Memorial Drive — which was opened in 1923 — taking over, hosting the tournament 12 times from 1926 to 1967.
The first tournament to be held at Memorial Drive is notable for being where Daphne Akhurst won the second of her five Australian Open singles titles — the ladies singles winner has won the trophy bearing her name since 1934, the year after her premature death at the age of just 29.
Mixed Melbourne beginnings turn into a bright future
The host venue for the first Australasian Championships, Warehouseman's Cricket Ground, is now better known as the Albert Cricket Ground in St Kilda and was won by Melbourne local Rodney Heath.
Heath won the final against South Australian Arthur Curtis to top a field of 17 entrants, with The Age reporting a crowd of "close on 5,000" spectators on hand to witness the crowning of the first ever men's champion.
It wasn't unanimously favoured, though.
The aforementioned Harry Parker noted in a July 1908 edition of the Hobart Mercury that "the courts are good, but rather slow, and the ground is exposed to the wind, and if it happens to be [blowing] … it is unpleasant playing there."
"The pavilion accommodation is the poorest of any any I have seen in Australasia," he added.
Nevertheless, Melbourne has hosted the tournament more than any other city, this year being the 68th occasion.
The Warehouseman's cricket ground hosted the Australian Open four times between 1905 and 1924 and is one of three venues — along with Adelaide Oval and the Sydney Cricket Ground — to have hosted both the Australian Open and a Test cricket match, with Australia's women playing New Zealand there in 1979.
Kooyong was first utilised as a venue in 1927, hosting it 12 times on rotation over the next 42 years before becoming the permanent host in 1972.
This too, was not widely loved as a venue.
As explained in the ABC documentary Australia's Open, the top players simply did not want to come.
"It's not good enough to play tennis on," seven time major winner John McEnroe, who never got past the semifinals at the Australian Open, said of Kooyong's grass on one occasion.
The executive director of the Lawn Tennis Association of Australia, Colin McDonald, told the documentary that Australia had "fallen behind the rest of the world" and was at risk of losing its status as a grand slam.
That's what prompted the move to Flinders Park, a $100 million redevelopment next to the MCG.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Follow all the Australian Open action via ABC Sport's live blogs at abc.net.au/sport and Grandstand's live coverage via the Listen app and radio.
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