Tennis History | Kooyong Stadium, Melbourne — a major with no fixed address for 67 years, January 1987

For most of its life the Australian major had no home. Between 1905 and 1971 it moved among Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth, and twice it was not held in Australia at all: Christchurch in 1906 and Hastings in 1912. Until 1927 the event was called the Australasian Championships, which is the honest name for a tournament that crossed the Tasman Sea. The grounds were whatever a host city could put up — a warehousemen's cricket ground in Melbourne, the Sydney Cricket Ground, the Adelaide Oval, courts beside the zoo in South Perth. Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club built its stadium in 1927 on Glenferrie Road, in the suburb of Toorak. The tournament came to it about a dozen times over the next four decades and each time left again. In 1972 the associations settled the question on commercial grounds: Melbourne drew the largest crowds of any Australian city, so Melbourne would keep it. Kooyong then held the Australian Open every year from 1972 to 1987 — sixteen years of permanence after sixty-seven without. The calendar is where accounts of this tournament go wrong. Through 1985 it was played in December. It then shifted to January, which means the December 1985 edition was followed by no tournament at all in 1986, and then by one played from 12 to 25 January 1987. A calendar year with no Australian Open sits in the middle of every champions list, and most lists do not say so. Any sentence about consecutive Australian titles has to be checked against the dates rather than the years. That January 1987 tournament was the last at Kooyong. Stefan Edberg beat Pat Cash in the men's final and Hana Mandlíková beat Martina Navratilova in the women's, on grass. From the following year Wimbledon was the only major played on grass. Tennis Australia's account of the move is that the tournament had outgrown Kooyong's capacity. The ground is a suburban club stand, hemmed in by houses, and while it once held around 15,000 it now seats a little over 5,000. The attendance figures are the association's strongest evidence and it has cited them ever since: about 140,000 at Kooyong in 1987, and 266,436 at Flinders Park in January 1988. The new ground was a state-backed development beside the Melbourne Cricket Ground, and it was hard court, not grass. The surface change and the venue change arrived together, in the same January. Kooyong is 4.8 km east-south-east of the Melbourne Park site that replaced it. **Status note, September 2026.** Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club continues to operate and to run its own invitational event in the week before the Australian Open. It has not hosted the major since January 1987. **Coordinate.** -37.838356, 145.031049, precision radius 250 m. Two independently maintained sources: Wikidata gives -37.838333, 145.031944 for Kooyong Stadium, and OpenStreetMap's sports-centre extent gives -37.838380, 145.030154 — about 157 m apart, far enough to be separate readings rather than one copied into the other. The pin is the club grounds, not the centre court; the radius covers the site. **Cover image.** "Exterior of Kooyong Stadium" — Brycewhite, CC BY-SA 4.0, photographed 18 January 2014 from outside the ground. The north grandstand, with KOOYONG in white capitals along the concrete fascia and the green broadcast boxes still standing on the roof. The hedge in front has been left to grow up over the lower arches. **Second image.** "Centre Court at Kooyong Stadium" — Brycewhite, CC BY-SA 4.0, 18 January 2014. The bowl seen from the top of a stand: empty green timber bench seating, the rooftops of Toorak behind, and in the middle a blue acrylic hard court. The grass the Australian Open was played on here is not in the photograph.