Tennis History | White City, Rushcutters Bay — the last major to admit women did it on a ground six weeks old, December 1922

Four national championships admitted women, and they did it thirty-eight years apart. The All England Club held a ladies' singles at Worple Road from 1884. The United States national championship held a women's singles from 1887. The French championship held one from 1897, with four entries. The Australasian Championships, which had been played since 1905, held none until December 1922 — and when it finally did, it played them on a ground that had been open for six weeks.

This pin is that ground, and the two facts belong together.

THE SEVENTEEN YEARS BEFORE

The Australasian Championships began at the Warehouseman's Cricket Ground in Melbourne in November 1905, and for its first seventeen editions it was a men's tournament that borrowed other people's premises. It moved between Australian cities and twice to New Zealand. It was played on cricket grounds, at a zoo, on an oval and in public parks, because the associations that ran it did not own a tennis ground large enough to stage it. Two entries already on this map describe that arrangement from the inside: the Sydney Cricket Ground in 1903, when Australia had six state championships and no national one and its biggest tennis week was fitted into the gap between the cricket and football seasons, and the founding meeting at the Albert Ground in Melbourne in 1905. Kooyong, and the sixty-seven years the tournament spent without a fixed address, is the other end of the same story.

Women were not absent from Australian tennis in those years. They played state championships — the 1905 Melbourne meeting ran a Victorian women's event alongside the Australasian men's one — and they played in the interstate weeks. What did not exist was a national women's title, and what the associations did not have was a ground of their own on which to put one.

THE GROUND, AND WHAT IT HAD BEEN

The site at Rushcutters Bay was an amusement park before it was a tennis ground, and it kept the amusement park's name.

The Woollahra heritage inventory held on the New South Wales planning portal dates the opening of the White City Amusement Park to 3 December 1913. It was laid out by T. H. Eslick, and the inventory states that the name was taken from a London amusement park, after the white plaster of its buildings. It ran seasonally — scenic railway, carousel, live acts — and the same document records its end plainly: the park "was hit by lightning and destroyed by fire in 1917."

The New South Wales Lawn Tennis Association bought the burnt-out site. Australian Geographic dates the purchase to October 1920 and puts the price at £13,600; that figure comes from one source and is repeated here as that source's, not as a verified sum. The association built its courts on the levelled ground, and the heritage inventory records the result with a date and a name: "The official opening of the Sydney Lawn Tennis Ground was on 21 October 1922 by the State Treasurer Mr AA Cocks."

Six weeks later, from 1 to 9 December 1922, the Australasian Championships were played here on grass — and for the first time in the tournament's history the programme included a women's singles, a women's doubles and a mixed doubles.

WHAT HAPPENED IN THE FIRST WOMEN'S DRAW

Fourteen players entered the women's singles. There were no seeds. Maud Margaret Molesworth, a Queenslander known as Mall, beat Esna Boyd 6–3, 10–8 in the final and took the first Australasian women's title without losing a set in the tournament. She won it again in 1923 at Milton Courts in Brisbane, beating Boyd in the final a second time. Boyd would lose the final of this event five times before winning it.

In the men's singles the same week, James Anderson beat Gerald Patterson 6–0, 3–6, 3–6, 6–3, 6–2.

WHAT THIS ENTRY ARGUES, AND WHAT IT DOES NOT

It argues that the two events are worth reading together: a national championship acquired a purpose-built home it controlled, and within six weeks it opened a competition to women it had excluded for seventeen years. A ground of one's own means a gate one collects, a fixture list one sets, and days of play one can fill. A women's draw is more days of play.

It does not argue that one caused the other. No document consulted for this entry states a motive, and the association's own reasoning for admitting women in 1922 — the argument that was made in the room, and by whom — has not been found. That is a gap, and it is named here rather than filled with a plausible sentence.

A DISPUTED VENUE, LEFT DISPUTED

Two accounts published by the sport's own governing body in Australia disagree about where the 1922 women's final was played.

Tennis Australia's article of December 2021 on Molesworth places it on "Sydney's Double Bay tennis courts." The Australian Open's own site, in its survey of the tournament's venues, places the championship at White City from 1922 onward and assigns the Double Bay Grounds to 1908 and 1919 only; the compilation record of the tournament's venues agrees with the second version. The heritage document above establishes that the Rushcutters Bay ground was open and had been formally opened by a state minister six weeks before the championship began, which makes it available; it does not by itself prove it was used.

Both readings are set out here and neither is adopted. Anyone standing on this pin should know that one of the sport's own bodies places the match about a kilometre and a half away.

WHAT WAS NOT CONSULTED

No contemporaneous newspaper was read for this entry. Trove, the National Library of Australia's newspaper archive, could not be searched from this session: its v2 interface is retired, its v3 interface requires a key this account does not hold, and its web search returned a bot-check page. PapersPast, the New Zealand equivalent, returned a protection stub. Every date, score and draw size above therefore rests on institutional and general-reference records rather than on the reporting of the week itself, and the December 1922 dates in particular deserve a newspaper check whenever the archive is reachable again.

The event was renamed the Australian Championships later in the 1920s — the tournament-year records place the change between the 1926 and 1927 editions. It is called the Australasian Championships here because that is what it was called in 1922. The grouping of four tournaments now spoken of as the majors was not settled in 1922 either; the International Lawn Tennis Federation's designations came in the middle of that decade. Neither sense of "Grand Slam" — the four tournaments, or all four won inside one calendar year — applied to this week when it was played.

THE GROUND TODAY

Status note, current as of September 2026. White City remained the tournament's Sydney home into the 1970s and staged Davis Cup ties into the 1970s and 1980s. Tennis in New South Wales moved to Homebush around the 2000 Olympics. The Hakoah Club bought the property in 2010–11, and the grandstand and clubhouse were demolished in December 2022, with new courts built in their place. The turf on which the first Australasian women's championship was decided is not there to be stood on.

COORDINATE

-33.879273, 151.230999, radius 150 m.

Two independent readings. Wikidata item Q7994559 (White City Stadium) gives -33.8794, 151.2310. OpenStreetMap way 1227234566, the "White City Redevelopment" land parcel, carries no Wikidata link and is drawn separately; its centre is -33.879145, 151.230999. The two are about 28 m apart, and the pin is their midpoint. A third reading supports them: the cluster of tennis-court polygons on the site, drawn from New South Wales LPI imagery and likewise carrying no Wikidata link, has a centre within about 30 m of both.

The radius is an envelope for the whole ground, not a court. The 1922 courts cannot be located within the site from any source read here, the layout was rebuilt repeatedly across a century, and the stands that once fixed the geometry were demolished in 2022. Standing on this pin puts you inside the ground and not on the court where anything in particular happened. The postal addresses attached to the heritage item are in Paddington and Edgecliff; the ground is universally called Rushcutters Bay, and both are correct.

COVER IMAGE

"White City Tennis Club 1923," public domain, credited by Wikimedia Commons to Popular Mechanics magazine, May 1923. An elevated view across at least eight grass courts in play, laid out in a flat basin and separated by portable X-braced timber trestle fencing rather than permanent surrounds. Players in white, several women in long skirts. Behind the courts is a raked bank of bare graded earth with spectators on it — terracing, not a grandstand — and above that the backs of terraced houses, workshop roofs and telegraph poles. It is a photograph of a very new ground: the seating is still dirt. Taken within months of the championship described here.

SECOND IMAGE

"Tennis at White City," circa 1929, by Sam Hood, from the State Library of New South Wales collection, public domain. A court-level view: a player airborne mid-stroke, another at the left of frame, a sagging net across the foreground, women playing on the court beyond. Behind the paling fence is the steep cut bank rising to terraced houses that also appears in the 1923 photograph — the fixed feature used here to confirm both images show the same ground. It shows the site about seven years after the 1922 championship, not the championship itself.

SOURCES FOR THE QUOTED WORDING

Both quotations above are from the Woollahra 2014 heritage inventory, published on the New South Wales Planning Portal: https://apps.planningportal.nsw.gov.au/prweb/PRRestService/DocMgmt/v1/PublicDocuments/DATA-WORKATTACH-FILE%20PEC-DPE-EP-WORK%20PP-2020-176!20200912T073957.809%20GMT

Tennis Australia's Molesworth article: https://www.tennis.com.au/news/2021/12/29/margaret-molesworth-honouring-an-inaugural-champion — the "Double Bay" wording is quoted from it. The Australian Open's venue survey: https://ausopen.com/articles/news/story-australian-opens-many-homes . The purchase date and price: https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/history-culture/2025/08/the-evolution-of-sydneys-white-city/