★ Australian Open

01Pourquoi c'est important

The Australian Open opens the tennis year, which gives it the season's first real evidence and a disproportionate share of the sport's attention in January. Its more interesting claim is commercial: it is the major that solved the problem of the non-fan. In our reading it is the least formal and most easily enjoyed of the four majors, and the one where a visitor with no ticket to a show court still has a full day.

02La semaine environnante

Melbourne in January is already at its loudest and the tournament sits on top of it. The city's summer runs through the cricket at the MCG next door, a dense music and comedy calendar, and the beach weekends down the Mornington Peninsula, and the Australian Open's crowd flows through all of it.

Corporate Melbourne treats the fortnight the way London treats Wimbledon, and the sponsor entertaining is concentrated in the arenas' suites and in a run of hotel takeovers in Southbank and the CBD.

03Quand arriver

Come for the first week: the outside courts run full programmes, ground passes are cheap, and the draw has not yet narrowed. The Monday to Wednesday of week one is the best of it.

04Où séjourner

The CBD is the obvious base and the right one for a short visit: from the Collins Street end it is a fifteen-minute walk across the river or three tram stops. Southbank puts you closest to the precinct and is where most of the tournament's corporate housing sits, at the cost of a slightly airless neighborhood.

05Accès et hospitalité

Tennis Australia sells the tournament in two layers. A Ground Pass, sold by day, admits the holder to the precinct and the outside courts; it is inexpensive by the standards of Grand Slam tennis and it is what most of that 1.36 million bought. The roofed arenas are sold as separate day and night sessions, seat by seat, with Rod Laver Arena the most expensive and the first to sell through. Sales run through the tournament's ticketing partner with a registered-fan presale ahead of the general on-sale, usually from the preceding spring, and Tennis Australia operates an official resale facility for returned tickets. Opening-week access, including qualifying, is sold at a low fixed price or given away, which is the cheapest serious tennis of the year anywhere.

06Où se déroule l'activité sociale

Inside the precinct, the public social life is Grand Slam Oval and Garden Square, the live music stage, and the bars strung between the arenas, all open to any ground-pass holder; the suites and hospitality rooms are not.

07Comment s'y rendre

08Informations pratiques

09Historique

The championship was first played in November 1905 at the Warehouseman's Cricket Ground in Melbourne, as the Australasian Championships, and for decades it moved between Australian and New Zealand cities and shifted around the calendar, which is why its early history is patchier than the other majors'. Distance kept the fields thin well into the Open era; through the 1970s many leading players skipped it. The tournament settled at Kooyong, then made the decisive move in 1988 to the purpose-built Flinders Park, since renamed Melbourne Park, abandoning grass for hard courts at the same time.

10Qui s'y trouve

The largest and most local crowd in Grand Slam tennis: Melbourne families and students on ground passes, a very substantial corporate contingent from Australian business, the touring tennis industry, an expatriate and diaspora following that gives the outside courts their partisan atmosphere, and international visitors combining the tournament with a longer Australian trip.