The importance of tennis in the sporting history of Australia can hardly be overestimated. Some Australians look back on their country’s former dominance of world tennis with the same degree of nostalgia as some British remember their past empire. By analysing trends in Australian tennis history, a large, influential, important and as yet untouched aspect of Australian social history may be revealed.
One of the most fundamental of unasked questions in Australian tennis is why have these questions remained unasked? Patently, the history of tennis in Victoria, and indeed Australia, has been neglected, especially in terms of how it reflected events in a wider social context and mirrored the values of a particular era, social group, and even a wider Australian self-image. In Australian social histories only a few casual references are made to a sport that has certainly long been an important focus for national pride and enjoyment.
Works specifically given to tennis tend to centre solely on match results, or basic chronological facts and provide mere information with little or no historical analysis or posited relationship to social context. Why is this, and why, furthermore, have working-class sports or team sports, both in terms of spectators and players, been discussed, rather than the primarily upper-middle class sport of tennis?
Perhaps it is because of the ideological orientation of many sports historians and sociologists, or simply because their personal interests revolve around the more popular team sports. So, while cricket, for instance, was certainly initiated by an upper-middle class, it was also a team sport and included varieties of persons from other sectors of the community. This may partly explain why so many cricket enthusiasts have written copiously on this game.
Perhaps the involvement of women in tennis to the point where they could participate with the men was also a fundamental reason for the lack of work done on tennis. Men rather than women have tended to write about their sports. Perhaps few have the wish, need or understanding to be capable of analysing a sport which also involved women, especially since the presence of women helped maintain tennis as a recreational activity, as opposed to a sport. To add to this, the smaller number of participants involved in any one match of tennis, as compared with cricket, may also provide a reason why tennis has received little analysis.
It seems also that far more tennis enthusiasts actually play the game than those interested in cricket. As a result, there is probably, in cricket, a much larger audience of interested enthusiasts who wish to actually read about their sport than in tennis quarters, where they would rather spend their time playing than reading about their game.
Yet there can be no doubt of the continued national popularity and wide media exposure of tennis. Traditionally the game in Australia has been played by literate middle-class people who have had the education and ability to investigate the history of tennis should they have wished. This could be expected, when one considers that the initial establishment of many Australian tennis clubs was connected with cricket clubs.
However, tennis remained a recreation, while cricket had an international, competitive and far more professional aspect for a much long- er period. So, while the first Australian tennis club was established in 1878 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground by a part of the Melbourne Cricket Club, and while Sydney’s first tennis club was directly linked with the Sydney Cricket Club, and many of those who played cricket also enjoyed tennis, cricket nevertheless remained their first priority and enthusiasm in terms of a competitive sport, theoretical interest and resultant analysis.
Thus, in looking at the history of tennis in Australia the questions that have been unasked are strikingly evident in my own particular thesis area. This area being a study of tennis which will illuminate, first, some neglected aspects of the history of the Victorian elite and how it operated; and second, how rapid social change, upward mobility and the impingement of powerful forces came to revolutionise, in this corner of the world the character of a game and disrupt the old authority that controlled it.
This analysis of tennis, therefore, will centre around how this game, when transferred to Australia by those who thought of themselves as being something of an ascendancy, that is, superior to the bulk of the Australian society and who sought to model themselves on the only leisure class they knew of, that of Britian, became by way of social extension, first thinkable for others, then possible, then an actuality.
Questions surrounding the developments in the Australian social and economic context which produced such changes, and way in which tennis reflected and illuminated these factors, must therefore be considered. Thus Australian tennis must be analysed in terms of the growth of an egalitarian spirit, the wider distribution of wealth and the absence of an aristocratic, or exclusively privileged class, or in other words, how Australia’s uniquely constituted population broke down barriers to give Australian tennis a distinctly Australian flavour.