History of Australian Tennis	Browse Other Pages Homepage A Viewpoint on the Game How It Began A Viewpoint on the Game 2 A Viewpoint on the Game 3 Concentration; Practice Condition, Physical and Mental Keep Your Eye on the Ball Footwork and Weight Control Women's Tennis The Grips The Service The Drive The Chop and the Slice The Volley The Subtle Shots Courage Your Opponent's Weaknesses General Tactics Outside Conditions Pressure on Your Opponent Doubles and Mixed Doubles The Coaching Job Legendary Tennis Players Olympic Tennis Does Youth Rule Tennis Hall of Fame Amateurism to Open Tennis Some Defects in Tennis Doping Olympic Review Technology and Sport The Slice Service Flat Serve The American Twist The Drive The Backhand Drive Drive - The Main Uses The Volley Net Position The Volley Position The Overhead Smash The Half-Volley The Drop Shot The Mechanics of the Slice The Main Uses of a Slice The Grips Doubles and Mixed Doubles To Open the Court Doubles In Europe and US Legendary Tennis Players (1940's) Questions in Australian Tennis History of Australian Tennis History of Australian Tennis 2 History of Australian Tennis Players Women's Tennis in Australia Australian Tennis: Nature Ages of Tennis Players The Careers of Women Players
	The sport, like so many features of Australian life was imported from England. It is the conclusion of leading authorities that modern lawn tennis was devised in 1869 and later patented in 1874 by Major Walter Clapton Wingfield in England. He called the game 'Sphairistike' (which was the Greek word for ball game): the presumption being that those who played the game had an acquaintance with the classics. The name was both a symbol and indication that the sport would be played by a select group. Wingfield's patent received provisional protection for three years but was not extended. However no one person can claim to have invented the game of lawn tennis. Before Wingfield was granted his patent, a game of lawn tennis was recorded as having been played by a certain J.B. Perara and a Major Harry Gem on a private lawn at Edgbaston. Indeed Major Gem became President of the Learnington Club which he founded in 1872. That was the first lawn tennis club in the world. The importance of Wingfield's patented game was that it popularised lawn tennis. The five guinea tennis kit, made up of balls, rackets, rules and netting, was sold in Britain and later brought out to Australia. By 1875 Wingfield was able to provide an impressive list of notable British and European figures who had bought the equipment. This not only did a great deal to further promote the game but also made certain the elite nature of tennis. From its beginnings and indeed in its very origins tennis had been connected with and became a symbol of the civilised rich. Its rules were a derivation (but also a breakaway) from older styles of tennis evolved from about 500BC in Ancient Greece and Rome, and also in more recent times in England and France from the games of Royal tennis and 'jeu de paume'. The degree to which lawn tennis was an outgrowth of the leisured civilisation of firstly Greece, Rome, Tudor England the France of the Sun King and later Victorian England, brings to light important and significant questions. In Australia the popularity of tennis came later and, although this is difficult to prove, probably a larger cross section than in England actually played, although the egalitarian nature of Australian tennis, especially in its early period, has, often been overrated. By analysing many of the well-known early Australian players' backgrounds, it becomes evident that the majority were in an affluent socio-economic position. The most likely explanation for the wider social popularity of tennis in Australia can be found in the different social compositions and environments of England and Australia. Of course, the more egalitarian nature of Australian tennis was not only a result of the particular social mix, but there was far more likelihood that relatively less affluent Australians would have the available land on which to build a court. Furthermore, while lawn tennis was initially regarded as a summer pastime, providing another alternative activity for late afternoons in both England and Australia, nevertheless the differing climates and latitudes worked to produce different attitudes to the game. For instance, as the Australian evenings were not nearly so long as in England, and because the rainfall differed in many places in Australia, grass was hard to establish and difficult to maintain. The result was that prior to the First World War, and indeed to a large extent up until the present day, Australian lawn tennis was played on surfaces other than grass, including asphalt and clay.Yet the fact that the rainfall was much less in Australia meant that the game could be played more often outdoors, if an appropriate surface was available. Perhaps also the fact that Australia was such a new settlement also meant that entertainment of any kind was rather scarce, so that sport played a greater role than in a society used to readily available professional amusement as in England, Australian tennis had a number of players with strong enough personalities, and abilities both as players and administrators, to help establish and direct the game, in particular, Norman Brookes. It was also far easier, in the new society of Australia, which had neither traditions nor precedents, for a new sport to succeed. As a result, there was far less pressure to confine tennis to becoming a mere garden party social diversion, as it was in England especially prior to World War One. However, as in England, tennis underwent 'a somewhat fragile growthperiod in Australia.In its initial stages Australian tennis matches,practice sessions and social games occurred at the private grounds of the wealthy in both the city and country areas, on club lawns or on the larger outback stations. This had obvious advantages to those who saw the game, as its early practitioners did, as the preserve of what could most accurately be described as an elite, a social grouping sufficiently selfcontained and aware of itself so that it was not necessary to join or form a club to make up the numbers for a team. Nor did tennis players need the large expanse of land necessary for such games as cricket. A private court, which was an adjunct to a substantial house, also meant that older people, or those who felt more like watching than playing the game, could sit and watch either on their verandah or close to the court. It also had an added attraction in that they could talk casually to all participants rather than merely to the outfielders in cricket. As in England 'there were no public courts as it was not a game for the public, but a private recreation of a particular kind and few open competitions except at the centres of the game, and it was not until after the World War of 1914-18 that it started to spread throughout the community'.8 The players were usually British, or perhaps, more accurately, English, from the upper middle class or with pretensions to reach that level. Because this was a tight-knit exclusive group, not growing at all rapidly in the late nineteenth century, interest in the game spread very gradually and only among a relatively small circle, mainly more mature, indeed even elderly people, What is now a game demanding greater athletic ability and calling on energies associated with the young, was originally seen in a quite different light as mainly a mild and quieter recreation for the middle aged. Initially it was seen - to emphasise the point by exaggeration - as mild exercise for geriatrics determined both to avoid the fate and to prove themselves as active. Furthermore it was a pastime, that is, precisely, a way of passing the time. Tennis initially was not a sport, nor a recreation, but simply a way of filling in spare time, pleasantly. This had two consequences. It was a pursuit for what could only be described as a section of the leisured class - people with excess time - and the implication is that it should be a pleasurable way of passing it. Tennis gradually progressed from being a pastime, to a recreation, to a sport. Why and when did those phases occur? The invention of the modern game of tennis in England occurred just prior to Melbourne's boom. In its earliest stages, Australian tennis was played by those who saw Melbourne's growth as a completion of the boyhood dreams of those born in the 183Os, who grew up in the hungry 'forties and many of whom had come to the goldfields of Victoria in the early 1850s. In their middle age they turned in imitation to what cultural achievements and expressions they had admired in England, or what they thought would have been the modern evolution of this. It was a period whose atmosphere is nicely caught in the title of Geoffrey Serle's book, The Rush to be Rich.The promotion of Tennis was partly an expression and physical illumination of this ambitious imitative impulse of Melbourne as being marvellous. It was a group of middle aged tennis players in 1880 who took the lead by conducting Australia's first tennis tournament - the Victorian Championships at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. This was a feat in itself because at this stage there was no state or national tennis association. Victoria did not establish such a body until 1892 and did not have association courts until 1908. By 1884, however, there were seven clubs in Melbourne which were competing in the only Melbourne competition, the Men's Winter Pennant: Mosspennock, the Bohemians, Windsor, St Kilda, Trinity College, Ormond College and the Melbourne Cricket Club Tennis Club. The growth of tennis clubs in Victoria can be explained at least in part as a facet - or is it an imitative legacy - of the system of family patronage and inheritance characteristic of the English bourgeois family in the nineteenth century. Such clubs, like other clubs of a professional or business nature, were conceived by their founders as creating a network of contacts for themselves, and their friends and family. Tennis clubs, as distinct from city business clubs, served a particular physical purpose. The city club existed to provide the business and professional man with various services, notably lunch, and perhaps occasional accommodation in salubrious and appropriate surroundings. But the growing cult of physical fitness - a healthy mind in a healthy body - encouraged clubs whose purposes included exercise and fitness dimensions, which could be combined with a social function. Thus, in accounting for the growth of tennis clubs, the operation of patronage, encouragement and moral coercion are extremely important. The problem of succession became more real as the business and professional men's retirement from active leadership grew closer, In the 1870s these men had denied themselves a great deal in order to give their sons a good education. Unfortunately many of the younger generation did not respond in the way their parents had hoped. Many sons expected to be given money plus a profession or partnership by their fathers, The reasons behind sons joining the same tennis clubs, and the resultant expansion of tennis clubs, was perhaps so that a certain degree of parental control or influence could be exerted. It also contrived to place the son in contact with a group of people who were considered by parents as acceptable and maybe useful for establishing social contacts and prospective business clients for their sons. They wished to establish tennis clubs partly for the formative benefits they believed it would provide for the young and also for themselves. In many cases, the sons probably saw the benefits of such an arrangement as it provided a cheap, comfortable and socially easy niche into which they could fit with a minimum effort. Next Home