tournament was held in Perth, no persons from Victoria or New South Wales crossed by train, a distance of approximately 3,000 kilometres between the east and west coasts. In Christchurch in 1906, of a small field of 10 players, only two Australians
attended, and the tournament was won by a New Zealander.
The first tournaments of the Australasian Championships suffered from the competition of the other Australasian tournaments, and before 1905 all Australian states and New Zealand had their own championships, the first being organised in 1880 in Melbourne and called the Championship of the Colony of Victoria (later became the
Championship of Victoria). In those years the best two players by far - the Australian Norman Brookes (whose name is now written on the men's singles cup) and the New Zealander Anthony Wilding - almost did not play this tournament. Brookes came once and won in 1911 and Wilding entered and won the competition twice (1906 and 1909). Their meetings in the Victorian Championships (or at Wimbledon) were the summits that helped to determine the best Australasian players. Even when the Australasian Championships were held in Hastings, New Zealand, in 1912, Wilding, though three times Wimbledon champion, did not come back to his home country.