Venue Bendigo Stadium Country Australia Format Ranking event | Location Bendigo Established 1979 | |
Organisation(s) World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association | ||
The Australian Goldfields Open was a professional ranking snooker tournament. The final champion is John Higgins.
History
Australia had previously hosted the 1971 and 1975 World Snooker Championships, as well as several other high-profile snooker tournaments and in 1979 the Australian Masters was established. There was an attempt to turn the event into a ranking tournament in 1989 but the sponsorship fell through so it was staged in Hong Kong instead, as the Hong Kong Open, which incidentally became the first ranking tournament to be staged in Asia. The Hong Kong event was discontinued after just one year, but returned to Australia in 1994 as the Australian Open. The tournament reverted to being called the Australian Masters for the following season, but was dropped from the calendar after the 1995 event. In 2011 the World Professional Billiards and Snooker Association resurrected the event under the Australian Goldfields Open name and added it to the 2011/2012 calendar. In 2016, the event was quietly dropped from the calendar.