Atlas F1 is pleased to introduce renowned journalist and historian Doug Nye - author of over 60 motor racing books, and among the founders of the Goodwood Festival of Speed. Throughout the 2002 season, Doug will offer insight and information about the local history of each venue on the F1 calendar. This week, we begin with Australia's 73-year long racing heritage that leads to this weekend's event

This weekend, Melbourne's magnificent Albert Park circuit will witness something far more significant and precious than just the opening round of this year's Formula One World Championship season - for this will be a weekend of world-class competition which consolidates a proud Australian motor racing heritage.

While the enthusiasts in their bleachers will be urging on Schumi or pulling for DC - or, perhaps more probably, roaring on Mark - Albert Park's lush, leathery grass and its bobbing, swaying pontoon bridge across the vast boating lagoon set the character of a course which itself drips in road racing history.

The same can be said for the state of Victoria, and for its deadly racing rival - South Australia, next door.

It was the Light Car Club of Victoria which organised the inaugural Australian Grand Prix, on Phillip Island, south of Melbourne, way back in 1928. A 6.5-mile rectangle of public roads was selected - rather unimaginatively - and prepared there, with two long straights linked by two short ones... of only one mile each! Can you picture a modern F1 field tackling a four-straight course, connected by 90-degree corners with front and back straights of 2.25-miles each? The aerodynamicists would have a seizure at the prospect, to say nothing of the drivers and Mr Mosley...

The rather lucky winner of this first Australian GP - run on Victoria's Labour Day - was Captain Arthur Waite, industrialist Herbert Austin's son-in-law, in an Austin 7.

The race became a fixture at Phillip Island until 1935 - it lapsed in '36 and was then effectively revived by the Sporting Car Club of South Australia in 1937, as part of the state celebrations for 100 years of European settlement. A new course was chosen near the whaling port of Victor Harbour. It was again mainly straight and undulating, composed of rural roads, and featured the magnificently named Nangawooka Hairpin, like an arrow on the map pointing straight towards Adelaide.

For 1938, New South Wales hosted the event on the new Mount Panorama circuit outside Bathurst, and for the first time a serious northern hemisphere 'proper' racing car was entered - British wool magnate Peter Whitehead's ERA. Despite the loose part dirt road surface, the visitor duly crushed the local specials, and won hands-down.

Bathurst had set a style for truly challenging road circuit selection. In 1939, another wonderful road circuit loop was selected for the 'AGP' - around the township of Lobethal, back in South Australia. You could still drive these roads today - winding, looping, climbing, diving, ripping down the village main street. Wonderful stuff. But the community hall in Lobethal would soon be thronged with farm boys, signing up to fight for King, Country and Empire - many of them never to return - and the world was at war.

Racing resumed in postwar Australia in 1947, back at Bathurst, NSW. An MG had won the last pre-war race - another (a TD) won the postwar revival event. This was far-flung colonial stuff. Little used military airfields now became racing venues.

For 1949 the AGP was run on an aerodrome at Leyburn, Queensland, not far from Toowoomba. One year later, 1950, back on the public roads of SA - at Nuriootpa, 30 miles north-east of Adelaide. 1951, Western Australia's turn - closed straight public roads at Narrogin, south of Perth. 1952 back to Bathurst - and a real European Formula One car wins for the first time - the big, booming Talbot-Lago of 'Gentleman' Doug Whiteford. Second behind him was Stan Jones in his fiendish Maybach Special - Stan, who had a young son named Alan, later to join the Williams team and become Formula One World Champion in 1980.

Then - in 1953 - the 'real' Light Car Club of Australia's AGP returned to Victoria, and Albert Park made its bow, located just south of Melbourne's thriving business centre.

Melbourne had a conservative reputation - one resident told me it was the last refuge of ladies wearing three-quarter length gloves to balls. But Albert Park had everything going for it. Melbourne might have been a little staid, but it was a sporting city - and the Park featured a handsome golf course, a couple of football/cricket ovals and the mighty lake on which power boat racing vied with sail and rowing. There were well-surfaced roads looping around the site - and enormous mature tree cover to give over-ambitious drivers a proper sense of perspective...

That 1953 race is said to have drawn as many as 70,000 spectators. Doug Whiteford won again in his lovely Talbot-Lago, running - as did all his rivals - anti-clockwise, unlike today.

Albert Park lay silent through 1954, but racing was revived here in March '55, as part of Melbourne's Moomba festival, and that meeting was repeated in March '56.

But the city had bigger fish to fry that year - for the 1956 Olympic Games were held there, with the year's AGP a frenetic supporting event that December. Works Maserati 250Fs were entered for Stirling Moss and French star Jean Behra - the Jean Alesi of his day - and 'Jeannot' it was who won. In all, six Maserati Formula One cars faced three open-wheeler Ferraris, two Lagos, a flotilla of Cooper-Bristols and the local specials - the Australian GP was now established on a world map.

The AGP itself continued its wanderings, Caversham aerodrome, Western Australia, 1957, Bathurst '58, Longford in Tasmania in 1959 - when crowd favourite Stan Jones at last won his home Grand Prix, at Lowood airstrip, Queensland, in 1960. But Albert Park had not been forgotten.

A revived Moomba race meeting was run between the trees and around that magnificent lake in March 1957, and November '58 then witnessed another two-weekend meeting with visiting superstar Stirling Moss strutting his stuff in his Rob Walker-entered private Formula One Cooper. Evocatively, he finished one race as dusk hurried in, and in the gloom the little Cooper's brake discs - and an overheated gearbox - could be seen dull-orange, glowing... Get close enough, and you could hear oil sizzling.

But noise, disruption, un-Melbourne frenzy - stirred city opposition, backed by the local media, and that 1958 motor race meeting was Albert Park's last for decades.

It slumbered and decayed - and the area became poorer, dirtier, even more run down - until the 1990s. The AGP had continued its parochial, gipsy existence around the nation until 1980, when 'Jonesie' - Alan Jones - had appeared at Calder Raceway, Victoria, in his current F1 World Champion Williams FW07.

At last it was clear that modern air-freight could enable an Australian outing to be fitted into a willing F1 team's schedule. It took years more for the scheduling, the sponsorship, the authorisation, the politics to place all the spoons in all the glasses.

The ambition and energy came from Adelaide and the South Australians - the first Formula One World Championship-qualifying Australian Grand Prix was run around the city streets of Adelaide in 1985 - when 1982 World Champion Keke Rosberg won in his turbocharged Williams-Honda FW10. Adelaide for 11 years became Australian home to Formula One - the compact, picturesque city, deemed by many Australians to be just small and behind-the-times - achieved disproportionately huge world stature by association with the World Championship glitterati.

Ultimately, Victorian competitiveness and Melbourne financial muscle made an offer that could not be refused, and in 1995 'little Adelaide' hosted its last AGP - won by Damon Hill in his Williams-Renault FW17B - and March 12, 1996, then saw Albert Park spectacularly revived as a stunning modern Formula One venue - and its debut race dominated by the Williams-Renault boys once more, Damon moving ahead to win from his tyro teammate, young Jacques Villeneuve.

In some ways, the wheel had come full circle: from Phillip Island, Victoria, 1928 to Albert Park, Melbourne, Victoria 1996. But you know what it's like with these motor racing wheels: they keep on turning, year upon year upon year...