The championship is reckoned to start in 1894 when the
Royal Melbourne Golf Club founded the "Victorian Golf Cup", open to all amateurs in Australasia. The 1894 contest was played on 5, 7 and 9 November with the result decided by a
bogey competition over three rounds.
Louis Whyte won with a score of 6 holes down on bogey, 6 holes ahead of
Mark Anderson. The 1896 contest was held from 23 to 25 September and was decided by match-play with the final over 36 holes. Defending champion, Robert Balfour-Melville, met
Harry Howden in the final. Howden was 4 up with 5 to play before Balfour-Melville levelled the match at the 35th. However Howden won the last to win by 1 hole. Unlike the earlier Victorian Golf Cup, the AGU championship meeting moved each year and in 1900 it was held at
Adelaide Golf Club on 28 and 29 June.
Louis Whyte won with a score of 382, four ahead of
Walter Carre Riddell. The leading 16 amateurs played in the match-play stage, over three days, with two 18-hole matches on the first day, followed by 36-hole semi-finals and final.
Jim Howden beat
Michael Scott 3&2 in the final, despite having finished 23 strokes behind him in the Open. When the meeting was held at Royal Melbourne in 1905 and 1907 there was no separate match-play stage, the amateur championship being won by the leading amateur in the Open. In 1905
Dan Soutar, a professional, won the Open with a score of 337, 10 strokes ahead of the runner-up, Scott, who therefore became the amateur champion. It was won by
Audley Lemprière who beat
Ivo Whitton 2&1 in the final, reversing the result in the Open, in which Whitton had won with Lemprière second. The cup was presented to
Legh Winser, the 1921 champion, by
Archibald Weigall, the
Governor of South Australia, at a ceremony at Adelaide Golf Club in April 1922.
Ivo Whitton had won the Open in 1912 and 1913 but it was not until 1922 that he won the amateur championship, beating
Henry McClelland 3&2 in the final. He repeated his success in 1923 beating
Harry Sinclair by the same score.
Harry Williams, the 1931 winner, won again in 1937. The six members of the Australian team that won the
Commonwealth Tournament returned in time to play in the amateur championship but too late to play in the Open, and were excluded. The Toogood brothers met in the 1954 final, with
Peter beating his brother
John, leading to the famous headline "Toogood Was Too Good For Toogood".
Harry Berwick was another two-time winner, in 1950 and 1956, beating
Bill Edgar in the final on both occasions. In 1959, 36-hole stroke-play qualifying was introduced with the leading 64 players playing in the match-play stage. In 1959
Jack Coogan led the qualifying but lost in the final to
Bruce Devlin. In 1971 the number of qualifiers was reduced to 16, with all the match-play contests over 36 holes. The change was not immediately successful since only one of the six members of the Australian team for the upcoming
Commonwealth Tournament qualified for the match-play stage. The 2021 championship was originally planned to be played in Melbourne in January but was rescheduled to February at
Kooyonga Golf Club.
Louis Dobbelaar won the championship by two strokes from
Jeffrey Guan.
Jack Thompson led by 5 shots at the start of the final round but took 82 and was later disqualified for signing for an incorrect score. The 2022 title was won by
Connor McKinney who holed a long birdie putt at the first extra hole in a three-way playoff. ==Winners==