Melbourne: Nearly half a century after Evonne Goolagong-Cawley became the first Aboriginal Australian to win a Grand Slam title at the 1971 French Open, the nation still waits for another indigenous talent to emerge and claim the game's highest honours.

Aboriginal athletes have featured prominently in the narrative of Australian sport and regularly light up the country's top flight rugby league (NRL) and Australian Rules football (AFL) competitions. Breaking into the big time of global tennis has proved a bigger obstacle, however, with world No. 16 Ashleigh Barty the only indigenous player currently in the women's top 200.

The men's ATP tour has long been bereft of Aboriginals, with promising juniors failing to make an impression in the professional ranks.

Ian Goolagong, Goolagong-Cawley's younger brother, is the only Aboriginal man to have played at Wimbledon having made a mixed doubles appearance with his seven-times Grand Slam title-winning sister in 1982.

Goolagong-Cawley, whose foundation is a prominent sponsor of indigenous tennis, has no illusions about the challenge of producing champions from Australia's 650,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, a population comparable to Macau.

A lack of tennis infrastructure, particularly for remote communities spread across the vast interior, invariably means the first piece of sporting equipment grasped by an Aboriginal child is an oval football rather than a racquet.

"All you need is a ball to kick, even in the communities and so on," Goolagong-Cawley said on Monday.

"The more young indigenous kids we have playing the game, the more chance we'll have of finding a champion," she said. Reuters