Ice hockey has been played in Australia at club level since 1906 when Melbourne Glaciarium opened. Victoria first played NSW officially in a three-game National championship series at Melbourne in 1909, the year before the first European Championship was played. The captain was Robert Jackson and Andy Reid, eldest son of Henry, played on the team. The Victorian Association formed in 1908, the same year as the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), and John Goodall, the Melbourne player who donated the Cup, later became its president. Goodall was also first president of the first National controlling authority in 1923, which joined the IIHF in 1938. The Goodall Cup became the holy grail of Australian ice hockey, and its tradition continues to this day in the AIHL. Among the International champions who trained Victoria were American Charles Uksila who played with Dunderdale in the forerunner to the Chicago Blackhawks, and European Henry Witte. First among Australia's best ice hockey champions and buiilders were Dunderdale, Leslie Reid, Kendall, MacGillicuddy, Molony, Brown, NHL one-gamer Coulter, Chase, Winter, Kennedy, Carson and McEachern. They were followed by the first Australian Olympic and World Championship teams from 1960. Many of these first champions and coaches developed in both the amateur and professional hockey leagues of Britain and North America.
The National Ice Skating Association of Australia was founded in the year 1911 at Melbourne Glaciarium, then known as 'The Academy of Skating'. Sydney formed its own national association in the late 1920s. Both held independent "Nationals" until 1931, when they collaborated to form the Council of the National Ice Skating Association of Australia, after which time championships were conducted in affiliation with the ISU. Professor Webster was the first instructor at Melbourne, and later Professor Langley and Felix Kaspar, an Austrian World Champion who was interned during the war and who later taught at Sydney Glaciarium. Henry Reid Jr was the winner of the inaugural independent National in 1911. The first ISU-affiliated Nationals were held in Sydney in 1931 for "men, ladies and waltzing on ice" disciplines. Reid's daughter Mireylees, trained by Kaspar, won many independent Nationals and the third ISU-affiliated National championship in 1935. Other world-famous instructors included Lena Uksila, Henry Witte, Rhona Thaell and Enders and Cambridge. Others among the first Australian figure skating champions and buiilders were Leslie Reid, Sydney Croll, Cyril MacGillicuddy, Ken Kennedy, Patricia and Gwenneth Molony, Jack Lee, Reg Park, Nancy Burley and daughters, Adrian Swan, Pat Gregory, Mason and Bower, Dawn Hunter, Nita Solomon, Charles Keeble, Aileen Shaw, Bill Cherrell, Tim Spencer and Mary Wilson.
The ISU first organised speed skating Championships in 1893, and the sport has been an integral part of Australian ice since the first rinks in the early 1900s. It was initially controlled by the Ice Hockey and Speed Skating Council. Leslie Reid, son of Henry Newman Reid was Australia's first speed skater, although he did not compete internationally. Australia's first International was Jim Brown and the first Olympian was Ken Kennedy. The Olympic Southern Flyers Ice Racing Club, the oldest sanctioned club in Australia, was founded in 1949 at Melbourne Glaciarium. In 1956, Colin Hickey came seventh in the 500 and 1000 metre speed skating. From 1952, speed skating was organized by the Australian Ice Racing Council. Colin Coates participated in six Winter Olympics, from 1968 to 1988, and came sixth in the 1976 10,000 metres event. Australia's first World Championship win in a winter sport came from its short track relay team in 1991 at Sydney. Short track speed skating also gave Australia its first Winter Olympic medal, a bronze won by the men's relay team in Lillehammer 1994, and its first winter gold medal, won by Steven Bradbury at Salt Lake City in 2002. Others among the first speed skating champions and builders in Australia were Sydney Croll, Len Duke, Eddie Spicer, Edward Tutty, Jeanette Neal, Gary Cassidy, John Eyre, Alan Heffernan, Teddi Jenkins and Barry Maybury.
Over the years, Australia's best Olympic results have been in ice sports for ten Games and snow sports for six. That is so, despite the fact that participation in ice sports represents less than one percent of the total participation in winter sports in Australia. Henry Newman Reid, James Thonemann and Dunbar Poole were the first and most significant builders. Their work was consolidated by Reid's three sons and daughter in all three of the major disciplines: ice hockey, figures and speed skating. These foundations were further developed by John Goodall, Molony and Gordon, Len Duke and Harry Kleiner in Melbourne; and Jim Pike, Ken Kennedy, Sydney Croll and Jimmy Bendrodt in Sydney. Of those, Molony, Gordon, Croll, Kleiner and Bendrodt were primarily focused on the management, promotion and development of rinks, but some were also very active in the administration of the various controlling bodies. Duke wrote the constitution for the first ice racing club. Goodall and Kennedy did similarly with the National ice hockey association, forging critical links to their International counterparts. From the late-1940s, their work was extended by rink managers such as Alwyn Smart in Melbourne, and John Caruana at the Glaciarium and Prince Alfred Park rinks in Sydney. The 1960s brought a new wave of rink developers, in particular Pat Burley and his family, which continues to the present day .
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