For Australian tennis, Johanna Konta is the one that got away.

And she’s not coming back.

Born in Sydney and fluent in English and Hungarian – the first language of father Gabor – Konta headed to Spain when she was 14 to follow her tennis dream.

Rather than continue to criss-cross the planet, the Konta family moved to Britain, the country the 24-year-old now proudly calls home.

“I was training in Spain for 15 months and while I was there my parents didn’t want to be halfway around the world away from their 14-year-old daughter,” she said.

“So they migrated to the UK because they had Hungarian passports and that’s in the EU, so they could work there.”

Konta made her first major breakthrough at last year’s US Open when she beat Spain’s Garbine Muguruza in the longest women’s match in history at Flushing Meadows.

She has now matched that run to the last 16 at Melbourne Park, having easily seen off the challenge of Czech Denisa Allertova 6-2 6-2 in the third round on Saturday.

Konta competed under the Australian flag at grand slam tournaments as a junior, including the 2005 Australian Open.

But that was then.

Along with Melbourne-born former Wimbledon junior champion Laura Robson, she is a proud Pom.

Call it a reverse Daria Gavrilova – born in Russia and now very much an Aussie.

“Australia is my birth home so it will always be a home of some sort,” Konta said on Saturday.

“But I’m very happy, very pleased to be representing Great Britain.

“That is my home and that is where my heart is.

“That is where I grew up essentially.

“So when people ask me where I’m from, where is home, that’s where it is.”

Konta is projected to break into the world’s top 40 after her Open run and will be knocking on the door of a seeding for the other three majors later in the year.

Her fourth-round opponent is unseeded Czech Barbora Strycova.