CASEY Dellacqua's amazing Australian Open journey ended last night but not before she won the respect of the tennis world.

Serbian star Jelena Jankovic is the latest big name to now understand who the 22-year-old Perth battler is after she was given a tough workout, particularly in the opening set, before winning through to the quarter-finals 7-6 6-1.

Dellacqua showed all her fighting qualities in the opening set, coming back from two breaks behind to force a tie-break but unfortunately the wheels fell off in the second set as Jankovic put her stamp on the contest.

"To be honest, I was very nervous," the No. 3 seed said. "Playing an Aussie is very difficult because they have all of you, (the crowd) is not on my side.

"It was difficult and I thought that Casey played very well. I want to congratulate her on a good tournament, she has done very well."

Dellacqua still takes a lot away from her career-breakthrough week at the Australian Open.

She pockets her biggest cheque, $85,625, and takes over the mantle of Australia’s No. 1 player with her ranking climbing into the 50s. The blockbuster fourth round encounter had a familiar look about it from the start with Dellacqua, who had not won a first set for the tournament, continuing that trend of being slow out of the blocks by quickly falling behind 5-2.

But Dellacqua dug deep in adversity, rattling off three consecutive games to get back into the set.

Jankovic then rode her big weapon, the double-handed backhand, to break straight back and set up a third attempt at serving out the set. The problem for the Serbian was that the big weakness in her game is her second serve and it came back to haunt with a double fault setting up a break point which Dellacqua duly converted to set up a tie-break.

Jankovic’s won the tiebreaker 7-3 to take command of the match after 50 minutes.

A series of errors saw Dellacqua lose her opening service game of the second set and fall 3-0 behind and she never recovered.