by Moana Hope
The sad result was that, at a time when I was at the peak of my athletic powers, I no longer felt that footy was a priority in my life. I was so scarred by the way I had been judged that I feared I might never take footy seriously again.
1
Life in the tough lane
INEVER HAD ANY trouble being me when I was a kid. Sure, I was a bit different from the average little girl. I didn’t want to play with dolls or paint my nails. I just wanted to kick the footy or play cricket. I wanted to wear my hair short and run around with my top off. And no one in my family ever wanted to change me. My mum and dad, and my thirteen brothers and sisters, loved me for who I was.
Sure, we had our moments of grief and anger. And we were prone to giving each other politically incorrect nicknames—my brothers called me ‘Turkey’, because they thought my darkish skin made me look like a Turkish person—but the amount of love I received from them is the thing I remember most about my childhood.
There’s no doubt growing up in such a large family was pretty crazy. At one stage, I think there would have been fifteen or sixteen of us living in our two-bedroom housing commission home in the northern Melbourne suburb of Glenroy—my mum still lives there and I haven’t moved far, as I am still in the same suburb. But our house was overflowing with love.
Both my parents worked: Dad at a pizza shop owned by my uncle (he and Dad were as close as brothers can be) and Mum at a nursing home. She must have left home quite early each morning to finish around 3 or 4 pm, about the time we arrived home from school. Once Mum was home, Dad headed off to the pizza shop and worked until 1 am or so, making and delivering pizzas.
Even though Mum and Dad both worked, we were such a large family that we only ever had just enough money to get by. We made do with what we had. For Christmas each year, Mum would get a few bags of clothes from an op shop and that would be it. When it came to food, we never ate out. The weekly trip to the supermarket was all we had to get us through.
Going shopping with Mum was a great adventure. There would be at least two trollies piled high with stuff and it would all cost hundreds of dollars. I remember Mum spending $600 on one shopping trip and thinking, ‘That’s the hugest amount of money I’ve ever heard of!’ But divide that by fifteen, and it’s not much.
With two working parents there wasn’t enough time to make all our food from scratch. Monday night meals might be meat pies and vegetables. We would warm up six of those family pies and halve them, and have potatoes or carrots on the side. On Tuesday nights it would be dim sims and vegetables. We would steam three bags of dim sims and get six or eight each. Wednesday night was something like canned baked beans or spaghetti on toast.
I remember all this well because we had chores to do around the house, and one of mine was cooking. I often made mince stew— basically a massive pile of cheap beef mince with some onions and tinned tomatoes, and maybe a few carrots or frozen peas. Even on the nights when we ate things like dim sims, I had to prepare the vegetables to go with them. A few of my siblings would help, and we’d peel twenty potatoes and a couple of bags of carrots and just get stuck in and chop them up.
Mum often got us out of bed by 6 am to do our chores before we went to school—Dad was still asleep at this time, as he worked so late. Mum had a big chalkboard on the wall where she’d write everyone’s name. It was like a military operation. And if Mum ever had to start work earlier than usual, the next in the chain of command, the oldest kid living at home at the time, took charge.
Alongside our names on that chalkboard were the jobs we had to do. Some of us would get food ready for that night’s dinner while others made the school lunches. Some would be cleaning the house or putting dirty clothes in the washing machine or hanging clothes out on the line. Mum would motivate us by saying, ‘If your jobs aren’t done you won’t be going to footy training tonight.’ If there was no training that night, she would just say that if we didn’t do as we were told we wouldn’t be able to play footy in the street. That was enough.
When it came to education, the primary school kids went to Corpus Christi, a Catholic primary school in Glenroy. The older ones went to Box Forest Secondary College, which was just down the end of our street. No one in our family cared much about the academic side of schooling. When I was at school, I just mucked around in class until lunchtime arrived and I could go out on the oval and play footy or cricket with the boys. The only school subject I liked was physical education, because in that class we mainly went outside and played sport.
When we arrived home from school there were usually more chores to do before we could go out and kick the footy. But as soon as Mum said everything was sweet, we were off. Rain, hail or shine. On non-training nights, we would play footy in the street until Mum came out and told us to come inside. In winter, it was often pitch-black by the time she dragged us inside for dinner.
We often set up goals out the front of our house, but sometimes a big mob of us neighbourhood kids went to the local oval, which was literally at the end of our street. When it was time for dinner, if Mum couldn’t find us in our street she would head straight for the oval. We weren’t naughty kids. We didn’t go places where Mum couldn’t find us or get into fights. We just loved playing football.
On those occasions when we went up to the oval, we often played a mad and chaotic sort of no-rules match. I loved those games of footy. A few other girls, including many of my sisters, joined in with the games, but none of them loved footy as much as me.
There were some hard times during those years, like when Dad was diagnosed with leukaemia and could no longer work. Money became really tight and we had to live an even more basic life. Mum would buy a big bag of carrots and shave them down into a soup, and that’s all we had to eat. Even though we hated the taste, it was food, and we knew Mum was doing the best she could. Sometimes, though, we benefitted from the generosity of others in our suburb.
The owners of the Glenroy Bakery looked after us like we were family. I can vividly remember the first time I walked past the bakery and they were making doughnuts. I was still in primary school and a few of us kids were on our way to Coles to buy some extra things for dinner. The smell from the bakery just about tripped us over. It was so good. We decided to go in and see if they would give us some and, amazingly, the person behind the counter gave us a whole bag of doughnuts. They were so fresh. The greatest thing I had ever tasted.
After that we started making a habit of sneaking down to the bakery at the end of the day to see if we could get some free doughnuts. Mum would have been horrified if she knew we were getting food without paying for it, so we didn’t tell her. We either ate them before we got home or smuggled them into our bedroom. Sometimes the people at the bakery even gave us doughnuts with jam in the middle. Seriously, they were heaven. I still love them, but they don’t taste as good as they used to. I think that’s because I can now afford more treat food, so eating doughnuts isn’t as special an experience as it once was.
My parents were both so selfless. They would go hungry if that was the only way to ensure all of us kids had enough to eat. Mum and Dad would give us the clothes off their backs if we needed them. We knew we were loved and that we were being looked after as well as our parents could manage.
Even though it was challenging at times, my parents loved having a big family. My mum, Rosemary, has Maōri heritage. She is related to the renowned Maōri leader Sir Graham Latimer, who was the president of the New Zealand Maori Council for more than forty years and in the 1980s led the fight to secure Maori rights, under the Treaty of Waitangi, to New Zealand’s state-owned lands, forests and fisheries. Mum grew up in New Zealand, in a culture where large families are the norm. As a result, she always wanted to have lots of kids. I’m not really sure whether Dad, who had German heritage but grew up in Queensland, always wanted to have so many kids or it just happened that way.
Mum met Dad in New Zealand when she was nineteen. I’m told he was a DJ back then. He was apparently v
ery well known in the pub scene in Melbourne at the time. I’m not sure why he went to New Zealand, but I think it must have been to do some gigs over there. After he met Mum they decided to move to Melbourne together.
Mum was Dad’s second wife. He had two girls—Eleanor and Kim—with his first wife. Then he had twelve more kids with Mum. Sometimes I still struggle to name us all. I find it easiest to go through the list in birth order, from youngest to oldest, so here goes: Ethan, Livinia, Elena, Gary (nicknamed Barney), me, Bree, Melanie, Renee, Corey, Jamie, Shona and Jennifer.
The sleeping arrangements when I was a kid took some organisation. I recall Mum and Dad sharing one bedroom with the youngest kids while the other nine or ten of us would share the other bedroom. I think there were eight beds in that room. It was basically four sets of bunks. Sometimes we had to share a bed—that’s just how it was.
All sorts of pranks happened in the kids’ bedroom, like there was no tomorrow. The chief aim was to get each other in trouble with Mum and Dad. We would take the slats out of someone’s bed, and then the person using that bed would fall through it. We would all laugh and Mum would have to come in and tell us off. Mum had to visit our room five or six times each night to tell us to be quiet and go to sleep. She was always trying to get us to remember that we needed a good night’s sleep so we could work hard at school the next day, but given not many of us cared for school that wasn’t an incentive to behave. All most of us wanted to do was kick a footy around or play cricket.
Our car was an old yellow Ford Falcon station wagon. There were often eight of us crammed into the main part of the car, while the rest went in the back. It was illegal but Dad didn’t give a shit. He couldn’t. It was the only way we could get around. Dad drove that old wagon up to Queensland a few times to see his brother Jack. He would take a couple of us kids with him each time, and I was usually one of the lucky ones who got to go. They were great trips.
I now know this was very different from the upbringing most kids in Australia had. But none of it seemed out of the ordinary to me at the time. We lived in a bubble, and what went on in that bubble was all I knew. There was never a time where I was saying, ‘Oh, we’re so broke’ or, ‘I’m sad because we’re poor’ or, ‘We don’t have anything like the other kids have’. If I had that time again, I would want exactly the same upbringing, because the way I grew up made me the person I am today.
I grew up in a family that looked at life the way I believe everyone should look at it. We didn’t go around judging people. We weren’t the sort who went around thinking, ‘You don’t look very rich’ or, ‘You don’t look like you’re wearing very expensive clothes’ or, ‘I need that really expensive house over there’. I think we just enjoyed life as it was. And the bond among us that was created during those years has endured, and we remain a very close and loving family to this day.
2
The loves of my life
I ENJOYED A VERY close relationship with both my parents during my pre-teen years. But Dad was my best friend, and I’m sure I was his. We were like two peas in a pod. To put it bluntly, I was his favourite child, closely followed by Livinia, my disabled sister. She is five years younger than me and was born with Moebius syndrome, a condition that means she cannot move her face properly and will forever have the developmental age of a six or seven year old.
I don’t know why I was Dad’s favourite. I always used to stir my brothers and sisters by saying, ‘I’m the best kid in the family, that’s why!’ To be honest, I am the hardest working and most driven person in my family, and maybe Dad spotted that from when I was young. Whatever it was, we were soul mates.
I used to go everywhere with Dad I could. Some nights he even took me out on the road delivering pizzas. I always wanted to be by his side, and on some nights I would set up a makeshift bed next to his and sleep there. On the odd occasion that Mum had to do a night shift at the nursing home, I would curl up and sleep next to him.
He was such a kind and generous man. A testament to that was the amount of love he showed to Livinia. He never gave up on her. She basically died two or three times in the days after she was born, and he didn’t give up. When the doctors said she would never walk, he didn’t give up. When she became so blocked up with snot that she could have stopped breathing, he sat by her bed with one of those sucker things to keep clearing her nose. I’m sure that there were a couple of times when he pretty much had to resuscitate her. ‘Vinny’, as we all call her, was his princess.
Vinny went to a special school from age five or six. We had spent hours and hours using a specific frame to teach her how to walk, and Dad and I started going to her school every now and then to have a picnic with her and her schoolmates. Dad would break our family budget and buy lamingtons, lollies, cakes, chocolates and party pies and then walk into the school carrying all this stuff in a big basket. The kids greeted him like he was Santa Claus. Dad would spread the food out on a table and all the kids would come and have a feast. They seriously used to go nuts when he arrived. They loved him. ‘Gary’s here!’ they would shout. They would jump on him and he enjoyed every minute of it.
It was Dad who sparked my passion for football. He was a big Essendon man, and he absolutely loved footy. He would happily watch footy all day, whether it was live at a footy ground or on television, or a replay. Although we were amazingly close, we didn’t barrack for the same AFL team. He and the rest of my family lived for the Bombers, but I barracked for Hawthorn. When I was about four or five years old, I had discovered our next-door neighbour barracked for the Hawks. He was a really good footy player, and I wanted to be like him, so I went for Hawthorn too. I don’t think Dad was very happy with my decision, but given the rest of the family followed his lead and supported Essendon, I don’t think he had much to complain about.
We all loved watching the AFL on the TV, but in our household playing footy was a bigger thing than watching it. My older brothers started out playing for the Hadfield Football Club in the Essendon District league. Hadfield is the neighbouring suburb to where we lived in Glenroy, so Dad and I often went down there to watch. I loved watching the boys play, and I was rapt that Hadfield players wore Hawthorn-style brown and gold stripes and the team was known as the Hawks. But I was just so frustrated as well, because I wanted to be out on the field. As soon as each quarter finished, I headed straight onto the ground, kicking a footy of my own.
At the start, I loved footy because Dad loved it, but I soon developed my own passion for the game. Mum remembers that by the age of three I carried a footy with me wherever I went. I even took it to bed every night. I was already very competitive. When I watched my brothers playing proper games of footy, I wanted to do the same.
Right from the start, Dad encouraged me to play sport, especially the sports that didn’t usually attract a lot of female players. He never once said anything like, ‘Girls can’t be playing footy’ or, ‘Girls are no good at cricket’. He was far more likely to say, ‘You can be whatever you want to be. If playing cricket is what you want to do, I’ll support it.’ Dad wasn’t only happy for me to play male-dominated sports, he was adamant that I could be better than the boys.
‘You need to beat them,’ he would tell me.
When I was at the footy oval or out in the street, I loved trying to kick the ball further than my brothers did. I imagined that I was one of my Hawthorn heroes: Dermott Brereton or Jason Dunstall or John Platten or Chris Langford or Daniel Harford or Shane Crawford. They could all kick the ball so far. I remember in the early days I couldn’t even kick the length of the goal square, but Dad encouraged me to get better and better. When I was old enough, he became like my personal coach. He would take me down to the local oval and get me to work on my fitness and my skills. I don’t think he had been much of a footy player in his day, but he was a great teacher. The kicking skills that hold me in such good stead today are a product of his brilliant teaching.
Mum and I have recently talked a lot about this time. We star
ted doing so when we were asked to be part of an episode about women’s footy for the ABC show Australian Story. And we have reminisced some more since I started writing this book.
‘You used to go out there and kick the ball, and then Dad would take you for a lap of the oval,’ Mum told me. ‘You would spend endless hours outside kicking the footy and running around.’
By the age of six, I was itching to play a proper game of footy. Hadfield had a number of junior teams and I was adamant that I was good enough to hold my own. I started going to training when I was six, even though I think the league’s rules stated that I couldn’t play a game until I turned seven. I was able to compete so well with the boys on the training track that when my seventh birthday arrived I went straight into the team—and I was the only girl in the side.
Dad was extremely proud when he saw me run onto the field in Hadfield’s brown and gold stripes. Before the game, he had given me just one piece of advice: ‘If you want to play with the boys you have to take the hits.’ He had nothing to worry about in that regard. I was so looking forward to playing and that meant taking some hits and dishing plenty out as well, just like it did when I was playing against my brothers in our backyard.
From that first game, my competitiveness kicked in and I revelled in the challenge of trying to be the best player on the field. I loved it when the boys tried to tackle me and I was able to get around them because I was so fast and agile. Dad loved that too. He started calling me ‘Mouse’, because I was clearly the smallest player on the field. But I often heard him cheering and laughing as I dodged around boys that were twice my size. I was so short that sometimes it looked like I was running through their legs.
