by Moana Hope
There were times when the boys caught me and threw me to the ground. But I took the blows, clambered back on my feet, and got on with the game. Dad thought I was the toughest player at the club, and he never once questioned whether it was right for a girl to be playing a sport that can be so rough.
I was never one for analysing this unusual situation either. For me, playing footy was never about trying to prove a point that girls could hold their own against boys, or anything like that. I just loved footy, so that’s why I played it. It was the same with cricket. I played it because I loved it. And when I was at training or playing in a match, I just felt like I was one of the boys. To be honest, it never crossed my mind that I was any different from them.
I didn’t read newspapers or magazines or watch television shows that promoted the idea that girls should do this and boys should do that. It never really crossed my mind that some people might have thought a girl playing footy against boys was a bit weird. When I think about today’s kids, there are so many influences that can screw them up. They look at magazines full of pretty girls and think, ‘That’s what I need to look like. I need to be a princess.’ And the boys see pictures of buffed Adonises—it’s all bullshit.
Recently I have read so many stories about how it’s controversial that girls want to have a kick with the boys. Those stories are so harmful. We should just let our kids explore their interests and encourage them. If a young boy wants to be a ballet dancer, let him be a ballet dancer—don’t tell boys that they can’t be ballet dancers. If the kids want to play soccer, let them play soccer. Don’t preach to your kids, ‘Oh, it’s so weird to see a girl playing football’ or, ‘Boys don’t do ballet’. Be careful what you say, because we all know that kids soak up what their parents say and then go and repeat many of the things they hear. A young girl who wants to play footy doesn’t need some boy coming up to her and saying it’s not what girls do.
The boys I played cricket and footy alongside and against were fantastic. I can’t remember one ever saying, ‘You’re a girl, you can’t kick’ or, ‘You’re a girl, you shouldn’t be playing’. When I played cricket, the boys bowled as fast at me as they did at any other batsman. To be fair, I then bowled just as fast at them. Those kids were never judgemental, and that’s why I feel children are the best people to be around if they have not had their heads filled with prejudices.
One of the things I love the most about playing sport is being part of a team. Right from those years when I was just a little tacker, being in a team felt like being part of another big family. Whether it was footy or cricket, we were all in it together. My brother Barney, who is just one year younger than me, and I were often on the same team. He is my closest sibling—in age and in terms of being friends—and we both lived for sport back then. Our lives were about cricket in the cricket season and footy in the footy season. That’s pretty much all we cared about.
I played in the Hadfield footy club’s junior boys teams until I was twelve. I was a little midfielder who loved to run forward and kick goals. Without wanting to sound like a big-head, I was better than most of the boys. I regularly won best-on-ground awards after games and I was right up there in the best and fairest at the end of each season. I was able to give my brothers a lot of shit, as I usually came home from the end-of-season function carrying a bag full of awards, while they came home with nothing. It made me feel like I was Number One in our household.
I’m not one for remembering every minor detail, but I think I played in at least one premiership as a child. The thing was that winning or losing wasn’t a big part of footy at that age. If we didn’t win, we didn’t all walk around scowling and saying, ‘We lost’. For us, footy was just about having fun with our mates. One of the highlights for me each week was getting a free can of soft drink and some lollies after the game. The people at the Hadfield Football Club were so lovely to my brothers and me. They knew our family didn’t have much money, so they would often give us a free hot dog or pie, and that was like heaven. They were great days. You got to play with some of your best mates and you got a free hot dog and a drink. That’s what sport should be all about for kids. It’s not about winning or losing or how many goals you kicked. It’s about being part of a fun environment and trying your hardest.
Those days continued until my gender inevitably came into play. The rules of our local footy competition stated that girls could only play against boys until they turned thirteen. So when I reached my teens I switched across to Hadfield’s open-age women’s team—the club didn’t have any junior teams for girls. Although I weighed no more than 40 kilograms, I was soon lining up against fully grown, big-bodied women. The only special rule put in place for me was that I had to wear a helmet.
Thanks to my apprenticeship against the boys, I was soon running rings around my opposition, and getting in a few fracas with them, as my great friend Nicole Graves, who was playing for the Darebin Falcons at the time, says:
I played against Mo when I was nineteen or twenty and she would have been only twelve or thirteen.You know, there were quite a few twelve year olds playing open-age women’s footy then, because there was nowhere else for them to play. She was so tiny that I was worried I was going to squish her, but then she kept turning our defenders inside out and kicked five goals in half a game. She started getting a bit cocky, so I said to her, ‘Who do you think you are, you little shit?’ She sledged me straight back, then we went our separate ways and nothing else came of it. All these years later, we still joke about it.
When I was thirteen, in 2001, I helped the Hadfield Hawks win the Division 2 premiership in the VWFL. Our victory resulted in us being promoted to Division 1. Playing against the top women’s teams in Victoria was something that I was really excited about and looking forward to—it was a dream come true. However, the 2002 season would coincide with the toughest period of my life.
3
No better man
IT WAS WHEN I was eleven years old that my dad was diagnosed with leukaemia. Initially, I had no real idea about how serious his illness was. When I was told that he had cancer, I was like, whatever. I had no idea what cancer was. I didn’t know there were different types of cancer. I thought he just had something like the flu. I remember people at school saying that cancer was really bad. But I thought it was impossible that a disease could kill someone as strong as my dad. He was a massive man. I think he weighed about 140 kilograms, but he wasn’t fat. He was quite tall and was built like a big rugby player. When I looked at him, I couldn’t see how an illness could possibly be stronger than him.
Even after the high doses of chemotherapy that Dad was receiving resulted in him losing his hair, I still didn’t think much about it. I always thought he’d be better in a couple more weeks. But over the course of two years Dad’s health deteriorated to the point where he was unable to drive, then unable to even walk, and it was then that the extent of how sick he was dawned on me.
Eventually, it got to the point where Dad was unable to cope with all the noise and chaos at home. The doctors were adamant that being around his family was proving very stressful for Dad. As he wasn’t one to complain, Mum took it upon herself to rent a small unit for him. I couldn’t bear being away from Dad at night, so I decided that I was going to be his carer. I didn’t ask Mum whether I could do it, I just told her I was going to look after him. I had to be there for him, and that was that.
I ended up caring for Dad for more than two years. I made all his food and I took care of all the medical things that I could handle. Looking back now, I’m not really sure how I managed to look after him as well as I did, because he needed a lot of help. As his illness progressed, he started coughing up a lot of blood. He would cough into a spit bag and I would change the bag every couple of hours. I was by his side right through the night. In fact, I don’t think I ever had a full night’s sleep during those years.
I missed a lot of school during the period that I was caring for Dad, but I don’t remember my tea
chers trying to stop me from being by his side. I think they understood how close I was to him. I think they also knew that Dad pretty much needed full-time care but Mum couldn’t provide it because she had to keep working to support our huge family. She was now our sole income earner. Without her bringing in money, we wouldn’t have been able to pay our bills or the two rents. We would have been homeless. If Mum had a weekday off or did a nightshift, then she looked after Dad during the day while I went to school. That’s how it worked.
In his last year or so, Dad was often admitted to hospital. He sometimes developed pneumonia and he needed blood transfusions. He always went to StVincent’s hospital in Fitzroy and I always went with him. We travelled there by taxi until Dad was so sick that we had to go by ambulance. When he was getting transfusions and stuff like that, I had no idea what was going on or why he needed new blood. But I never left his side. If he had to stay overnight, I pushed two chairs together and slept beside him. The nurses became so used to me doing this that they started setting up a bed for me on the floor. I never left him while he was in hospital, and Dad always shared his food with me. We were there for each other.
Towards the end of his life, Dad became very fragile. On one occasion he rolled over in bed and one of his ribs fractured. It was heartbreaking to see him reduced from such a big, strong man to a pile of skin and splintering bones. I think that he ended up weighing just 38 kilograms. He became so skinny that when I rubbed his back I could clearly see the shape of his tailbone.
When Dad got to the point where he knew he was going to die, he moved back into our family home, and I did too. Dad wanted to be surrounded by his family in his last few days, but he went through a really emotional period once we moved back home. I remember I was watching television in the lounge room with my brother Barney one evening and I could hear Mum saying to Dad, ‘Don’t be an idiot. Don’t say things like that.’ The thing was that Dad had started pouring out all of his life’s regrets. Over and over again, he kept telling Mum that he had so many regrets about his life. He kept saying that he regretted working in a job that meant he didn’t spend enough time with his kids. And he was crying a lot. That was a massive shock for me. I don’t think I had ever seen him cry before then.
Dad knew he was about to die, and he was just going through that phase of full-blown regret. He was thinking, Fuck, why didn’t I just do things that I wanted to do? Why did I go waste all that time working nightshifts? So many things must have been going through his head. I remember he called one of my older siblings into his bedroom and started apologising to them. He couldn’t stop saying, ‘I’m sorry.’
Mum kept telling him to stop saying these things, to stop feeling like he needed to apologise to everyone. But Dad just couldn’t help it. He couldn’t find any inner peace. I had no idea what was going on. Deep down, I still didn’t believe he was going to die. I just didn’t want to believe it.
It was 2002, I was fourteen and enrolled in Box Forest Secondary College (which was closed down at the end of 2009 and then reopened as Glenroy College). I was doing what was known as the Koorie Open Door Education (KODE) program, which meant I was in classes with kids—most of them Indigenous—who needed extra help with their reading and writing, which I did too. People probably judged me for being in the program. They probably thought it meant I was dumb. But I didn’t give a shit. I loved it. I found a certain amount of freedom being with others who struggled academically.
Even though I was missing a lot of school days because of Dad’s illness, the teachers wanted me to take part in the work experience program. Dad thought it would be good for me too. He wanted me to be someone who grew up and made a contribution to society, not someone who turned into a dole bludger. So my school arranged for me to spend a week at the local Bi-Lo supermarket. It was the one where we did most of our shopping and where two of my sisters already worked. But I didn’t want to go. The day before I was due to start, Dad called me over and quietly said, ‘Hey, you have to go to work experience.Your school has set it up, so you have to go.’
‘Fuck that, I’m not going,’ I replied. ‘I have to be here with you.’
But Dad was adamant.
‘You have to go.’
The next day I went down to Bi-Lo and followed my sisters around. One of them was a duty supervisor and the other one was basically a full-time shelf stacker. The following morning I got up and went to see Dad. He looked unbelievably weak, and it was soon decided that he would need to be admitted to hospital.
‘I’m coming with you,’ I said. He then plucked up the strength to say, ‘No. You have to go to work experience. You’re not coming.’
I started crying and lost it.
‘Fuck this, I hate this,’ I yelled. ‘Fuck work experience, who cares about work experience?’
He looked at me and repeated what he had said earlier: ‘You have to go.’
At 11 am, as I wandered around the supermarket, one of the staff members came up to me and said, ‘Your mum has just rung. You have to go home.’ I thought that Mum must have organised for us to go and see Dad at the hospital. When I got home, she asked us to sit down in the lounge room. All of my brothers and sisters were there.
‘Your father might pass away soon,’ she said. It was like a hit across the head and I think I started going into shock. I felt so numb. Then the phone rang and Mum answered it. I’ll never forget seeing her drop to her knees, like she was sort of fainting. She started crying hysterically. One of my brothers could tell that I wasn’t really registering what was going on.
‘Dad has died,’ he said.
Those words struck me hard. I had been by his side day after day and now he had passed away while I was at a stupid supermarket doing work experience. I felt so bitter. My best friend, my only really close friend, was gone and I had not been there at the end. To this day, the thought of Dad dying in that hospital without his family makes me cry. It breaks my heart. I went with him every time he went to the hospital, but on the one day that I didn’t go with him he died.
But it was probably a very selfless act for Dad to push me away that day. He knew how close he was to dying and for a young kid like me to watch a parent die would be extremely traumatic— probably more traumatic than not being there. So in some ways I’m grateful for what he did.
I found it impossible to process the idea that Dad was gone forever. I remember family friends saying to me, ‘I’m so sorry to hear about your dad,’ but I sort of acted like I didn’t know what they were talking about. On one level, it just didn’t feel real. A carload of my teammates from the Hadfield footy club came over to see me, which was really sweet. One of them suggested, ‘Let’s go and play basketball to take your mind off things.’ I was rapt to get the chance to go out and play some sport, but I was in a state where my mind didn’t really need to be diverted. It hadn’t fully registered the gravity of what had happened. Even after being given the chance to go to the funeral home and view his body in the casket, I still couldn’t really grasp the reality. I had seen him lying there, clearly lifeless, but I couldn’t stop believing that somehow it was just a bad dream.
I didn’t really take it in at the time, but a freakish thing happened at Dad’s funeral. He had chosen the song ‘Better Man’ by Robbie Williams for the service. But when the time came for the song to be played, the next track, which was ‘My Way’, came on instead. I love to think that Dad changed his mind up in heaven and reached down into the church and changed the track, because ‘My Way’ was so much more appropriate. Dad used to do everything his way; it was his way or the highway. Nobody ever overruled him. He was the one to have the first and last say in everything.
After the church service, the people who ran the funeral home were really apologetic about the mix-up with the music. They kept saying things like, ‘We put it on Track 1, we don’t know how it got to Track 2.’ I know people will probably think I’m crazy saying this, but I’m sure Dad did it.
Another strange thing happened not
long after the funeral. Mum was sitting on her bed crying with a few of us trying to comfort her when Livinia walked in. Vinny was the only one who didn’t see Dad’s casket, because she genuinely wasn’t able to process what had happened. She really thought that Dad had just gone down to the shops and would return home soon. But she came into Mum’s room and pronounced, ‘I saw Dad last night.’ Then she said it again. I started trying to distract Vinny, because I thought what she was saying would make Mum even more emotional. But Vinny kept talking.
‘Yeah,’ she went on, ‘Dad was wearing his brown leather jacket, his blue pants and his favourite shoes.’ Mum sat up and said, ‘What did you say?’ Vinny was describing the outfit that Dad was dressed in as he lay there in his coffin. Then Vinny looked at Mum and said, ‘You know who else was there?’ She then told us a name, which I have now forgotten, but let’s say it was ‘John Smith’. The next time we went to the cemetery, we saw that a John Smith was buried next to Dad. It was bizarre. It was like Dad had planted a dream in Vinny’s brain.
Mum struggled to come to terms with her loss for a long time after Dad died. She cried and cried and cried. I think she made matters worse by playing the CD made for the funeral over and over again. The songs ‘Better Man’ and ‘My Way’ seemed to make her more emotional but she kept pressing repeat and listening to them again and again. Some days Mum struggled to even get out of bed. Watching Mum in that state, with tears continually pouring down her cheeks, was unbelievably tough. She was, and is, such an amazingly strong woman, but I think she felt scared to be on her own with so many kids to support. None of us knew what to do to help her. We tried to by sitting on her bed and gathering around her. Six or seven of us would give her group hugs. But, really, I struggled to grasp exactly why she was so sad at the time, because I had shut out the enormity of what had happened. It wasn’t until many years later that the loss of my dad properly sank in.
