by Moana Hope
Backs: Patricia Kinnersly, Roi Boutsikakis, Shevaun Hogan
Half-backs: Melissa Hickey, Kerryn Stephens, Yasmin Horsham
Centres: Natalie Wood, Daisy Pearce, Monique Kelly
Half-forwards: Anna McIlroy, Bronwyn Hutchinson, Lauren Arnell
Forwards: Jane Lange, Moana Hope, Kate Burke
Followers: Aasta O’Connor, Sarah Hammond, Kathy Zacharopoulos
Interchangers: Kris Gardiner, Anna Schwager, Georgina Thompson, Anna Brown
Coach: Peta Searle
Increasingly, though, I found that I just wasn’t enjoying footy as much as I had before. I felt like I had achieved just about everything that was possible in the women’s game. And I could not escape the feeling that people were continually judging me. Part of this was due to a lack of self-confidence. Being shy also didn’t help. These traits turned me into a worried mess.
At the same time, my life was getting really hectic. I had moved out of Nicole Graves’ house and into my own place in Glenroy. I was working full-time in traffic management. And I had decided to help out my family by providing food, clothing and somewhere to live to two of my nephews. I wanted and felt I needed to step up and help out in this way as my two older sisters had had nineteen children between them by this time, obviously following the big-family tradition. But they weren’t coping, due to lack of support. Mum became concerned about the kids and took them all into her own home.
This is one of the best examples of why Mum is an inspiration to me. She should be made a saint before she dies. She is the most caring and generous person on the planet. Sometimes, in person or on social media, people say that I’m an inspiration to them, given my background and what I’ve managed to achieve. My answer is always the same: ‘You haven’t met my mum.’ With nineteen kids living with her in her tiny place in Glenroy, I decided to muck in and help the family in the best way I could.
The Department of Human Services supported Mum by renovating her house to create extra rooms and a couple of bungalows out the back to accommodate everyone. Then somebody gave Mum a caravan that could be used as an extra room. I’m not really sure what the highest number of people living at Mum’s place at one time was, but it would have been at least twenty-five. Crazy stuff. But I could tell that Mum’s health was deteriorating due to the stress she was under. Really, helping out was the least I could do.
I had a good job and I had been able to afford to rent a decent place. But taking on my two nephews, who were only primary school age, markedly increased the level of stress in my life. I was only twenty-two, but I felt like I needed to support the two kids living with me as well as some of my brothers and sisters who were still living with Mum. It was a lot of pressure. But I have never been a person to take the easy way out. I have always been a person who wants to work hard and achieve things in life. As Mum said on the episode of Australian Story that featured us, ‘Moana’s always been wanting to work. I’ve never known Moana to be, you know, “I’ll stay at home today” or, “I don’t want to do this anymore”.’
With so much on my plate, something had to give. I was feeling very insecure about myself, and those feelings were strongest when I was at the footy club. I started thinking about quitting, and then I started thinking about Dad. Then I started thinking about him passing away and how losing him still made me so sad. I suppose I had tried to suppress my sadness about Dad’s passing for a long time. I had used sport as a way of avoiding the grief that I had suffered. I tried to think about nothing other than footy and cricket, and for a number of years this tactic had worked. But now that deep sadness started to grip me. I think I was finally starting to properly process Dad’s death and what a loss it had been for me.
When those feelings combined with my suspicions that the people who were running women’s footy hated me because of my short hair and tattoos, I spiralled into a real funk. For me this look had been the way I expressed myself, my way of me being me, so I couldn’t understand why people would not accept that. My state of mind just got worse and I became depressed, which nobody knew about, because I never really told anyone.
I couldn’t think of any other remedy apart from walking away from football. So I did it, but the decision sparked a new wave of negative emotions within me. I felt like I had let Dad down. He had encouraged me to chase my dreams, to be the best footballer that I could be, and now I had given up. And by walking away from the game, I felt I was losing my connection to him. But I was so angry at the way I had been treated and judged. I felt deeply scarred.
I played just one game for the Falcons early in the 2010 season, and then quit the club and stood out of the game for the rest of the year. I departed having played eighty-seven games and kicked 315 goals. I talked quite a bit with Nicole Graves during this time, and her thoughts on why my relationship with footy unravelled are interesting:
She was always such a freaky, elite little player. But even in the middle of her time at Darebin, she went through some periods where she was thinking, ‘Will I play footy, won’t I play footy? I’m not really sure if I can be myself in this sport.’ Mo is prone to going through those stages. What I now do for a living is nurture those kids, many of them Indigenous, who have that kind of crazy talent that no one really knows where it has come from. So I have spent time reflecting on how they compare to Mo. What I now know is if you don’t support their flair and nurture their flair, then those players will say, ‘Well, I can’t do this anymore. I’m going to do something else.’ That certainly happened to Mo at times when people didn’t support her in the way she wanted, and I think that explains why she quit the game when she did.
But, in defence of the people who were running the game back then, it was a very different time for women’s footy. I don’t blame those in charge of women’s footy for doing what they did when they asked Mo to cover up her tattoos. I had been on the board of the Victorian Women’s Football League for a time, so I knew what the people running the league were up against. The image of women’s footy was that it was a bunch of butch lesbians with short hair and tattoos playing a male-dominated sport. So they were trying to project an image to counter that stereotype. These days so many women have got tattoos and funky hairstyles that no one notices them. Those sorts of things are cool. Just look at how much people love Mo’s tatts. It seems to me like the whole world is celebrating Mo’s tattoos, which is really wonderful to see. But it was different back then.
The women’s footy administrators were trying to grow the game and reassure parents that their little girls weren’t going to be changed forever by playing some Aussie Rules.You look at how it is now, and every kid is encouraged to play, so it was just a different time. And Mo wasn’t the only one who was told to cover up their tatts and look a bit more feminine for media appearances. There were several others who didn’t quite fit the image and were asked to look a certain way. Some chose to conform and some told them to fuck off.
Once I stopped playing footy, my life started to veer off the rails. This happened in two ways. First, I was so insecure about myself. I struggled to go out in public because I was worried that I was continually being judged. I had been so hurt by the league I started doubting all human interactions. I became scared of them and so I avoided them.
To try to combat my insecurity and shyness, I started drinking heavily. I was drunk basically every weekend. Once I was drunk and in party mode, I could be a totally different person. Even so, when I went out clubbing, which I did regularly, I was completely paranoid about going to the toilet. I would make a friend open the door of the toilets, and I would literally run in, do what I had to do, and then run out. I was so worried that people, thinking I was a boy, would call me a pervert or something for being in the women’s toilets. The pressures of my life and all the things going on my head were pretty fraught and mixed up. On top of that, I had always been quite skinny and very fit, but now I was putting on weight and feeling like a slob. I was, to put it simply, pretty fucked up. It was a wasted year.
In early 2011, I decided I needed to try to get back into footy. I missed the camaraderie, and the feeling of being engrossed in a game, when getting your hands on the Sherrin is the only thing you think about. I joined the St Albans Spurs, but I only played two games before I lost interest again. The key problem was that I was still going out every Friday night, so I kept turning up to games hung over. Being in bad shape meant I couldn’t do the things I wanted to on the field, which made me frustrated. The footy field had once been my safe haven. But now it was a place that made me unhappy. I had to confront the truth about the mess I was in. Instead I just wasted another year.
In 2012, I tried again to rekindle my love of football. I went back to the Spurs and played twelve games and kicked a very respectable forty-five goals. But I still couldn’t escape the feeling that the people running women’s footy wanted me to fail because I didn’t fit their desire for the game to become a beauty pageant. Being in this terrible headspace even started to affect my work. I would get called into the office for a meeting and I would be paranoid about what I looked like, thinking, I’d better try to put my hair up in a ponytail or something, or they won’t accept me. I couldn’t shake that original rejection. It had derailed me.
Part II
Counterpoint
BY 2013, I was lost. I was going out with my mates a lot and acting like a real party animal, but I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t physically happy. I wasn’t mentally happy. I desperately wanted to fall in love with football again. It was the outlet from everyday life that I longed for and loved the most. Inside I felt football had the power to make me happy again.
I decided to go back to the Eastern Devils for the 2013 season. I played a few games early in the year but, like when I was at the St Albans Spurs, I really just went through the motions. I should have been working hard on the track to get myself back in shape, but instead I hardly went to training at all. There were a few times when I thought about giving up on footy for good.
I started mentioning these thoughts to one of my closest friends, Tegan, who I had been mates with since childhood. She told me that I wasting my talent. I should have cared about what she said, but I didn’t. Then, one day, Tegan rang me and said, ‘Hey, did you know there’s going to be a footy match between the Western Bulldogs and Melbourne next week? And it’s going to be played at the MCG.’ ‘What’s so great about that?’ I replied. ‘The Bulldogs play Melbourne every year.’
‘No, it’s a women’s game.’
You might find this hard to believe, given the game was being heavily promoted in the media at the time, but I didn’t even know it was taking place. I was living in my own little world, which involved working hard, partying hard and being a foster mother to two young boys. As Tegan explained to me what the match was all about, I nearly dropped my phone.
‘No way,’ I said. ‘There can’t be a women’s game between the Bulldogs and Melbourne. It’s not possible.’
‘Well, there is,’ Tegan insisted. ‘And we should go.’
As I later found out, the game was organised to form the centrepiece of the AFL’s Women’s Round, which had previously been mostly about paying tribute to the impact that women have on Aussie Rules footy off the field. But the AFL was now seriously thinking about creating a national women’s competition sometime in the future, with each AFL club fielding a women’s team. With this in mind, the Western Bulldogs and Melbourne had put their hands up to start the revolution by kitting out two teams made up of the best female footballers in Australia. What would be the first of six exhibition matches between the Dogs and Demons was subsequently held as a curtain-raiser to a men’s match between the same sides.
I ummed and ahhed for a few days about going to the game. On a number of occasions I rang Tegan and said, ‘Nah, I’m not going to go. I can’t. It’s probably going to be too confronting.’
To put it bluntly, I knew inside that if I had been fit and motivated I would have been one of the best female footballers in the nation. I could have been playing in that game. How could I just sit in the stands and watch these others run around and take all the glory?
A couple of days out from the game, Tegan wasn’t giving up so easily. She rang again. She put on her most serious voice and said, ‘Mo, this is bullshit. You have got to go.’ So, on Sunday, 30 June 2013, we walked into the MCG and took our seats just as the teams were running out.
My former Darebin teammate Daisy Pearce led the Melbourne team onto the field. An Australia-wide draft had been held after the women’s national championships to decide which players would represent the Demons and which players would represent the Dogs. Daisy had been chosen by Melbourne, which had the first pick in the draft. She looked so joyous as she jogged onto the MCG, and I was really happy for her.
As the players warmed up, I could hardly believe what I was seeing. It wasn’t like when I last played in the national championships and we had just one coach and one trainer. These girls were being looked after by an army of coaches, fitness staff and water carriers. They were wearing AFL colours, and they were running around on the MCG. It was a complete head-spin.
‘How did this happen?’ I kept saying to Tegan. ‘How did women’s footy go from playing two games in a day in front of no one and getting drunk every night at my last national championships to these girls representing AFL clubs at the home of footy in brand-new gear?’
My jaw hit the floor once the game started. Even though it was a damp evening, the standard of footy was amazing. Daisy’s Melbourne team won by thirty-two points, which meant she received the Hampson–Hardeman Cup, a trophy that had been specially struck to honour Barb Hampson and Lisa Hardeman, who started the women’s national championships back in the 1990s.
I walked out of the MCG that evening utterly inspired. As we were heading to the train, I gave Tegan a hug and exclaimed, ‘That was fucking brilliant.’
I wanted to go to the gym right there and then, although I went to the pub instead, where I ran into Nicole Graves, who had come across from Western Australia to watch the game. We had a heap of drinks and a great time, and when we finally parted I said to Nicole, ‘I’m going to play in the next one.’
6
Back in the game
THE FOLLOWING DAY I went and visited my mum. ‘I’m going to devote myself to footy again,’ I told her. She gave me a smile, then calmly stated, ‘You make sure you do it your way.’
That comment really struck me. It was so meaningful, reminding me of the music we played at Dad’s funeral. I nodded and repeated, ‘I’m going back to footy and I’m definitely going to do it my way’
Ten minutes later I was at my local gym signing a membership form. I was probably 15 or 20 kilograms overweight, but I was adamant that if I set my mind to it I could play in the next Western Bulldogs versus Melbourne game, which was set to take place the following year. I knew it was going to be a hard road; my body wasn’t just going to bounce back into shape in a week. But, at the age of twenty-five, the resurrection of my football career had begun.
Even though I didn’t play in that first exhibition match, I walked taller after it. My feeling was that women’s footy was finally arriving on the big stage, and this was the theme of an article written by Samantha Lane in The Age following the game:
The first AFL-sanctioned women’s match has been declared a resounding success with the movement now set to receive unprecedented league support after winning a host of powerful new fans.
A contest between Australia’s most talented female footballers who played for Melbourne and the Western Bulldogs in a historic curtain-raiser to the corresponding men’s fixture last Saturday at the MCG, will almost certainly be repeated in 2014 and may even happen twice next season. The grand plan is that a televised national women’s competition will be functioning by 2020, and that some AFL clubs could adopt women’s teams permanently.
A crowd of about 3000 assembled for the start of the women’s match and swelled to about 7500 by three-quarter-t
ime—about 90 minutes before the start of the traditional main event that eventually drew 21,217 spectators.
The three-quarter-time attendance for the female footy game—bigger than the crowds recorded for four Greater Western Sydney games this season—impressed AFL deputy chief executive Gillon McLachlan.
‘I thought it was fantastic. I think that the talent in women’s football is a story that we haven’t told very well … it’s not something that we’ve pushed or told stories about,’ McLachlan told Fairfax Media. ‘I think this year is the first time we have, and I think it was certainly something that people wanted to know more about, and bought into.
‘The fact that there were around 3000 people there for the start of the game, and around 7000 people there at three-quarter time, it’s obvious that it has interest for a lot of people.
I think that can be regarded as a great success.
‘I think what is 100 per cent on the agenda now is that Australian rules football is a legitimate sporting option for all women … we certainly think there is great scope to improve and evolve the stream of football for talented girls.’
I started going to the gym twice a day. I enrolled in a boxing program and I worked with the boxing coaches nearly every day. They were brutal sessions but they helped me rebuild my aerobic fitness and lose weight. My performances for the Eastern Devils improved out of sight.
I rang Emily Woods and told her about my epiphany. She was rapt:
I mainly keep up to date these days with Mo on Facebook and Instagram and that sort of stuff, and I remember there was that period when she was hardly playing football and there were always pictures of her at clubs with drinks in her hands. I thought, ‘Oh, it’s such a waste of talent.’ So I was really happy when she did devote herself to the game again. It was such a relief to see that her amazing talent wasn’t going to waste.
