its a gorgeous brisbane evening, a little too warm for my liking, just enough of a breeze to want a jacket and artistically placed clouds to make the sky shine pink and orange as the sun sets. its AFLW season baby! ive been waiting for this moment all year and was so upset to miss the first round at home.
i remember the aftermath of the men’s team winning their second consecutive title last year and while it was an incredible moment to feel somewhat adjacently a part of, the first thing i did afterwards was not renew my membership. the atmosphere at the games, the abuse of umpires, booing opposition teams for doing the things that make sport, well, sport (like kicking goals), was not how i wanted to be spending my precious limited time in this existence. even though it is ethereal to be a part of 50,000 people singing “take me home, country roads” long after the stadium has stopped playing it, and just long enough for Charlie Cameron to kick yet another goal and start it up all over again, it doesnt outweigh the abhorrent things that people feel comfortable doing in the anonymity~group think mentality of a sporting event crowd.
i had to reiterate a few times that i was only interested in the women’s membership for the brisbane lions in 2026 – a request that must be quite rare after holding both memberships. in the end, i was charged for the mens membership and not the womens, so another email chain ensued. like many moments in my experiences with(in) womens sports, i was left wondering “i bet the men never have to deal with this”.
a lovely segue to two incredible threads that sparked this newsletter – watching the lions play at their (smaller) arena in springfield and an flawless stage production about the origins of the aflw called Strong is the New Pretty.
im standing near the stands, wandering in circles around the ground to keep my restless body moving and catching the game from every angle. on the hill, there are reserved signs – a local girls private school has filled a wedge of the oval, a sea of uniforms on a saturday night with massive posters of one player’s face, screaming fanatically every time she got near the ball or looked in their direction, an alum held up as a hero. should we be fanatically celebrating someone who was recently returning from a suspension after striking a player? i guess thats up to the HASS (humanities and social sciences) teachers to unpack on monday… (i doubt it).
as you’re probably seeing by now, in this post and if you’ve ever read my work, i think and speak about the layers that we sometimes choose not to notice or write about, so of course many of the things im going to say in here may be seen as petty or not worth interrogating – but i wholeheartedly disagree. these murky, tense spaces are exactly where we should be, standing in the middle of it all with eyes wide open.
it’s a messy game of footy, as the women’s game often is, because teams are incredibly strong and well matched; its difficult to be the one to break away or win a mark amongst a pack. the unforced errors like drop balls, short kicks, occasional decision making and skill (mis)execution makes it a very different version of footy, hence the recent (re)branding of “footy our way”. the body contact is fierce and rough, the ball carrying will keep getting better with exposure, and the kicking distance gets better each and every year.
no, this is not just a ‘different body types’ thing – we see it in every. single. sport. imma detour really quickly to remind us that sport or any movement of the human body is never, ever just physiological. how far i believe i can kick the ball plays into that final distance. how far away my teammates stand from me to call for the ball is an echo of how far away my parents or friends used to stay as a kid, an unsaid communication in that space that tells me “you can do it, kick it to me”. i wont go into the depths of affordance perception and invitations to act but in these moments, when we lament the (in)action of others, it is important to remember how much (is missed) in the background, in the everyday encounters of children that girls rarely are privy to, on top of the differences in limb length. this includes the omnipresent (albeit buried) notion of whether women even should play footy, which seems to constantly lurk beneath the surface. it’s not one or the other, its both and more.
im standing beneath the stands, enjoying the view of the ball movement across the field when i hear some gruff voices nearby. the barnacles, i like to call them. weathered, older men who cannot read the scoreboard in the distance but are very vocal about how the game should be played. members of the club for my lifetime and more no doubt, here at a women’s match and vocal about it. i am so so so torn in these moments, when these characters enter a space that is often considered family-friendly and supportive by default. it is very rare to hear people yelling at umpires, there’s never any booing, and the vibes are high every time we kick a goal. but theres always one or two who do, and i think their presence, and disruption, is an important paradox.
for anyone who has been following the recent rise (or resurrection) of the matildas and support for women’s football (soccer) in australia, or the australian women’s cricket team when they finally lost some games, the conversation around criticism is a rollercoaster. if we don’t criticise anything, especially the performance elements of sport that are there for the conversation, then we are doing the game and its players a disservice. the conversation, nuanced and complex and sometimes critical, shows that we care. when those same conversations are not balanced and critical, are not care-full, and are empty-hearted or petty, then little good comes from it. The overly uncritical conversation isn’t much better, where the subtext essentially says “don’t be so mean, isn’t it cute that they’re at least trying to play the game?”. in a similar vein, this line of thinking does not progress our thinking around/with/through the gendered dynamics of sport either.
so when a barnacle yells from the sideline to “be better!!” when a kick from in front of goal misses to the side, i don’t think that is inherently the problem. there was a time where the faithful fans across generations would never set foot in the small arenas, with the women’s team on display, where it’s not ‘real footy’, and really give a shit about those players. know their names, want the best for them, know that they are capable of more than what they are giving right now. that is why we barrack for our sports teams, isn’t it?! it’s fitting then, that ‘built on belief’ is the tagline of the brisbane lions, adopted from ted lasso’s ‘believe’ by two head coaches that are renowned for their emotional intelligence. i left the ground with so many thoughts after that encounter, because i’ve seen it for the better and for the worse.
when i started my phd, it was with the question of why we coach girls differently to boys in cricket. nothing overt, if anything it was the lack of overtness that pissed me off the most. this thinly-veiled disdain or disbelief hidden behind participation numbers and pink balls and uniforms that still never fit or were frighteningly white. the notion that we should be grateful for even having somewhere to play, in a competition that wrote us out of any hope of getting better, because just being there was an achievement and that’s all we really deserve.
so when a show called “strong is the new pretty” appears at the theatre, you just know that every sport-loving, feminist sociologist is gonna be first in line at the door, waiting to hear how the origin story of the aflw will be told. to witness the narrative that we have been entangled in play out on stage, to wonder what will make the cut and how it will be cast, given the complexity of what they are undertaking. all of these threads that i have mentioned were woven through a story so well told that my heart rate was through the roof for the first half, and i was crying tears of joy for the second. i was bracing for impact like one of the players on the field/stage.
the godmother, the commissioner, the coach. the stories behind the stories we see on the television now, the people that made that sentence possible. the off-hand, dismissive way the title of the show is said in dialogue, dropping the need for such empty words and needless comparisons. strong is strong, and this strength takes many forms. the strength to say yes before we were ready, to put the weight of expectations and misogyny on your shoulders and do it anyway, to slowly and steadily and surely lay the foundations for those who have been systematically left behind.
performance art gives us a medium of affect that my words will never hold. this was abundantly clear in the depiction of that kick, you know the one. the famous photo of Tayla Harris doing the splits mid-air to absolutely launch the footy, one of the most iconic photographs of human athleticism. but of course, that is not where the conversation ended. paused in this pose on stage, a screen hovering above silently plays some of the horrific comments that followed. at this point, i couldn’t keep pretending that i wasn’t crying. as someone who very briefly shared the field with her, seeing this unfold in realtime and again on stage was heart-wrenching – as it should be. did you need to be a footy fan to understand/feel the gravity of that moment? did you need to know the players, the teams, the timeline to bear witness to something so significant? i don’t think so, and that is the power of art: it can transcend the ‘real’ context.
as we left the theatre, we are prompted to complete a survey about our experiences, which curiously included questions about the crossover of sport and the arts: if you had to pick, would you go to a game, or come to the theatre? i scrolled for the ‘both’ option, because how could you possibly choose? how could you not want a life where sitting on the hill in a small stadium to watch your team play is complemented by a theatre production of that same league’s origin story just 18 hours later, and you get to share it with people who are equally as passionate and nerdy and invested in both?
maybe we’ve been going about science communication all wrong. what if it was never just about documenting the methods, but helping people feel why they matter. a reason for the average person to give a shit about asking questions, seeking answers, and the diversity of ways this can be achieved. this is the line of thinking that has fuelled my poetry, my illustrations, these newsletters, everything. we’re just people, doing what we can, and making some incredible things along the way.
Strong is the New Pretty is playing at QPAC until 19th Sept. Please do yourself a favour and give it a watch.
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