by Moana Hope
I eventually went back to school full time. Missing so much schooling during those years that Dad was sick had put me well behind my classmates, and I never caught up. But I didn’t care then and I don’t care now. If somebody says to me, ‘I can turn back time and if you go to school instead of looking after your dad you’ll end up being the prime minister and earning one million dollars a year,’ I would reply, ‘No thanks.’
I am proud to have lived my life the way I want to live it. I have never forgotten Dad having all those regrets on his deathbed. Never, ever do I want to be that person. I don’t want to get to the end of my life and wish that I’d done things differently. I cared for Dad because I loved him. Our life was not about money or having a big house or a big TV or the latest mobile phone. We didn’t have any of that, but we had the most priceless thing in the world, and that’s love. I loved my dad and that’s why I made so many sacrifices for him. I wouldn’t change that aspect of my life for anything. The only thing I would change, if I could, is to be by Dad’s side on the day he died.
4
Sport on my mind
MY DISTRACTION FROM the grief of losing my dad was sport. Because he had encouraged me to play footy and cricket, sport was also my connection to memories of him. When I was out on the footy field or playing cricket it felt like he was there by my side.
The people at the Hadfield footy club were like another family to me at this time. They had supported me so much when my dad died—a few carloads of them came to his funeral, which is something I will treasure forever—and they were always looking out for me. It was through this period that I became really close friends with someone in the women’s team, Emily Woods. She had spent a bit of time around the club during the 2001 season and then decided to have a real crack at playing footy in 2002. I was a bit shy around her at the start, but she soon took me under her wing and became like a big sister to me. She was always there when I needed a lift somewhere or just needed someone to talk to. Emily, who is six years older than me, is one of the most amazing and generous people I have ever met.
She has a much better memory for details than I do and this is how, she tells me, we came to know each other:
I remember going out and watching Hadfield in their Division 2 Grand Final and seeing Mo, as a tiny thirteen year old, just kicking high goals from the boundary with apparent ease. I thought, ‘Wow, who’s this kid?’ She was a very good player. But the thing that struck me once I decided to play for Hadfield the following year was that she just didn’t talk. She didn’t talk at all. She was so shy.
But once she got to know me she really opened up and we became great friends. I always used to call her my little sister. I’m the youngest in my family, so I never had any younger sisters or brothers. Once I got to know her and her background, it was clear that she was living a somewhat troubled and difficult life, so I started sort of looking out for her. Her dad had been the one who transported her around a lot to various sporting commitments, but with him gone it became really tough. Her mum was a bit busy with all the other kids, so she was never able to help Mo get to footy games or training sessions that required travel. That’s where I tried to help out as much as I could.
As Mo freely admits, she wouldn’t have been able to get far in her sporting career without the support of others, because she wouldn’t have been able to get anywhere. But a lot of us who played footy with her could see that she had so much talent and skill. It would have been a terrible waste if she had been forced to give up on sport because she was unable to travel anywhere, and that’s a major reason why a lot of us made a big effort to support her in that way. Even with stuff like the fees she had to pay to play footy or cricket, everyone would get around her and chip in. We just sort of did what we could for her. I remember Mo avoiding school a lot, but I tried to get her there when I could.
Most of the players in our Hadfield team were out of their depth when we played our first season in Division 1 in 2002. Not only did we not win a game, we got beaten by between twenty and thirty goals pretty much every week. Emily and I and a couple of others were the only players on our side who were up to Division 1 standard. This meant that the only way we could score was to just kick the ball to each other, as Emily also recalls:
We didn’t have the greatest team, and I remember how we would kick the ball to each other. One of us would mark it and the other one would keep running so that they were the next option, and she’d mark it and I’d keep running. But she’d always make sure that she was the one that marked it in the forward fifty so that she could have the shot on goal.
In one of those seasons that I played in Hadfield’s women’s team I celebrated my 100th game with the club. The tally included all the games I had played with the boys in the juniors. They made a big banner for me to run through, which I was super excited about. The whole thing made me feel like the Hadfield footy community had a lot of love and respect for me, and I have no doubt that my feelings were right. They were fantastic people and they helped me so much that I will be forever grateful.
Despite losing every week by a hundred points or more during the 2002 season, our Hadfield women’s team was allowed to stay in Division 1 for 2003. Once again, we copped some serious thrashings, but we did have one awesome afternoon when we defeated the Darebin Falcons in the second-last home-and-away round. I was involved in a funny incident. Before the game, our coach had given me a talking to about hogging the ball, particularly in the forward line. In my defence, getting the ball and trying to keep it was ingrained in me. When I played footy in our backyard with my brothers, it was all about getting the ball, then trying to run as fast as you could and booting it through the makeshift goals we set up. When I started out in Hadfield’s women’s team that’s how I played. I just tried to get the ball, run as far as I could, then kick a goal. I used to try to run around everyone, then boot the crap out of the ball. I didn’t know any other way to play, which meant it took the coaches at Hadfield a long time to get me to understand that sticking to our game plan and sharing the ball around could actually help the team.
That day I ran onto the field adamant I was going to do what the coach asked and share the ball around more. When the game was on the line in the last quarter, with only a few points separating us and the Falcons, I received the ball deep in the forward line and started running towards the goal square. I could have taken two more steps, steadied, then easily kicked the goal, but I suddenly remembered what the coach had said. Oh crap, I thought. He’s going to think I’m being selfish if I kick the goal. So I stopped and turned around, then fired off a handball to a shocked teammate. She pulled herself together and kicked the goal, but our runner then came straight out to me with a message from the coach.
‘If you’re 5 metres out from goal you just put it through,’ she said. ‘We want you to share the ball but we don’t want you to cost us the game!’ In the end, we did win the game, which meant my antics created much laughter during our raucous post-match celebrations.
That same year, Emily and I were lucky enough to be selected for a City versus Country women’s match, which was used to help select the Victorian squad to play in the AFL Women’s National Championships. The Country team was a bit short on numbers, so I was a country girl for the day and ended up playing against Emily, who was part of the City team. We were the only Hadfield players to take part, and there was a big picture of us in the local paper, which was pretty cool. I can’t remember who won the game, but neither of us made it into the Victorian squad.
Hadfield ended up being relegated back to Division 2 after the 2003 season. It soon became clear to Emily and me that we needed to keep playing in Division 1 if we wanted to have any chance of playing for Victoria at the 2004 national championships. Emily, who was working in a music store in the city at the time, knew some girls playing out at the Eastern Devils, so we ended up moving to their club.
I liked the idea of playing for the Devils, but they were based out in East Burwood in Mel
bourne’s eastern suburbs, a long way from my place in Glenroy. However, Emily offered to drive me to training each week—often a two-hour round trip—and then take me to the games, which was an amazing gesture.
Given the Devils were based in the eastern suburbs, where the people with money live, I felt a bit out of place, rocking up in my cheap clothes. They all wore nice new runners and clothes made by the big brand names. I was most jealous of the girls who wore Nike gear. I don’t really know why, but I was obsessed with Nike stuff. I just loved the swoosh logo and I loved the great athletes, like the famous sprinter Michael Johnson and the great basketballer Michael Jordan, who were part of the Nike family. I wanted to have my own Nike gear, so I started using a Texta to draw the swoosh on the cheap t-shirts and shorts that Mum bought me from Kmart or Target.
I can’t draw for shit, so I’m sure the swoosh looked like a scribbled line, but I thought it looked legit. One time, during the summer, I bought a headband and drew the swoosh on it, and then wore it to cricket training. My mates were like, ‘Hey, did you draw that on it?’ I was like, ‘Nah, I bought it.’ They probably laughed at me, but I didn’t care.
During my one season with the Devils, I had to be a different player than I had been at Hadfield, as Emily remembers only too well:
I think she probably had to adapt to the fact that it was a better team, so she wasn’t the star. The Devils had better coaching and there was a bit more structure to our game plan, so everyone had a bit of a role to play. This was when Mo started playing in the forward line, as the Devils already had a lot of good midfielders. She played across half-forward and stuck to her role reasonably well, although she was always trying to snag a goal!
Playing as a half-forward didn’t stop me from making an impression on the state selectors, and I lived out one of my sporting dreams when I was picked to be in the Victorian squad that played at the AFL Women’s National Championships in Adelaide. At just sixteen, I was one of the youngest members of the squad. Raising the money to go on the trip was a challenge, but the VWFL helped everyone in the squad by holding auction nights and things like that. Each player still had to cover a gap in the funding, but the people at the Devils rallied around and covered it for me.
Being so shy made the trip very daunting for me, as did the idea of travelling so far from home. But there were four other Devils players in the squad, so that made it a lot easier. I’m not sure I could have plucked up the courage to go if they hadn’t been on the trip. In the end, it all worked out. We won the tournament and I played pretty well, getting a few mentions of being among our best players.
Although my career was on the up and I really enjoyed playing for the Devils, I felt like I was putting a lot of strain on Emily. She was using up so much of her time driving over to Glenroy to pick me up. Emily was great about it, but I didn’t want to become a burden to her. Just as I was thinking that I needed to find a club closer to home, Emily told me that she was moving to Adelaide for work. For a while, I felt like the rug had been pulled out from underneath me. I really relied on her for a lot of support. But I came to the conclusion that everything would be okay if I just started playing footy in my own neck of the woods.
Everything did fall into place when Nicole Graves, who was now the president of the Darebin Falcons, asked me to come and play for the Falcons. The club is based in the suburb of Preston, just 10 kilometres east of my family home. Nicole knew I came from a family who didn’t have much money, so she generously said that she would cover my fees if I wanted to play for the Falcons. I signed up straightaway.
I arrived at the Falcons in 2005, at a time when the club was about to take the VWFL by storm. Under the coaching of Peta Searle, who has gone on to become a development coach at St Kilda, the Falcons would win five successive premierships between 2006 and 2010, and I would be lucky enough to feature in the first four of them. In 2005, however, we made the Grand Final but were beaten by Melbourne University. Still, that loss didn’t take the gloss off what was a great season for me.
That year Victoria fielded a second team in the AFL Women’s National Championships, which were played in Melbourne. There was a very good reason for the change: the Vics had won every Grand Final since the championships were first held in 1992. The extra Victorian team was made up of players aged nineteen and under. Not only was I selected to play in the new team, I was also made captain.
Our squad was made up of young girls and we were outsized by the adult women playing in the other teams, but we had some serious talent in our line-up. We played really well during the round-robin matches, defeating every non-Victorian team and almost toppling the Vics’ open-age side. We ended up playing the open-age Victorian team again in the Grand Final, but this time we were no match for their strength and skill. Tired after playing a number of games in the space of a week, we lost by more than a hundred points. However, my highlight of the week came after the Grand Final, when I was announced the player of the championships. To win such an award, at the age of seventeen, was an amazing buzz.
When playing for Victoria, I swapped between centre half-forward and full-forward, but when I was back at the Falcons I played most of my footy out of the goal square. It was a great position to play, as we had some superstar midfielders, like Daisy Pearce and Natalie Wood, who delivered the ball to me beautifully. They helped me top the VWFL goal-kicking table in my second, third and fourth seasons with the club. I kicked eighty goals in 2006, seventy-nine in 2007 and seventy-one in 2008. It was around this time that I started wearing number 23.You might think I chose that particular number because I loved all the great sportsmen who had worn it, like Michael Jordan, Buddy Franklin and Shane Warne. But I chose it as a tribute to my dad, who died on 23 August 2001.
During the time that I played for the Falcons, Nicole Graves became like a second mother to me, and I ended up living with her for a couple of years. Nicole recalls how it was that I came to live at her place:
Because all of Mo’s nieces and nephews were living with her mum, there was something like twenty children living in the house. Mo’s mum is an amazing woman, but she was under the pump big-time. I used to pick up Mo and take her to footy training and we used to have a lot of conversations as we were driving. She was getting really upset because every time she left the house the other kids would go into her room and steal her stuff. She was worried that they were going to wreck her music collection, which was one of the most important things in her life at the time. She eventually put a padlock on her door, which was pretty crazy. I had a free bedroom at my house, so I said to her, ‘How about I have a chat to your mum and then you come and camp with me.’ We had the discussion and it was agreed that she would come and live at my house.
Nicole was amazingly generous to me. She went and bought me a bed and some bedside tables. I had never had my own stuff like that before, so I felt like the luckiest person in the world.
In 2006, when I was eighteen, I was once again selected to be in the Victorian under-19 team that played at the national championships. This time Daisy Pearce was made captain. We ended up making it to the bronze medal match, but we lost to Queensland by thirty-six points. Playing full-forward, I had a great carnival and was one of five players from our team selected to be in the All Australian team. Two of my Falcons teammates, Daisy Pearce and Lauren Arnell, also made this prestigious team. Daisy and I were then granted an amazing opportunity when we were selected to be in an Australian team that travelled to Ireland to play two International Rules matches against the best female Gaelic footballers.
Nicole Graves coached the Australian team and also organised the trip, and she explains how this all came about:
I played some Gaelic footy in Australia and was part of a couple of tours to Ireland, so I knew quite a few people at the Gaelic Athletic Association. I spoke to them about setting up a two-match International Rules tour, similar to what the AFL players had done. Women’s Gaelic football was already huge in Ireland, and TG4, which is the Gaelic TV
station over there, said they would telecast the matches live. So we started fundraising and went from there.
TG4 ended up giving us $50,000 to get over there, so they were really fantastic. The AFL supplied all the uniforms, and all the girls fundraised, and in the end we spent two and a half weeks in Ireland for about $1200 each, which wasn’t bad.
Despite that money from the Irish TV station and the money from fundraising, we still had to cover some of the trip costs ourselves. My mum wasn’t in a position to contribute any money for me, so Nicole reached into her own pocket and paid my share herself. She is renowned for such acts of generosity. As Nicole likes to say, ‘No kid in my charge doesn’t go somewhere because of money.’ Nicole also helped me organise a passport, which proved to be quite a saga because we couldn’t find my birth certificate. To be honest, I don’t know if my parents even kept any of our birth certificates. But after a few visits to the office of Births, Deaths and Marriages we managed to get it sorted.
Our 25-strong Australian squad was not only made up of the best women’s Australian Rules footballers in the country, we also had a few girls who had mainly played Gaelic footy. They were a great help, as they had all the knowledge of how to kick a round ball. Daisy Pearce and I were by far the youngest members of the touring party, but the other women looked after us so well. We were like a big family.
The whole trip to Ireland was incredible. For someone who had rarely left Melbourne, travelling to the other side of the earth was an absolute head-spin. Emerging from my bubble in Glenroy into the wide world made me feel like a caged animal being let out into the jungle. I kept thinking, Oh my God, there’s a whole different world out there, with people who speak funny and do strange things. I was blown away by the whole experience.