by Moana Hope
We used most of the same rules as the men did for their International Rules games, but there was one key difference: no tackling. That meant we could not physically intimidate our Irish opponents like the Aussie men had done over the years—there is no tackling in Gaelic footy, so the Irish are not used to being flattened! So Nicole had picked a lot of fast players, because the Irish are renowned for their speed.
In the first game, which was played on 31 October at Breffni Park, Cavan, we were beaten 134 to 15. We were much more competitive in the second match, which was played on 4 November at Parnell Park in Dublin. But we lost that one as well. The final score was 39 to 18. In the end, we were outclassed by an Irish team who were both too quick and too skilful for us.
Despite those lopsided scores, I look back on those games with great pride. We were a team of trailblazers, and just by making it to Ireland we demonstrated that big things were going to happen in women’s football in the coming years. Nicole also recalls that trip in terms of what we needed to do to move ahead:
The big crowds and being on TV was really exciting. The scores were pretty average, but if we had been allowed to tackle it might have been different. I guess the Ireland tour was a great step for women’s footy and it showed us where we were at in terms of women’s sport. Our girls thought they could play at an elite level, but we got absolutely trounced. We were playing a very different game. It was pretty much Gaelic football. But women’s football in Ireland was miles ahead of where we were at, so I suppose the tour taught us about where we needed to get to.
It took a while for me to get my feet back on the ground when I returned from that tour to Ireland. I had experienced what the big, wide world had to offer and now I was back in Glenroy. Don’t get me wrong, I was rapt to be back with my family, but I suddenly wanted to get on a plane and go somewhere else. I think my brothers and sisters thought I was weird when I said things like that to them. I don’t think they were particularly jealous of my trip. They just never thought about the world outside our family, so they didn’t see any need to go anywhere else.
The skills I learned on that tour to Ireland set me up for a big 2007 footy season. I was once again selected to be in the Victorian under-19 team that played in the AFL Women’s National Championships, which this time were held at Canberra’s Manuka Oval. Daisy Pearce captained our team, and we almost pulled off the upset of the carnival when we got within five points of defeating the open-age Victorian team. Daisy and I were again named in the All Australian team.
A couple of months after the championships, I attracted one of my first mentions in the national media when The Age writer Martin Flanagan came to a Darebin Falcons game to write a feature story on Daisy. He included some stuff about me in the article, even drawing comparisons between my evasive skills and peripheral vision and those of Chris Judd and Peter Matera. I was very happy to receive such praise from a person who must have watched a lot of footy in his time.
I think this made a lot of people in women’s footy sit up and take notice of me. Maybe it played a role in boosting my reputation as one of the best female players in the country, which led to me being made captain of a Victorian team that played in the national women’s championships in the late 2000s.
The funny thing was that just as my reputation as a footballer took off, I was grappling with a decision about my sporting future. I had made state and national teams in both football and cricket, and now I was being asked to decide to concentrate on one or the other.
Although I have focussed on my footy career to this point, cricket was also a massive part of my life during my teenage years. I had honed my skills during many marathon bowling and battling sessions with my brother Barney in the nets at our local oval. Some summers we went to the nets pretty much every day. We only had shitty second-hand gear, but we loved it.
I started out playing in boys’ teams for the Glenroy Cricket Club. I think I could have kept playing against the boys through my teenage years, because the rules about that in cricket weren’t as strict as in footy. But once I got to a certain age I just decided that I would be better off playing against girls, so that’s what I did. I moved to the Merlynston Hadfield Cricket Club, and ended up playing in their women’s team under the captaincy of my great friend Emily Woods.
I fancied myself as an all-rounder, and I could certainly do a bit of damage with the bat. I would try to smash every ball I faced.
I would not block; I would never block. If somebody told me to block a ball, I’d tell them to get stuffed. When I batted, I would be charging down the wicket from the first ball I faced, because I remembered training in the nets with my brothers, and I always wanted to smack their deliveries out of the park. So there was no real technique to my batting. I couldn’t hit a classical cover drive or anything like that. I just tried to smash everything over midwicket or square leg.
Although my work with the willow was good enough to win me the odd batting average, I was first and foremost a fast bowler. I loved running in and trying to bowl as fast as I could. I was a little bit erratic at times, but I had a ripper bouncer, which could intimidate even grown men in the nets. In fact, I was clocked at 132 kilometres per hour when I was part of a Victorian women’s state team in my late teens.
Emily Woods has some great memories of captaining me during my early years with the Merlynston Hadfield:
Mo was a very good fast bowler. Her batting was pretty good, but she didn’t like getting out. I still remember having to take her to the tribunal one time after she went off at the umpire after being given out. She was adamant that she wasn’t out and I think she said some stuff to the umpire and then smashed the stumps down. Looking back, I can’t help having a bit of a laugh about it, because no one ever used to go to the tribunal in women’s cricket. And she was only fifteen or sixteen and I had to take her there to face the music. I had to try and control her a bit more on the field after that. I remember telling her to pull her head in a little bit. But she has always had this amazingly competitive spirit. There was nothing nasty about her. She just wanted to win.
To be fair, I was a bit of a competitive captain, and when I wanted to get someone out I’d always bring her on, and first ball would always have to be a bouncer to show what she could do, because she did have a bit of raw pace with the cricket ball. She couldn’t really control the ball as much as I would have liked, but her bouncer was good enough to scare people and put them on their back foot.
I was selected in state teams in a number of age groups and played alongside a number of girls who went on and made the Australian team, like Jess Cameron and Elyse Villani. The people from Cricket Victoria, particularly a lady called Claudia Fatone, really supported me. They were amazing. Claudia knew I was from a family who didn’t have much. After all, everyone else would rock up at practice with a cricket bag full of top-notch gear, including proper cricket shoes with spikes. But I would just turn up wearing a daggy Kmart t-shirt and some cheap runners. Not that I gave a shit. I would have happily played in a pair of thongs. But when I was about fifteen, Claudia went to the Kookaburra cricket gear company and asked if they would sponsor me. The first I heard about it was when Claudia came up to me at training one day and said, ‘Mo, I’ve got some stuff for you.’ She then handed me a new cricket bag full of new gear, including shoes with spikes. I was like a kid in a candy shop. I couldn’t believe it. I think I just looked at the bag and said, ‘Oh my God’ about fifty times. That kind of generosity means so much to someone like me, someone who has come from a family who had so little in terms of money. I treasured that cricket gear.
I was lucky enough to travel around Australia with the various state cricket teams that I played in. We went to Perth for one tournament, and that was probably the first time I went on a plane, which was pretty exciting. We also had a trip to Adelaide one year. Even going to play in Geelong was exciting for me. I was happy to go anywhere. All these places seemed exotic compared with Glenroy.
But when I reache
d my late teens, if I wanted to try to play open-age cricket for Australia, I was going to have to devote myself to the sport, which meant giving up footy. In a way, it was a tough call. I really wanted to try to make the Australian cricket team and play footy too. But the cricket people insisted I choose. Football was my first love, so I chose to give up on my cricket career and focus on footy.
It was sad to walk away from cricket, particularly all the mates I had made in the various state teams, but the reality is that I thought of cricket as more of an individual sport. And it’s also a sport in which you can field all day and then, when you finally get a chance to bat, you can go out on the first ball. In contrast, footy is a real team game, and you get plenty of chances to make up for your mistakes. For me, playing footy was also about staying close to the memories of my dad. So it was never really a true choice between the two. I was always going to stick with footy when push came to shove.
5
Hitting rock bottom
DURING THOSE TEENAGE years, when my sporting career took off, I did try to get to school as much as I could, even though I wasn’t really interested. It was hard. Box Forest Secondary College was pretty rough, but I didn’t mind that. I wasn’t there for any sort of academic advancement. I just went to school so that I could find some new people to kick the footy with.
I had heaps of fun in the Koorie Open Door Education program. I felt like I had come from the same upbringing as the Koori kids, in that they didn’t have much and I didn’t have much. So we didn’t see each other as being different. And we did our best to support each other. Some of them would come to school without any lunch, because their home lives were so chaotic and their parents were either poor or wasted their money. But nobody gave a shit about that. We would simply share our food with those kids who had none. We considered ourselves among equals.
The teachers at KODE were great. Their classes were not too hard and not boring. They were chilled and they let us have a lot of fun. I was just obsessed with sport, so my favourite teacher was the sports teacher. He encouraged me to take sport a little more seriously, as he could see that I had the talent to potentially make a career out of it. And he loved seeing me out there on the field, playing cricket or footy with the boys at recess and lunchtime. I was the only girl who played sport with the boys, and those boys loved me like a brother. It was such a cool time in my life.
KODE only offered classes up to Year 10, so I transferred into the mainstream part of Box Forest Secondary College for Year 11. I didn’t have anywhere near the academic skills needed to pass the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE), so I was enrolled in the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL), which aims to teach students basic numeracy and literacy but also to set them up for their working lives by giving them practical work-related experience. Even so, the VCAL program was too much for me. I just didn’t like being at school, learning stuff I didn’t care about, so halfway through the year I quit.
At this time I was living with Nicole Graves, and I was very lucky to have her support. She helped me enrol with a job network, which got me into traffic management, the line of work I remain in today. Soon I was driving around Melbourne setting up witches hats and directing traffic around worksites. I enjoyed it, as I loved being out and about and doing stuff. Nicole made sure I was out of bed at 6 am every day so that I was at work on time. I really can’t thank her enough for what she did for me.
At eighteen years old, I felt much older. I had already been through a lot in my life. I think that when people go through the kind of loss that I did, they express their feelings in a different way. I found myself desperately searching for ways to connect with Dad beyond football, because without him I often felt like I had lost everything. I no longer had my best friend to turn to. I started to think about all the great things I did with my dad and how he loved calling me Mouse. Then I had an idea: I’m going to get a tattoo of a mouse. So I did. It was my first tattoo—the first of many.
From that point on, I felt the need to express myself through body art. I didn’t care whether other people thought tattoos were bogan or feral or unladylike. Expressing myself that way was what I wanted to do. I truly believe that you only live one life, and I truly believe that you are put on this earth to live how you want to live. This was another time when I thought to myself, I don’t want to be on my deathbed wishing I’d done things differently, like my dad had. And the more I started to deal with my dad’s death, the more art I wanted to put on my body. I had my dad’s name tattooed on me, and then I added my mum’s name, and also Livinia’s.
Now my arms and legs are covered in wonderfully varied images, including replicas of several Salvador Dali works. I just love his paintings. They are so out there. To be able to carry them around with me every day is really special. I also have the name of a dearly departed friend tattooed in Hindi on my neck. That friend looked after me a lot when I was growing up. My body art is also about tapping into my Maori heritage. I have our tribal tattoo just above my stomach.
No one in my family has ever had a problem with my tattoos, but I couldn’t say the same thing about the people who ran women’s football in the mid 2000s. When I was made captain of the first Victorian under-19 team that played at the national championships in Melbourne in 2005 I tried to be a good leader, to be there for my teammates. And given we made it all the way to the Grand Final, I felt like I had done pretty well. I don’t think our team would have played so well if the players had thought their captain was no good.
It was in the year between the 2005 and 2006 national championships that I got the first of my tattoos and cut my hair short. In hindsight it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that they took the captaincy from me back then and gave it to Daisy Pearce, a player who had the ponytail and nice smile that the women’s footy administrators seemed obsessed with at the time. They didn’t even select me to be in the leadership group. For a while, I chose to ignore what had happened. I thought, Oh they’re just sharing it around. Shit happens. I’ll get on with playing good footy. But I soon became convinced that the reason they took the captaincy from me was my short hair and tattoos, and I remain certain about that to this day.
A lot of people thought that everyone who played women’s footy was a lesbian. Sure, there were some gay girls among the various teams that were part of the VWFL, but there were plenty of others, like Daisy Pearce and myself, who were not—and are not. The administrators were paranoid about the perception that women’s footy was full of tattooed, butch dykes. They believed that to succeed women’s football had to appeal to men, and they didn’t think that blokes liked this kind of woman. They were just hoodwinking themselves into believing that they had to sex up women’s footy to be what they thought men wanted.
In the process of doing that, it felt to players like me that they wanted to stop everyone from just being themselves, and were sidelining those who did not fit the image of clean-cut, ponytailed girls they were trying to promote. When I got my hair cut short and embraced the world of body art, it felt to me that they thought people would assume I was a heavy-duty lesbian, as if sexuality somehow had a bearing on whether you were good at what you did or not, or whether you were a good person or not. Although they wanted me to keep playing—I was one of the best players in the state, after all—they didn’t seem to want me to hold a leadership role or be part of the push to promote the women’s game. This really left a huge negative mark on me, making me wonder where I stood in all this, even while I thought their stance was pathetic and undersold our skills and commitment.
It made me doubt whether the people running the game I loved wanted me to succeed. I felt like they were becoming more and more judgemental as I added tattoos to my body as a means of selfexpression. The way they treated me was so different from the way the girls my age treated each other at the footy club. Some of those girls had short hair and some of them didn’t, but we never assumed things like, ‘She’s got short hair, she must be gay.’ It was only the ‘
adults’ who worried about this stuff. When I mucked around with kids my own age, we never had those sorts of conversations. The conversations we had were like, ‘What’s the latest song, so I can put it on my iPod?’ or, ‘Who’s got the playlist today?’ or, ‘Let’s win today.’
I played in the national championships again in 2007 and 2008, in the open-age team, and I tried to enjoy myself. I was old enough to drink legally—although most kids who grow up in Glenroy start drinking a few years before they turn eighteen—and that meant those footy carnivals were like one big party. You would wake up in the morning, go play a game of footy, have some food and a brief rest, play another game, then head to a bar with the players from all the other teams and get drunk. We barely did any kind of warm-up before the matches, and there were no recovery sessions or ice baths afterwards. We didn’t have any staff telling us what to eat or keeping our fitness on track. There was just one coach and one trainer, who strapped ankles and gave rubdowns. Those carnivals were just about playing footy and getting hammered. Which felt great at the time!
I also achieved a lot in club football in 2006, 2007 and 2008. I played in three premierships with Darebin and topped the VWFL goal-kicking table each year. But in 2009 I got the telephone call that set me back big time. When the VWFL asked me to cover up my tattoos for the Herald Sun photo shoot, I really started to wonder why people were being so judgemental about me. So many thoughts coursed through my brain about what I could have done wrong to end up here. They had taken the under-19 team captaincy from me back in 2006 and now they were overtly telling me to change who I was.
The whole saga really got me down, but I kept playing and was part of the Falcons’ 2009 Grand Final win. My role in this success—and the three previous flags—would see me feature in the Falcons’ Silver Jubilee Team, which was picked in 2015, to mark the 25th anniversary of the club’s founding: