by Moana Hope
I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was so shocked when she walked into the room. She had this extraordinary hairdo and was carrying a Dolce & Gabbana handbag and wearing a pearl necklace. The pearls really struck me. The only time I had seen pearls before was in the movie Titanic, when the posh people on board that ship were wearing them. I had no idea who she was. I was thinking, Who is this lady, and why is she here? I didn’t know she was the club’s vice-president.
As she started walking around the room and chatting to the girls, I began feeling extremely anxious. I thought, Fuck, she’s going to look at me. She’s going to stare at me for too long. She’s going to judge me. A person like her is going to think I’m some kind of animal, with my tatts and no ponytail. I was heading straight into full panic attack mode, so I tried to avoid eye contact with her. I really didn’t want to have to talk to her. With, She’s really going to think I’m a loser if she hears me speak, being the main thought coursing through my brain, I was silently begging, Please don’t ask me a question.
The funny thing is that some judgemental thoughts did pop into Susan’s head when she met me, as she said much later on Australian Story: ‘When I first met her I kept thinking, “How could a beautiful young woman (and she is beautiful, she really is beautiful) want to cover herself in tattoos?” So I did judge her, but I was so wrong and I will admit that.’
Despite all of this, it wasn’t long until I started warming to Sue. She had come to see us and tell us her life story and about a cause close to her heart, the Susan Alberti Medical Research Foundation. She started by telling us how she grew up in a housing commission home and that her family could rarely afford nice things. I could relate. Wow, I kept thinking, what an amazing journey she must have been on. It was clear that her wealth and status had not been presented to her on a silver platter.
Sue also told us about how she and her first husband, Angelo Alberti, built up a hugely successful property development business, Dansu Constructions. Then she shared with us the heartbreak of losing Angelo, who died in 1995 after being knocked off his bike by a truck. The most powerful part of Sue’s talk, though, was about her daughter, Danielle, who was a very talented artist and was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at a young age. She told us how Danielle went to live in New York despite her illness, and how she, Sue, had been very worried about her deteriorating health. I struggled to contain my own emotions when Sue told us about how her daughter was eventually approved for a kidney transplant, which was to take place in Australia. She said she travelled to New York so that she could fly home with Danielle, but the end of that story is heart-breaking.
Later she would talk about the flight home on Australian Story:
And about an hour out of Los Angeles, Danielle started thrashing around and wanting to take off her clothes, and I thought, ‘This is really odd.’ She said, ‘Mum, my back is so painful.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll rub it.’ She said, ‘Will you hold me, Mum?’ And I did, and I sat there on the side of her seat holding her, and with that she had a massive heart attack and she died in my arms. I laid next to her for the next nine hours or ten hours bringing her home to Australia, not alive but dead.
Thinking about Sue being in that terrible situation still sends a shiver down my spine. But on the day she visited us she wasn’t telling us these stories to gain our sympathy. She wanted us to know that no matter how tough life can be at times, resilience and strength can lead to better days. That was a message I really appreciated and related to. While she has a chauffeur who drives her around in an expensive Mercedes, right then I felt like I genuinely had some things in common with her.
The next time I saw Sue was in our change rooms after the game. Even though her story had inspired me, I still felt intimidated by her. But when I saw her standing by herself at one stage, I found some courage and thought, What the heck. I’m going to stir her up a bit. The people at the St Kilda Sharks, a club she has given a lot of financial support to over the years, often referred to her as ‘The Queen’ or ‘Her Majesty’. I remember that I went over to her and made some wisecrack about that and about how it would take a hurricane to move her hair. I was thinking, She’s either going to get my humour or she’s not. Fortunately, Sue laughed at my banter, I breathed a sigh of relief, and since then an amazing friendship has developed between us.
I have learned so much more about her story in the past couple of years. I have learned about her battle with cancer, her open-heart surgery and how she went through a stage of putting on weight before she was given a stern talking to by a doctor, then used her steely resolve to lose 48 kilograms and keep it off. On top of all that, she is one of the most generous people on the planet. She has given away more money than I can imagine ever earning. The amount she has donated to various causes is said to be more than $25 million, not that she has ever shared those kinds of numbers with me. According to a number of feature stories written about her, she has donated $15 million to medical research, including to scientists who are trying to develop both a vaccine and a cure for Type 1 diabetes, a cause that is painfully close to her heart.
Sue is truly an extraordinary woman. And that’s before you take into account her fight against sexism, which saw her sue Sam Newman after he denigrated her on The Footy Show a few years ago. Sue’s effort to win that case, (she then donated the $220,000 settlement to charity) struck a great blow for women’s rights.
Sue and I have been able to bond by speaking honestly about the fact we had both judged each other on our first meeting, even though our life stories have some similarities. It was so shit of me to have judged her based purely on what she looked like, when I hated people doing that to me. I remember looking at her and thinking, Oh, you’ve got pearls and a driver and millions of dollars, you must be a typical rich and snobby person. Of course, my first reaction should have been, I wonder what she is like as a person? That’s how I want people to approach me. It was a breakthrough for me to reflect on this.
As I said earlier, Sue also regretted thinking about me this way. But once we started hanging out a bit, we were both like, Wow, you are amazing. As she said on Australian Story:
I got to know more and more about her background and I found out what a very solid, wonderful person she was. Not only a good footballer, she’d done it so tough. She’d had the hard school of knocks like myself and immediately we had a rapport, the two of us.
We realised that we are both good people on the inside, even if we look completely different on the outside. And this realisation did so much to reduce my levels of anxiety generally about the issue of how people might view me. It was, without wanting to overstate it, a massive turning point in my life. It means so much to me that a person as accomplished and successful as Sue is happy to take me for who I am. These days, Sue often invites me to functions to support the Susan Alberti Medial Research Foundation, and she often speaks super highly of me in her speeches. When she does, I just think, Wow, the people at these functions are the cream of society and here she is telling them about me and how good I am. The fact that she is proud of me has made me proud of myself.
Thinking back to the first few times that I spoke to Sue, the thing that actually blew me away the most was her revelation that she had been a serious football player in her younger days. I could not believe that a person who was so prim and proper could once have been out there in the mud chasing a footy around. But that was the truth of the matter. She and her brother, Richard Jenkings, talked about her younger days on Australian Story:
Richard: Sue is almost a dichotomy in her personality. When she was a child she was mischievous, daring, lovable, at times very, very girlie. At other times when she felt like it, which was in the backyard with me, she’d tough it out with me playing football.
Susan: I really wanted to play serious football. I was a pretty tough rover, I was a tough tackler and Dad used to think I was pretty good. But then, by about the age of fifteen, Dad didn’t think it was safe for a young woman, particular
ly as I was playing against, well, mature men, so I had to hang up my boots at fifteen.
Richard: That was in the fifties, late fifties, she had no opportunity really to partake in a team. There were no girls’ teams.
Susan: When I couldn’t continue playing football, I was absolutely heartbroken because the love of the game has been there since I was about six years old and it still continues to this day.
Finding out that she had been a footballer in her younger days was a huge revelation. I now understood why she was so passionate about footy and why she had devoted herself to the game to the point where she had become the first female vice-president of the Western Bulldogs. I now also realised why a few years earlier she had written a cheque for $25,000 to the VWFL, which basically saved the competition from going bankrupt—and this was on top of the thousands and thousands of dollars that she has donated to the Bulldogs over the years. And I understood why I often saw her standing at the back of the huddle at St Kilda Sharks games, with a twinkle in her eye that suggested she wished she could take off her expensive clothes, put on some footy gear, and run around with us.
Finding out that Sue had played footy made me feel so much better about myself. If a respected person like her had played women’s footy and was prepared to back the game with her own money, then all of us who played the game clearly had some serious firepower in our camp. We weren’t just a bunch of butch lesbians, as so many people seemed to think. We were a group of athletes from many different backgrounds and with many different ways of being in the world who deserved to be respected.
My relationship with Sue became stronger when we both appeared in that episode of Australian Story in 2016. Funnily enough, women’s footy wasn’t even in the original plans for the episode, as Sue recalls:
Australian Story was initially going to be about my support and passion for medical research, but I told them there’s a bigger thing out there that I’m really involved in. I told them that I really wanted to promote women’s football and asked them what they thought about that. The producers thought it was a great idea, so I nominated Mo to be part of the story and that’s how we became close. We really got to know one another and we really bonded during the four months that the cameras followed us around. It went on and on and on and on! We were together so much and we had so much of our lives to share. Of course, we look so different. When we met for lunch at a cafe in Toorak, she was there in her tracksuit pants and t-shirt and I was wearing one of my tailored suits. But we have a lot in common. We are from similar backgrounds, the school of hard knocks. We both grew up in public housing. And I like to help young women, particularly if they’ve got aspirations and they’re talented, too. And she is.
Sue and I spent a lot of time together during the filming and joked around a lot with each other. We just clicked. I felt like I was hanging out with an older version of me. Sue loves joking around, and she is funny. She’ll also tell you how it is when she feels the need. She’s no fake. I think that’s the key to her.
The highlight of our time together for Australian Story came when Sue visited my mum’s house. The funniest part was when one of the show’s producers said to me, ‘How would you feel if Sue came to Glenroy? Her driver will take her over there in her Mercedes.’ I was like, ‘A Mercedes driving down my mum’s street? That has never happened. And if it has happened before, it must have been stolen or the driver must have been frickin’ lost.’ I then joked to the producer, ‘I’m happy to park it for her when she gets there, but it might not be there when she comes back out!’
The producer also asked me if my mum, whose health was deteriorating, would be stressed about someone like Susan Alberti visiting her home. But I quickly put him at ease. My mum is one of the most easygoing people on the planet. Even if the Queen were coming over, Mum wouldn’t suddenly want to change her house. She wouldn’t go around trying to fix everything up. She’d just say to the Queen, ‘Here you go, have a seat on my chair that I bought from the op shop. Here’s a cup of tea with normal tea bags and normal milk, and, sorry, but we don’t have biscuits around here. By the way, how’s your day going?’ That would be my mum. So I knew that Mum wouldn’t be freaked out by Susan coming to her place. She was never going to react like, ‘Oh, you’re this rich lady, so I had better try and act like someone I’m not.’ She’s as authentic as Sue is. And that’s exactly how it all panned out.
Mum didn’t do anything out of the ordinary before Sue arrived. She didn’t do a big spring clean; she didn’t set things up trying to be posh. She was actually in the middle of setting up a birthday party for a family member, so there was stuff everywhere. The house was messy as hell, but she didn’t care. Because Mum is one of those people who says, ‘You either accept me or you don’t. And this is my house, so this is how it is.’
Still,it was funny when the big moment came and Sue’s Mercedes pulled up out the front. She got out, looking like the Queen, and walked into the humble old housing commission home where I had grown up. Yet this is the thing about Sue: she might look all high and mighty, but she’s so down to earth, so she and Mum got along like a house on fire. We all sat around and had a cup of tea and then Susan wandered back out to her Mercedes—thankfully, it was still there!—and headed off.
Sue says of her visit:
You know what, it reminded me so much of my own old home. There was so much coming and going of people. I had never seen anything like that in my life. It was clearly a halfway house, with a bungalow here, a shed there and a caravan out the back. But it was spotlessly clean. That’s the thing I noticed the most. You see, my mum kept our house like that. She was very proud of what she had, as is Mo’s mother, Rosemary. And everyone was so friendly and warm when I visited. I think they probably thought that, given I turned up in a chauffeur-driven car, I was going to be a bit of a snob. Well, I wasn’t. I was anything but. They were warm,
I was warm, and we all got on really well. Rosemary is just gorgeous. I asked her if she knew the names of all the people living in the house at the moment. She just looked at me with a smile and said, ‘No way. I haven’t got time for that.’ We all had a laugh. It was a really lovely occasion.
I have been to Sue’s workplace and, as I mentioned, to lots of functions with her, including the 2016 Brownlow Medal Count, but I still haven’t been to her fancy house. I assume it’s like the place where the Queen lives. I remember watching the full version of the Australian Story episode and seeing her standing in front of plates that were on display there. No doubt they were worth a trillion dollars. I thought, Why would you have plates on display?
But then I came to a conclusion: The Queen would have plates on display, so that must be why.
Last year, not long before we appeared at a charity breakfast to promote women’s footy, Sue gave me a string of pearls. I then wore them to the breakfast. When Sue was speaking, she referred to the fact that I was wearing pearls. I then yelled out, ‘I promise I didn’t steal them!’ Everyone laughed, including Sue. That’s the kind of mates we are. Classic Aussie mates who love and respect each other but are only too keen to take the piss out of each other and ourselves when we get the chance.
8
Collingwood calling
THE WOMEN’S EXHIBITION matches that were played between the Western Bulldogs and Melbourne in 2013, 2014 and 2015 were so successful that the AFL found itself under pressure to bring forward the planned start date for its national women’s competition. Of course, it wasn’t just those exhibition games that created the momentum for the AFL to get its act together sooner. The AFL’s own participation statistics showed that women’s footy was booming, with almost 400,000 females around the nation playing the game, which was a 20 per cent increase on the year before.
This led to the announcement in February 2016 that the AFL would indeed launch its women’s league earlier than it had initially planned. It had been due to commence in 2020, but was now going to begin in 2017—just twelve months away—and this created much excitemen
t among the women’s football community. It was quite amazing to hear AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan outline that he wanted to launch an eight-team competition, with games to be played in most capital cities during the following February and March. ‘There’s a revolution going on,’ he said during a press conference that was held after the announcement. ‘I’ve stuck my neck out with the 2017 as opposed to a bit later. There’s been concern around the depth. But the success of the academies, the talent searches … means that I think next year … it looks more like eight teams rather than six.’
I couldn’t quite believe it. In the space of just three years, female footballers had gone from being laughed at to being elevated onto the national stage. I felt a lot of pride at having played my part in building up women’s footy.
To prepare for the new competition, a whole series of women’s exhibition games was planned, featuring matches in a number of states. There were derbies between West Coast and Fremantle, Sydney and Greater Western Sydney and the Brisbane Lions and Gold Coast. There were also state games between teams representing South Australia, New South Wales/Australian Capital Territory, Tasmania and the Northern Territory. In addition to all that, two games were scheduled between the Western Bulldogs and Melbourne. The first was set down for March, with the second to be played as a stand-alone feature match on the weekend before the AFL finals, on which the AFL had decided to schedule a general bye so that all the teams playing in the finals could have a rest before starting the battle for the premiership.