Five minutes with author Fiona Crawford
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Love the Matildas’ moves? Get to know the moves that got them into the spotlight of the world’s favourite game, football.
Never just a matter of playing well, the fight to elevate women’s football has been the passion of many. From the suburban fields, the tour buses, and the board rooms, find out about the journey to the World Cup that is as much about human rights as it is about sport.
We took five minutes with author Fiona Crawford on the eve of the Women’s World Cup to discuss The Matilda Effect.
The title of the book is clever—tell us about that!
I’d actually come up with The Matilda Effect title while thinking about the effect the Matildas have had on the sporting and gender equality landscapes—because they play the truly world game, when something shifts in the sport in terms of pay parity or gender equality, it sets a new benchmark for other women’s sports. We’ve seen that with, for example, improved conditions and pay, and even more broadly in terms of media profiles and media coverage.
In researching The Matilda Effect, I stumbled across a scientific theory by the same name. That theory relates to how women’s scientific contributions have often been overlooked, maligned, or attributed to the nearest male. I realised those hallmarks transcend science and are very recognisable in women’s sport, with women’s sporting contributions traditionally being overlooked, maligned, and/or the credit being given to men.
(An example from the book is when the Socceroos won the Men’s Asian Cup. The media coverage congratulated them on becoming the first Australian team to do so. Women’s football fans had to politely set the record straight: the Socceroos were the first Australian men’s team to win the Asian Cup. The Matildas had won it five years earlier.)
So the title has a dual meaning (something I was also sure to explain to the New Zealand administrators and players I interviewed for the book!).
When/how did you come to take such a keen interest in the Matildas and/or the history of women’s soccer?
The Matildas came to my attention during the 2007 Women’s World Cup, which was the first time SBS broadcast all the tournament games, and when a filmmaker called Helen Barrow produced a behind-the-scenes documentary called Never Say Die. That was when I realised not only did women play football, but we had a national team and an international tournament full of remarkable women.
I realised there was an absolute scarcity of information available, and almost no media coverage, so I started writing about the players and the sport. I think like many people involved in women’s sport, I instinctively knew the information was important and there was and would be an audience for it, even if we couldn’t quite prove it yet. Based on where we are now, you could say the instinct was correct, but I still feel like we’ve only just begun to learn about this incredible and largely invisible history and the people who made it.
The popularity of women’s soccer seems like an overnight success—how much truth is there to that and what can you ascribe it to?
It certainly seems like it, but that’s why we added the nod to the ‘overnight’ success in the book I co-authored with Lee McGowan. (It’s called Never Say Die: The Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women’s Football.)
The Matildas have officially existed for approximately 40 years and the Matildas’ profile and success has been meteoric in the past few years, but those are built on 100 years of women quietly building solid foundations.
The first recorded women’s football match in Australia was played in at the Gabba in Brisbane in 1921. 10,000 people turned up to that match, so we know that not only were women playing football but that there was an audience for it. It took the (mostly male) administrators the next 100 years to realise that, so women were playing and administering football with very few resources or support, and even less media coverage.
As a result, we haven’t seen or truly understood their contributions. That’s changing now, but that lack of visibility or historical record certainly makes it seem like their success is linear and overnight.
Favourite anecdote unearthed in your research?
Gosh, too many—and I’m going to remember about seven more I should have included when I’m awake thinking about this at 3 am.
My favourite anecdotes are probably the ones that came out of leftfield during the interviews. For example, when I realised that super fans the Croissants, who dress up like Steve Irwin and get about with an inflatable croc-Kerr-dile in tribute to Matildas captain Sam Kerr, organically crossed paths with human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson, whom many of us know as one of the lawyers who represents Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.
For me, it summed up the range of complementary ways women are edging women’s football and gender equality forward, and how those ways and those people are organically crossing paths. At one end of the spectrum, there’s a group of women who are lending visible and vocal support to the players, including creating politically savvy shirts for the Italian team emblazoned ‘pay me in pasta’. At the other end is a human rights lawyer leveraging the law to try to force FIFA to enact equal pay and conditions. I discovered quite by accident that they’d encountered each other at the 2019 Women’s World Cup—it turns out Jennifer Robinson had approached the Croissants and their crocodile for a photo.
Another relates to modern football matriarch Heather Reid’s recounting of attending the 1991 tournament. She was likely the first Australian media to attend a Women’s World Cup and was reporting back on some pretty telling attitudes towards women’s football. That reporting included conveying information to ‘Tracey’, as in ABC journalist and recent Australian Sports Commission Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Tracey Holmes, who was at the time just starting out in her career.
Two other favourite anecdotes relate to 2003, when the Australians were the only bidders for the tournament but missed out on actually hosting it twice—first through FIFA pulling a political swifty and awarding the Women’s World Cup to China as compensation for China missing out on hosting a Men’s Youth World Cup, and a second time when the SARS pandemic derailed China’s ability to host the tournament.
The other was about how the Australian Women’s Soccer Association (AWSA), the organisation that originally ran the Matildas, discovered it was going into liquidation. Matilda Sacha Wainwright, who was also a lawyer, turned up and saw the organisation listed at the ACT Supreme Court when she arrived there for another matter. Her panicked phone call was what tipped the AWSA’s administrators off.
Do you have a favourite Matilda?
I actually don’t. It might sound a little trite, but I just tend to be impressed when I hear new information about the often fairly unglamorous and unpaid but inventive lengths to which the players and administrators went to make women’s football happen. They’re incredibly humble about their work, so often something they did as a matter of course is particularly fascinating and innovative.
Who’s your prediction for World Cup champ?
Well, apart from wanting to see the Matildas win (because how incredible and incredibly fitting that would be given they’ve regularly broken new ground in women’s sport in Australia), I’d probably have to say the reigning champions and perennial favourites the US. They’re not just technically gifted and have an enviable squad depth, but they’re a team that, as US great Megan Rapinoe said in a press conference, is not one ‘that does any sort of resting on its laurels’. They’d be incredibly fierce and intimidating to come up against in the best kind of way.
Recent knee injuries notwithstanding, teams like the Lionesses, who just won the Euros, and teams like France and Spain (the latter with Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putellas) are also likely to be in the mix. That said, anything and everything can happen in a World Cup, and one goal or one match can really tip the balance, so it’s highly possible these predictions will turn out to be completely off the mark.
Also, I’m just as (or even more) interested in the first-time or underdog teams. (2023 is the first time the tournament will include 32 teams, up from 24 in 2019.) I think they’re likely to be fast and firm Australian crowd favourites.
Other books to recommend for Matilda fans or sports lovers?
I’d say any and all sports books for and about girls and women. It’s a fledgling genre because, just as with the sport itself, it’s taken a long time to prove to the gatekeepers that there’s actually a market for books about women’s sport. So the books that are available—all the way from Sam Kerr’s and Lydia Williams’ and Hayley Raso’s children’s books through to mine—are inadvertently serving a number of purposes: to document important and little-known histories; to help girls and women see what they can be (an important step to inspiring the next generation of Matildas); to show that there’s an audience for women’s sports books.
And/or what’s on your TBR?
So, so, so many books. Front of mind is Anna Funder’s Wifedom, both because Stasiland remains a standout book and this is likely a brilliant follow-up and because you could say Funder’s choice of subject matter (the story of George Orwell’s wife, whose contributions were little documented until now, but that undoubtedly enabled him to have the stellar writing career that he did) is something I’m interested in. Lessons in Chemistry is also on my list—another Matilda Effect-reminiscent book about women’s contributions. It’s clearly a theme.
I’d add Ellen Van Neervan’s Personal Score, which explores women’s football from both a First Nations and queer perspective. I’m keen to read Chloe Dalton’s Girls Don’t Play Sport when it’s released. Finally, Thomas Mayo and Kerry O’Brien’s The Voice to Parliament Handbook and Megan Davis’ Quarterly Essay Voice of Reason on Recognition and Renewal, because I want to head into the referendum as informed as I can possibly be.
The Matilda Effect is out now, published by MUP and available in all good bookstores.
