Why, for the nation’s women, tonight’s game is personal
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At least 4 million Australians locked eyeballs on one thing on Saturday evening.
By around 8pm almost all of them were smiling, cheering and high-fiving friends or strangers next to them. A rare and joyful unity stopped the nation. And it all turned on women’s sport and the staggering athleticism, deftness, and passion of team Matildas.
For those who grew up in a different age, this was also a moment of whiplash: a jolting appreciation for just how much the world had changed. As a child of the 70s and 80s, I can hardly remember seeing women’s sport on TV other than the odd grand-slam tennis match. While streaming services were just a glimmer in the eye of a sports exec somewhere, there was still plenty of televised sport—mostly men’s cricket and men’s AFL, rugby league, and rugby union. I watched on with my brothers, watched all the men do all the things. I unquestioningly accepted it as a given that in sport—and perhaps everything—men played the ball and played the hero, and women were nowhere. We were watching sport, but we were also imbibing a malign Bible of unspoken messages about what men and women could do and could be.
Fast-forward to August 2023: watching my 11-year-old son’s face as he marvels at a masterful Mary Fowler pass, or Mackenzie Arnold’s jaw-dropping mental composure, or Sam’s Kerr’s everything. I see how he takes it all just as seriously as any men’s competition—reveres these players in the same way he does the Socceroos and Western Bulldogs. And I see how the historical significance is—quite wonderfully—lost on him. When I bring up the bad old days, how it hasn’t always been like this, he looks slightly perplexed. His look tells me how far we’ve come. The past is a foreign land. For the generation growing up now, it is a given that women’s sport is naturally treated equally to men’s: why wouldn’t it be?
Looking back, it’s impossible not to wonder how the invisibility of women’s sport in the 70s and 80s shaped my generation in ways we can’t even see. I wasn’t sporty, and some of my sporty peers may have different memories of this time. Maybe they somehow found their own female sporting heroes and role models despite the visibility vacuum. Tellingly, I struggle to remember any of my female school friends following any women’s sporting competition, but I do recall a classmate, in her sparkly green Lycra leotard, training for the Canberra Raiders cheer-leader squad.
Whether or not the Matildas make it through to the finals, we can thank them for being such down-to-earth carriers of this cultural and historical moment. Their skills, attitude and demeanour have no doubt inspired thousands of girls and made a life-long impression on the impressionable mind of thousands of boys. In an era when misogyny and sexism are still pervasive, this is a moment to appreciate and celebrate.
