By the end of winter, Bowman Park has turned to dust. Local footballers joke about the “Bardon bobble” that plagues the ground each year after heavy boot traffic has shredded the autumn’s green grass.
Women have been playing football here in Brisbane’s inner-west for more than 100 years. Inside the clubhouse is a photograph of Australia’s first ever women’s side, the 1921 Latrobe Ladies.
The modern iteration of the club, Bardon Latrobe FC, has 236 girls and women on the books – and more than 1,000 registered football players in total – sharing Bowman Park, where there is barely enough space for two regulation fields.
The club president, Samuel Irvine Casey, estimates they have turned away a few hundred girls, boys and adults this season because the club cannot cater to local demand.
“We just don’t have the room for everyone who wants to play,” Irvine Casey says.
A few kilometres from Bowman Park is Lang Park, the site of Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium where the Matildas will play France in a World Cup quarter-final on Saturday – arguably the most significant football match ever played in Australia.
The success of the Women’s World Cup and the Matildas’ thrilling progress have prompted discussion about whether this might be a turning point for the round-ball game (and not just the women’s game) in a country where “soccer” receives relatively little public attention or funding compared to other football codes.
The Matildas are “inspiring the next generation”. Football Australia’s Legacy ’23 plan for after the World Cup envisages 400,000 new female participants, and aims for gender parity in the playing ranks by 2027.
But will the next generation of Matildas have anywhere to play?
More ground to play on
For decades, football has been Australia’s most popular sport in terms of participation numbers. But it has struggled to convince governments to back it.
Two years ago, Football Queensland claimed the state government spent 13 times more per participant on rugby union facilities than on soccer grounds.
On Thursday, a few days before the Matildas match in Brisbane, there was progress of sorts. The Brisbane city council announced it would lease new grounds at Nudgee, on Brisbane’s northern outskirts, to Football Queensland.
We're thrilled to announce that Football Queensland has been awarded the tender to lease the $35 million transformed Nudgee Recreation Reserve under a landmark agreement with @bne_lordmayor and the @brisbanecityqld 🏟️⚽
— Football Queensland (@FootballQLD) August 10, 2023
Read more: https://t.co/aJlHD7CHvt
“Enabling infrastructure projects like this are key to delivering opportunities for the thousands of boys and girls who are being turned away by local clubs every season due to a lack of infrastructure to service the current demands of our ever growing game,” the Football Queensland chief executive, Robert Cavallucci, says. The success of the Women’s World Cup showed Brisbane was a “football city”.
The idea of building new fields is an easier task in the outer suburbs, where communities are not under the same pressures as those in the city.
At Bowman Park, however, some residents have complained about parking and lighting issues as the football club bursts at the seams; there are locals who want more community access – and less organised football – at the parklands.
“If we were [outside the city] we could just put down another field,” says Irvine Casey. “But we can’t do that. Hitting the 50-50 gender target would mean we’d need to take on another 500 players. We’d need double the space. At some point something has to give.”
Steve Georgakis, a senior lecturer in sports studies at the University of Sydney, says it’s a “complete disgrace” local clubs are forced to turn away young players, including girls.
He warns “a substantial commitment” is needed to women’s grassroots football to capitalise on the wave of interest generated by the World Cup.
“Everyone’s jumped on the bandwagon, but we need to understand that history tells us this never really translates into very much at grassroots. That’s a myth,” he says.
“If there’s going to be more investment it needs to go to those grassroots clubs. The money needs to trickle down, and research tells us that it never does.”
Decades of ‘invisible barriers’
Newspaper clippings recount the formation of the Queensland Women’s Ladies Soccer Football Association after a meeting of about 100 women at a Brisbane gymnasium in July 1921.
An exhibition in September that year between North Brisbane and South Brisbane at the Gabba reportedly attracted 10,000 spectators. The following season, Latrobe and three other clubs – North Brisbane, South Brisbane and Celtic – played competition matches at Bowman Park.
And then most of the games stopped. Women’s football has faced decades of “invisible barriers”, says Fiona Crawford, a Brisbane-based writer who co-authored Never Say Die: The Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women’s Football.
Women were not officially banned but they “might as well have been”. “You didn’t get access to the good pitches, you didn’t get gear that fit, you didn’t get changing rooms, training was not held at times that suited,” Crawford says.
“For so long it’s been treated as the little sister of men’s football, but it’s this really wholesome, inclusive standalone product. And it’s really stepping out of the shadow of men’s football.”
Crawford says the legacy planning for the World Cup has been “quite good”, including a focus on facilities such as changing rooms for women, but finding accessible places for girls to play is still a significant challenge.
“The pitch space is a bigger issue and the one that’s outside Football Australia’s control or the clubs’ control,” she says.
“It really is going to require government or local councils stepping up to the plate. We know the physical and mental health benefits that football brings, so prioritising green space is going to be so crucial as we move forward.”
Breeding the next Matilda
A few years ago, Karen Dickson wandered the sidelines of junior games at Bowman Park, asking if some of the mothers were keen for a kickabout.
Almost 100 years after the formation of the Latrobe Ladies, Dickson began the task of re-establishing a women’s side at Bardon. She gathered a group of women who trained together at first, and the following year they registered for an over-30s competition as the Bardon-Latrobe Bolts.
“And then they all left me!” Dickson says. “So I walked the fields at Bowman one day and said, ‘Hey, do you want to join a ladies soccer team.’ And that’s how I built my first team.
“The majority of us had never played before. I was 42 and had never kicked a ball before. We just build that rapport of just fun. We didn’t mind if you hadn’t played before.
“We’ve built ourselves up and we’re actually quite competitive now. We chat and play and party and do all of that.”
In 2021 the Bolts wore special jerseys to mark the 100-year anniversary of women’s football in Queensland.
Dickson, who is Bardon-Latrobe’s general manager, says the club would love to expand its girls’ teams and add a women’s side into the competitive Brisbane metro leagues.
“There’s more girls coming through, but we just don’t have the field space. That’s more limiting than receiving money per player or anything like that,” she says.
“The most important thing is that the girls can then see a pathway … if you’re wanting to become a Matilda, then we want to have the ability to say that you can do that here.”
