Football’s women, a correspondent wrote in The Age in the 1970s, “are mere appendages to the game, extras in an all-male saga, tolerated but not taken seriously”. For so long, that’s how it was in football. Women washed our socks. They drove us to training. Leigh Matthews did psychological profiles of his Brisbane players’ wives and girlfriends “to assist their playing partners to be better footballers”.
When a young Darebin Falcons player was taken as the No 1 pick in the inaugural national women’s draft, things were changing. It was six months after Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech. In the next few years, a woman would pilot a Melbourne Cup winner at 100-1, and nearly 25,000 people would cram into Princes Park for the first AFLW game.
