The First Matildas: The 1975 Asian Ladies Championship

By Greg Downes

The First Matildas is the story of the women who played for Australia in the Asian Cup Ladies Football Tournament held in Hong Kong in 1975. Australia took part along with teams from Hong Kong, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Thailand. The tournament, which was the forerunner to what is known today as the Asian Foot

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fair Play Publishing
• Release date: Jul 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781925914535

Greg Downes

Dr Greg Downes completed his Ph.D. in 2016 with Victoria University, in Melbourne, Australia, and currently writes, teaches, and researches women's sports history, sport management, and human services from his home in Lennox Head on the north coast of NSW, Australia. He became interested in women's football due to the involvement of his youngest daughter Caitlin. Greg was involved in many roles over the years his daughter played club, school, and regional representative soccer in northern NSW with the Byron Bay club, including as Chairman of the North Coast Academy of Sport. He has been both clubs- and representative-team manager, club treasurer, regional-committee member, supporter, and general dogsbody.As a parent, Greg became aware of the many injustices and discriminations faced by young girls and women in their pursuit to play the game. During this time he became involved in the fight to make his daughter's involvement in soccer an inclusive one.While studying for his Masters, Greg used examples of these injustices faced by women involved in football as topics for his research. He came to realise that little or no research had been done on the history of women's football in Australia. The voices of the women were unheard and were yet to be written into the history of the game. Greg's Ph.D. research topic, An oral history of women's football in Australia, formed the basis of his book Dedicated Lives - Stories of Pioneers in women's football in Australia published by Fair Play Publishing in 2019.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The 1920s–1950s

Australian women, like their compatriots in the UK and the US, were experiencing unprecedented growth in their freedoms as the 1920s swung into play. Victorian ideals were being swept away, and women were everywhere—in the workplace, in medicine, and even—with the 1925 appointment of Millicent Preston-Stanley to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly—in politics. It’s only natural that sport was part of this revolution as well. Sport, especially a game such as football, is as essential to a culture as any song or painting, and nobody knows that more than its players and fans.

One of those players was Alma Kelly, a young woman from the coalfields of the Hunter Valley. She was born in 1910 or 1911 and joined the Weston women’s team when she was 17 or 18. Described as a gregarious, larger-than-life figure, she quickly became a favourite amongst her teammates, even becoming their captain. For the rest of her short life, Alma pushed for the importance of women’s football and the right of women to play.

Close to 250 kilometres away, in Sydney, Maisie Alexander spent the latter half of the 1910s playing in England, Canada, and New Zealand before returning to her homeland. Back in Australia, in 1921 she was appointed as head of the Sydney Ladies´ Soccer Association.

Both Alma and Maisie probably served as an inspiration for many other young women down the line as the game continued to grow in the country slowly but surely.

Daphne Martin played for the Granville club in western Sydney during the Second World War. She’d gone from munitions to midfield after leaving the factory to help her family in their hamburger shop and needing an outlet for her physical energy. So, at a dance with her friends, Martin formed a team. And that wasn´t the only one! Teams need other teams to play against! In 1942, Granville played a team called Central and caused quite a scandal. After all, they weren’t just women. Some of them were even married! One, Martha Sheldrick, even parked her toddler’s pram on the sidelines before a game.

There are hundreds more stories like this—probably thousands of them. Sadly, those we know now can only be gleaned through old newspaper snippets, long-held family gossip, or closely guarded keepsakes from friends. The vast majority of these stories don’t even have these kinds of background and, sadly, the tales of these women pioneers have been lost to history.

But eventually, the slow growth blossomed, and the bright, brilliant petals emerged.

The 1960s and on

The 1960s arrived and brought the Women’s Liberation Movement with it. As women strived for freedom across Australia, they found a sense of it on the pitch. Reports from Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland saw women’s teams popping up all over the place, like a current of water that would need more than a cork to stop the flow—but any flow needs direction, and Australian women’s football needed someone to guide it from the source.

Those guides were the O’Connor´s—Pat and Joe, the godparents of history in the making.

The Controversy

In 1975, a team from Australia took part in a six-nation tournament, the very first Asian Women’s Cup run by the Asian Ladies Football Confederation (ALFC). The team was made up of:

– Pat O’Connor

– Captain

– Christel Abenthum

– Sue Binns

– Kim Coates

– Julie Dolan AM

– Lynn Everett-Miller

– Trudy Fischer

– Cindy Heydon

– Vickie Kohen

– Sue Larsen

– Lynn McKenzie

– Connie Selby

– Trixie Tagg

– Sue Taylor

– Aunty Tarita Yvonne Peters (then known as Stacey Tracy)

– Gundy Zarins

These women, many would argue, could be and should be recognised as the first Matildas. After all, they competed as a team from Australia sanctioned by the then Australian Soccer Federation, competing against other sanctioned teams from New Zealand, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. It would be hard to argue that this wasn’t a truly international tournament, and that the players in it were not national teams!

These 1975ers, for the most part, expected to finally gain this recognition after a long battle and series of negotiations with Football Australia (FA) over many years. With the upcoming 2023 World Cup and the increase in recognition for women’s football, it seemed like the perfect time to acknowledge their place in football history.

But when FA gave a statement in May 2022, it wasn’t exactly what the team wanted to hear:

The women who have been recognised today for their accomplishments are a shining example of the rich history of football in our country, which is so closely linked to the Australian story. We are proud to welcome them into the national team’s family.

They welcomed the team—a team which has been an essential part of football history for nearly half a century already! After years of fighting for recognition, many members of the team saw this as an insult rather than any movement forward. In fact, a majority of members of the 1975ers decided to reject the peace offering and instead keep fighting for recognition.

So why did these women never receive their numbered caps? FA’s official statement on the matter is quite vague. They state that, while a historically significant team, the team did not meet the criteria to be categorised as an Australian Senior National Women’s Team.

This was, apparently, a decision recommended by the history committee. But what were the criteria? There is no clear answer. The fact is, though, there can only ever be one criterion when reflecting on history—to borrow a quotation from writer Bonita Mersiades on this subject: While history is always relevant, there are other considerations too: fairness, justice, common sense, historical context, gender equity—and the pub test.

Let’s break that down.

Fairness and justice

It is a fact, regardless of whatever politics take place in the background, that the 1975ers played in national colours, sanctioned by the then equivalent of today’s FA, in an international tournament against several other countries. Is it just that, all this time later, the importance of that fact is only now truly recognised? And is it fair that, due to vague criteria, they are told that it isn’t enough to earn them their caps?

Common Sense

Common sense—what’s the definition of a national team? A soccer/football team that represents a particular nation in an international tournament. By applying common sense to the story of the 1975ers, is there any way to say they don’t fit into this definition?

Historical context and gender equity

Football hasn’t always been what it is now, and that goes triple for women’s football. Looking at the historical context of the 1975ers and their achievements, can we shine more of a light on the politics of the situation? In this book, we’ll go into more detail about their stories, and in turn glean a more contextual truth.

As pointed out by Mersiades in the article referenced earlier:

The view of the historians is apparently that because there was not a competitive process to select the team, it is not really an Australian team.

But this ignores one important part of history, and that is historical context.

In 1975, the then nascent Australian Women’s Soccer Association was responsible for state and national championships, but they were not involved in international competition and could not be because they were not the official member of FIFA—the ASF was.

And so, if the 1922 team is recognised as the original Socceroos based on the historical context of the time, then how can it be in doubt that the 1975ers were the true First Matildas?

While today’s FA point to a lack of written evidence to support the ASF’s decision, the fact is, as this book shows, we have the oral testimony of the women involved including those such as Pat O’Connor who have received the highest recognition from FA as pioneers of the game in Australia. Her evidence along should be enough to support the claims of the 1975ers.

Again context is important. Men controlled football in the early 1970s. The women’s game was in its infancy and was generally not supported by the male dominated organisations. There is a strong argument that suggests documented (written) history is often in the hands of those in power, and the documentation of the early years of women’s football was clearly not of importance to those running the game at that point.

This is supported by the failure to locate any of the relevant written history of the AWSA.

The Pub Test

If we brought up the achievements of the 1975ers in a pub rather than in an FA boardroom, would the results have been different? Just how much headway would the voices of ordinary people have made to the women’s fight for recognition as representatives of their country?

An article by Selina Steele quotes renowned journalist and historian Ted Simmons with a suggestion on the issue—not to renumber all the caps, but to give these women their acknowledgement and assign them Roman numerals on their caps. It would not only be fair, but an answer that everyone in the pub would surely get behind.

The Stories

Everyone has a story. Starting from the very beginning, the stories told in these pages take in the point of view of women who up until now have been silent, and puts it all in the context they truly deserve—often in their own words.

They are the 1975ers. The first Australian national side.

The First Matildas.

Part 1

BEGINNINGS TO 1968

Pat and Joe O’Connor

I’m getting on a bit now. Maybe not so much for me, but for the rest of the girls, they really played their hearts out, and I think that some kind of recognition would be fantastic.

Teammate Trixie Tagg referred to Pat and Joe O’Connor as the godfather and godmother of women’s football in Australia, and it is, by far, a fitting description. The O’Connors were British immigrants who came to the game in the 1960s; football provided an opportunity for them both to become involved in the local sporting culture. It was an important decade, especially in the historical context, as it became the decade now widely recognised as the period in which the women’s game became firmly established in Australia.

Over their 15 years of involvement, between 1963 and 1978, the couple were instrumental in developing and formalising many aspects of the modern game, including the creation of the Metropolitan Ladies Soccer Association (MLSA), NSW Ladies Soccer Federation, and the Australian Women’s Soccer Association (AWSA). They also played a major role in the presentation of the women’s game in the international arena, with the Asian Ladies Soccer Confederation (ALSC). Most importantly for this book, they were the driving force behind the first national women’s team to represent Australia at an international tournament—at the 1975 Asian Women’s Cup.

Joe O’Connor was born in 1933 in a small town called Cahir, located in the County of Tipperary, Ireland, as one of eleven children. Due to the economic conditions in Ireland in the 1950s, Joe emigrated to England at the age of 21, where he worked in various small jobs before taking up a position building electric transmission towers. The work took him all over England.

Pat was born in 1941 in Nuneaton, northern Warwickshire, England. As it happened, Joe’s sister met and married Pat’s brother and through this, Joe and Pat met at a young age. In her own words, Pat describes her family as:

A typical Irish family. Joe’s sister married my brother. Although Joe was eight years older than me, I’ve known him for a long time—since I was a kid. He worked on building the electric pylons (transmission towers) in England. So, he travelled all over the place. He used to come back to see his sister every now and again.

When he first came over, he was doing various small jobs. And then he met someone, and they said, Come and join us! He did, and travelled all over the place. We got together. I was very young. We got married and we travelled all over England with the job until we came to Australia. So, we saw most of England as well.

In 1963, the pair made the decision together to move to Australia. Pat explains the reasons behind this choice:

We always wanted to come to Australia, mainly because of the weather, I must admit. The English weather for people who like the outdoors is not great. Joe was a bodybuilder and weightlifter when he was in England. That was his hobby. He won various competitions bodybuilding and got a couple of medals for weightlifting. He was a real outdoors type.

Even though he was a weightlifter and an outdoorsman, and Pat liked the outdoors too, football wasn’t really on their horizon. While Joe had played some football in Ireland (as a goalkeeper for the local Cahir Town Football Club), Pat had no interest in the game at all. Due to the traveling required by Joe’s employment, joining a football club was difficult and his interest in bodybuilding and weightlifting led him to joining gyms all over the country as he travelled. Now, though, in Australia, things would change.

We came to Australia in 1963 and we spent six months in the Villawood Hostel. And then we saved everything we could to buy a house—not far away from the hostel actually—just to get into the housing market. It was right opposite the Bass Hill RSL Club, and our son, Kirk, was in Year 6 at the time and was going to the local Catholic School.

Of all things, a note