AFLW arrived like a freight train in 2017, changing Australian rules football forever. Photographs have told its story and challenged the status quo.
Some blurry, black and white images exist of women playing Australian rules football in the early years. In one, women run at the ball, the fabric of their knee-length skirts flapping behind them. The photograph was taken in Adelaide in 1918. What's striking about it today is not women playing footy, it's how they must have struggled in those clothes.
"The word that keeps coming to mind is ill-fitting," Dr Emma Phillips says. Before sports uniforms were cut for women's bodies ill-fitting clothes contributed to the idea that women were ill-fit for sport, Phillips, an assistant professor of visual communication at the University of Canberra, says.
Phillips played Australian rules at an amateur level. In an era she calls "the long years". Before 2017 when the AFL launched its national women's league, the AFLW. Before most people knew that women's football existed.
She has watched the popularity of women's sport explode. How it is represented has changed too. Photographs of female athletes generally used to fall into two categories: sexualised or trivialised — thankfully that's no longer the case, she says.
But photographs of women and non-binary athletes playing footy still reckon with so much.
Photographs have documented AFLW's most essential moments.
The joy of winning.
The heartache of injury.
The camaraderie of a team.
But photographs have also challenged assumptions of how women should look and behave. They have been attacked and derided.
And they have celebrated what was ignored for too long.
Eight years ago, 24,000 people filed into a suburban oval in Melbourne on a balmy February evening to watch the first game of AFLW. "It literally sends a shiver down your spine to see this, the welcoming in of women's football," an ABC Radio commentator murmured as Collingwood and Carlton, two of the league's oldest rivals, waited for an umpire to signal the start of the game by raising a neon-yellow egg-shaped ball in the air.
The match came 121 years after the men's league was founded, and 159 years after two of Melbourne's elite private schools competed in what's believed to be the first organised game of Australian rules football. The following year, on the northern side of the Barassi Line — an imaginary border separating Australia's preference for rugby and Australian rules — the NRL formed a women's league.
An enthralling sport of fierce tackles and elegant, gravity-defying leaps that requires the mastering of a ball so unpredictable it appears to have a mind of its own, Australia's own game is derived from rugby and according to some is also influenced by Gaelic football and an Aboriginal game — others say this is "a seductive myth".
Outside the stadium at the first game in 2017, the AFL's then-chief executive Gillon McLachlan haplessly apologised to fans who were locked outside of the sold-out match. Excluding the Olympics and Commonwealth Games, it was the largest crowd ever assembled in Australia to watch a women's-only sporting event. (That record is now held by the Australian Women's Cricket Team who attracted 86,000 to the MCG in 2020 and likely would have been beaten by the Matildas had they been able to play at the MCG during the 2023 Women's World Cup.)
In 2019, Geelong's Georgie Rankin is photographed running into the open arms of young girls in the grandstand. It beautifully encapsulates the "you can't be what you can't see" motto, Phillips says. But she also sees something darker: a hidden weight to the elation of the girls waiting to receive their hero.
Phillips, who used to be a professional photographer, has recently conducted research embedded with the Greater Western Sydney Giants AFLW team and the Canberra A-League women's soccer team. She explored how players represented themselves through photography on social media and found that front of mind was the health of the game and a pressure to present an overly positive image. She calls this "legacy pressure".
"I always get this sense that things are precarious," Phillips says. "With negative images in the media about financial loss or lack of strategic plan and of course their pay is far from what the male players earn… there is this sense that at any moment those key stakeholders could rip the carpet out from underneath them."
This week, the 10th season of AFLW will begin. The milestone comes within nine years because two seasons were played in 2022 after the competition was moved from summer to winter. The change was an experiment to "give the AFLW the best chance to shine", AFL football operations manager Andrew Dillon said in 2022.
"As has been customary with AFLW for a long time, players and staff agreed to the changes with a fair dose of goodwill, up-ending and putting lives on hold for the greater good and growth of the competition," Kate O'Hallaran wrote at the time. As Rankin celebrates with the young fans, Phillips sees a player who is conscious "to make sure that she has the game in good shape for all those young girls to come through".
"I'm never going to be an athlete, and I'm never going to be a football player, that's not my journey," Dr Kasey Symons says. Footy-mad Symons is a fan. Her childhood was marked by the Saturday afternoon ritual of country football, and when she moved to Melbourne ("the city of footy" as she calls it) her fandom intensified.
Symons is a lecturer of communication sports media at Deakin University. She researches sport fans' experiences, particularly from a gender perspective. She says some of the most important AFLW photographs are the ones that point a lens at the grandstand, capturing the people and culture that sustain women's footy.
AFLW has been promoted to young women as something to aspire to, Symons says. And why not? It’s a positive message that encourages sports participation. “We know there’s a huge drop out of girls when they reach their teenage years and they disappear from sport.” But that messaging excludes others, she says. “We don't talk about older women. We don't talk about gender diverse folk. We don't talk about adult fans. We don't talk about the social benefits of women's sports and community building – which is such an important story of the women's sports space.”
People are coming to AFLW through non-traditional pathways, Symons says. Her latest research is looking at sports romance literature as an entrée to sport. Sports romance is a genre on the rise, where authors "create narratives that reflect their own experiences and identity or contribute perspectives they feel are missing in the sporting landscape," Symons wrote in The Conversation recently.
Symons has identified a handful of AFLW sports romance books. Given how few books have been written about the AFLW that's not insignificant, she argues. Many have queer narratives, which is important given "the queer community is so foundational to the AFLW, as well as most women's sport," she says. Many of the sport's biggest names are queer.
Which is where "you can't be what you can't see" takes on another meaning. Symons says Hawthorn star Tilly Lucas Rodd sharing their experience of top surgery with ABC Sport's Marnie Vinall was extremely powerful.
"When people see an athlete being so open about their identity and the process that they're going through to claim their authentic selves, the power that that has on someone who is going through something similar is just immeasurable." The educational aspect of sharing this lived experience is so important, Symons says. But there's an emotional labour to this which she says often goes un-celebrated in women's sport.
The photographer Megan Brewer began following women's football the year before the AFLW was launched. "A lot of the mainstream media wasn't around in the way that they are now," Brewer says. She volunteered countless hours on the boundary line ("the best seat in the house") to capture the seemingly endless historic "firsts" that were being created in women's footy. "I was wanting to record those moments for the women playing and their families." As the league evolved, she was driven by a desire to showcase what the athletes could do on the field.
Brewer can't pick out a favourite image she's taken. She's proud of the archive in its totality, as a record of the early years of the AFLW and the people who brought it to life, on and off the field. Her photographs, shared on Instagram, challenge the traditional presentation of female athletes "styled in a dress and holding sporting equipment", Brewer says. She says players appreciated seeing themselves in action shots.
These photos don't conform to the "patriarchal idea of what female athletes should look like" she says. "I think that sort of action and injury imagery has really challenged people in ways they didn't know they needed to be challenged."
"Of course I'm going to say Tayla Harris, that's just obvious," Phillips says. The 2019 photograph of Harris, airborne and resolute, is probably the most well-known and definitely most discussed in the AFLW's lifespan. The photo attracted a torrent of derogatory and sexual comments when it was published online by Channel 7. Harris said: "That is what I would consider sexual abuse on social media."
"It's such a turning point in so many ways for the game and women's sport in this country," Phillips says. Harris forced the nation, and Channel 7 — which initially deleted the photo rather than deal with the trolls and the misogyny festering on its social media accounts — to engage in a conversation about the sexualisation of women athletes' bodies and misogyny, she says. "It doesn't mean everything is good now, but it's definitely better."
Despite all the advances she's seen since the AFLW was founded, the patriarchy is "still the number one stakeholder" when it comes to how players and fans encounter the game, Phillips says. "Whether that means they have to have long hair, whether that means they have to smile more, whether that means they have to temper something that they do in order to make sure they don't lose that contract or lose the game itself."
AFL Chief Photographer Michael Wilson told ABC Arts he knew the photograph was special as soon as he looked through the viewfinder. "She's at her highest elevation and I thought, What an amazing action picture of a female athlete, just going about her craft." It didn't cross his mind that the photograph would be trolled.
Author Sam George-Allen likened the reaction to the photo of Harris to historical responses to witchcraft and the idea that female power is aberrant. "That kind of response that's either sexualising or putting down, that's an attempt to put someone in their place — that place being not in AFL," she told ABC. O'Hallaran reminded us that the trolling of female athletes was widespread, and Harris was not the only AFLW player to have a photo taken offline because of abuse. Eventually, Harris's kick was immortalised in bronze.
"Everyone has a right to do what they love," Harris said when the statue was unveiled. "That's what I want people to see when they look at this."
Maddy Prespakis's goal celebration in 2024 sparked another conversation about trolling. "We all know when a footballer pulls up their shirt and points to their stomach, that is a powerful symbol, it has a powerful history," ABC Radio's Raf Epstein told listeners at the time.
Epstein was of course referring to the iconic image of Nicky Winmar standing up against the racist abuse he and other Indigenous players were subjected to. Prespakis, who has spoken openly about her struggles with body image, was reportedly pointing to her stomach in response to the body shaming she'd been subjected to online. "I think she's saying, 'I'm beautiful, this is who I am, and bugger off'," broadcaster, footy commentator and proud First Nations woman Shelly Ware told Epstein.
Sarah Perkins, who was also a target of body-shaming abuse during her playing career, told The Guardian that she had reached out to Prespakis: "To remind her that she is a strong and powerful athlete, and she's perfect the way that she is, because the way that she plays footy is exactly the way that her body allows her to be, and she's one of the best footballers in our game."
Perkins played 40 games across eight seasons, and was an unlikely hero in Adelaide's 2017 premiership winning team after she was overlooked by all Victorian clubs. That year she kicked 11 goals across eight games. Her goal celebrations were glorious. Arms outstretched, eyes up, legs planted firmly in the ground as if to say I am here and there is nowhere else I should be.
In footy parlance, Ebony Marinoff is in and under, she puts her body on the line and gives 110 per cent. Every single week. Symons says the photo of a blood-soaked Marinoff leaving the field made a lot of people uncomfortable and fuelled conversations about women playing contact sport. It's an argument infamously articulated by former player and coach and now ABC Radio commentator Mick Malthouse in 2018 when he called for AFLW to be modified to remove tackling and heavy bumping to reduce injuries because of the experience of women in his family. "I don't say you shouldn't play it," he told ABC. "I say I don't like it."
Symons says it's a complicated image because she doesn't want "to romanticise injuries in sport". But injuries are a part of sport and "we don't want to create a narrative where we need to put bubble wrap around these women athletes". "Marinoff is one of the most exceptional players that we've had in this competition since day dot. I think for her to unapologetically… [say] 'yeah, I get hurt and I keep playing, this is what we do' is great."
The Office for Women in Sport and Recreation's annual report into the representation of women in sports news coverage found that in 2023-24 women were less likely to be depicted in images showing action than male athletes. They were also less likely to be depicted in portrait images.
Dr Adele Pavlidis, the Director of the Griffiths Centre for Social and Cultural Research, says when the AFLW started it was marketed in a celebratory light that pushed an acceptable femininity. "I feel like the media team were trying to hedge their bets a little bit — you know, we are going to do AFLW but the players are going to be beautiful, they're going to be smiling and they're going to be nice," Pavlidis says.
There was a lot of what she calls "white women smiling" — a reference to the title of a study she co-authored analysing media representations of female athletes at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. "We still have far to go if we are to embrace women in their multiplicity — and to recognise that women can be strong, capable, butch, femme, and varied in their range of expressions of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity," the authors wrote.
Pavlidis believes she's witnessed a shift in how the sport is marketed to show a seriousness to the athletes and more diversity. "Whether that be short hair, long hair, different ethnicities," she says. "I do think that having these different depictions, more in line with reality, the public is learning that femininity, that being a woman, is not a single set of traits. It's not nice, happy, kind, attractive, beautiful."
The impact of these images in the public sphere is immense, she says. "These are teaching us what we already know, deep down, that these qualities they don't belong to particular bodies as they're gendered and that women and non-binary people, they can have all sorts of qualities."
When Erin Phillips won the league's inaugural best and fairest award and was photographed kissing her wife, Pavlidis says it was historic. It normalised same-sex relationships within the context of AFLW. “It's been amazing. The AFLW has done what AFL has not been able to do by embracing all of its players."
Phillips has given the game so much. The three-time premiership player, triple All-Australian, dual League Best and Fairest and one of the first women inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame showed everyone what was possible. She retired early from professional basketball for the opportunity to play AFLW. "I just wanted to do something that brought joy back into me being an athlete," she recently told The Guardian.
Emma Phillips says the stories that surround women's footy are wonderful. But we shouldn't lose sight of what happens on that green grass over four quarters of football. "I think we do the players and the game a great disservice by [only] focusing on a narrative that is beyond just the f***ing love of the game."
In photographs, players brace for the crunch about to come. Their bodies are yet to hit the ground, the ball is yet to be marked, the siren is yet to sound. Maybe there is time for one more goal to win the game. Anything is possible.
Credits
Words: Rhiannon Stevens
Editing: Catherine Taylor
Photographs: Getty Images, AAP, Megan Brewer / Siren Sport, State Library of South Australia, ABC News
Images: Lindsay Dunbar
