Claire McNeel is the author of Darkness Runs Deep (30 January 2024)
The old adage ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’ has been shattered by women in sport. Athletes in the Australian Football League for Women (AFLW), particularly older players, proved that they didn’t need to see women competing to want to play; many participated in boys’ teams until they were around 13-years-old.
Children today get to grow up seeing women compete at an elite level in historically male-dominated sports including cricket, Australian rules football, rugby, and soccer. Despite this, in comparison to boys and men, female-driven sports narratives are limited in both screen and page.
So, why aren’t women depicted in films, television shows, and books to a greater extent? The typical response would be that worn line: people are more interested in reading about male athletes and watching men compete, so stories involving men are more sought out. But to delve a bit deeper is to consider that many sports narratives are based on true stories and men have had far more opportunities than women to play a variety of sports for a considerably longer period of time.
Also, stories that are told years, often decades after the fact can sometimes seem more authentic and are therefore better received. This further lends itself to male narratives because they have the benefit of time. Women’s stories are going unheard because they haven’t had the chance to write them.
There are only a few quality sports films with girls or women at their hearts, particularly in sports more commonly associated with men—think surfing in Blue Crush, based on the magazine article Life’s Swell; baseball in A League of Their Own, also based on a true story; soccer in Bend it Like Beckham; and boxing in Girlfight and in Million Dollar Baby.
Over the last decade, only a handful of films have centred on a true story about a female athlete or athletes (e.g., figure skater Tonya Harding in I, Tonya; tennis players Serena and Venus Williams in King Richard; tennis player Billie Jean King in Battle of the Sexes; swimmers Yusra Mardini and Sarah Mardini in The Swimmers; and professional wrestler Saraya ‘Paige’ Bevis in Fighting with My Family).
As someone who was lucky enough to grow up competing in a number of different sports without barriers, each of these films was a reminder of the burdens and challenges that female athletes often contend with on a daily basis. Despite the fact that Australia is a sports-obsessed nation, there are only two films I’m aware of that focus on an Australian female athlete: Ride Like A Girl, the story of Melbourne Cup winning jockey Michelle Payne; and Dawn! the story of Olympic swimmer Dawn Fraser. Both are fictionalised accounts of true stories.
A growing trend to uncover stories involving Australian sportswomen has produced documentaries including Girls Can’t Surf, Fearless: The Inside Story of the AFLW, and Matildas: The World at Our Feet. All capture the challenges, athletic prowess, and joy of competing in the sport these athletes love, and highlight that there are many women’s stories still to be told.
Until the women’s Australian rules football exhibition matches were broadcast, I’d never seen women play footy. As the inaugural 2017 AFLW season approached, I remember thinking how I’d never seen a film or television series involving women who played football (and to be honest, very few involving men). This prompted me to write a screenplay centred on a fictional women’s country football team, and this screenplay evolved into the novel, Darkness Runs Deep.
Although we can be what we can’t see, creating female characters who play sport, watch sport, and enjoy sport is more reflective of society, and it’s definitely easier to emulate what we do see. And, for that matter, read.
