LUMEN Summer 2019 - Flipbook - Page 15
silly questions, even though men all
around me were asking silly questions.
“I felt the pressure to be better than
them and I had to work doubly hard
to be respected,” she said.
Her best defence was to quickly
develop a robust sense of humour
and get on with the job, which she
did, working in television as a sports
presenter for ABC for more than a
decade. She has also appeared, cohosted and presented on ABC Radio
Melbourne, Sport 927, and been a
columnist and feature writer for the
AFL website and The Sunday Age.
Angela’s tipping point, where she
finally felt she had enough runs on
the board in her career to speak
out, was empowered by a couple of
events away from the sporting world.
The first being then Prime Minister
Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech in
parliament in 2012.
“I saw so much of myself in her
when she stood up in parliament
and did that.
“I saw myself rapidly moving
towards that point where I would be
able to stand in front of my peers and
say the same thing,” Angela said.
The other significant moment was
the birth of her son Francis in 2013.
“It’s really hard to explain, but I
think what happened was that I was
no longer the centre of my universe.
It started to matter less what people
thought of me, my focus was on
Francis and the world that he was
going to grow up in,” she said.
In her second book, Breaking the
Mould: Taking A Hammer To Sexism
In Sport, Angela describes the many
events in 2015 that created the
conditions for movement towards
positive change. These include
Michelle Payne’s historic Melbourne
Cup win, and the Matilda’s
(Australian women’s soccer team)
stand for more respect and a
decent base salary.
The introduction of AFL Women's
(AFLW) in 2017 was, for Angela,
the most exciting thing to happen in
sport in her lifetime.
“What I love about AFLW is that it’s
okay to be physical, but it also creates
another version of what it means to
be a girl or woman.
“I see the women of AFLW as the
modern day suffragists as they have
stared convention in the face and
won. That’s after a long period of
ridicule and being made to feel like
oddities and unnatural for wanting to
play the game,” she said.
Angela has written, directed and
produced two television documentaries
about the rise of women in Australian
Rules football. She has a third
documentary in the pipeline.
“I feel like I’ve had a career revival
really because things have started to
change for women and it’s given me
a real spring in my step to continue
to change the culture of sport so
women can be at their sporting best.”
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