Women's Rugby Heritage Highlight
Women’s Rugby Debuts at the RAS Showground
In the RAS’s bicentennial year we celebrated not only 200 years of a remarkable home-grown organisation but also just over 100 years of another surprising milestone – the debut of Australian women’s rugby.
In September 1921 the Sydney Showground was the scene for an action-packed encounter which had the press of the day in raptures: the scrums “packed down faultlessly, the tackles were good and hard, the hooking of both rakes clever and the passing rushes…quite up to the standard of many first-grade matches”. And it wasn’t the blokes they were talking about here but the girls.
Despite declining an initial request by the NSW Ladies Rugby Football League for the use of the Sydney Showground at Moore Park as a games venue in June 1921 – just two months later the rather conversative Council of the RAS had an enlightened change of heart. An application by Mr Innes-Kerr for hire of the Show Ground on the 17th of September for a ‘Ladies Football Match’ was referred to Council and in due course was ‘Granted in usual terms’.
And very glad about that decision they turned out to be. It was reported in the RAS Council Minutes that ‘The Ladies Football match was a great success and over £1400 was taken at the gate on the day’. The Daily Telegraph provided a fuller picture of the momentous day reporting that, ‘Thirty-four thousand people stood up at the Agricultural Ground on Saturday and cheered’ as the ‘Sydney Reds’ and ‘Metropolitan Blues’ played under the same rules and wore the same football attire as the men. The outstanding player of the day, young Maggie Maloney, was even hailed by the Sun newspaper as ‘the Dally Messenger of the Blues’ and that game would confirm her status as the first star of the women’s league.
On a slightly more reflective note the Sydney Morning Herald of 19 September 1921 queried, ‘Whether football is destined to have any permanent vogue amongst women….’ and I think, one hundred years on, we can quite confidently confirm that it did.