If Australians get the media they deserve and sport is a microcosm of life as well as a key stakeholder, then the game that has punctuated so much of my career and my life – Australian Rules football – has reflected that progress.
Caroline Wilson.Credit:Justin McManus
The AFL boasts two women commissioners and hopefully a third by the end of the year, which will mean the females in the boardroom of the biggest sport in this country no longer represent cultural change and not a conspiracy.
There are three women executives at head office and the game will soon announce a new pay deal to accompany the new broadcast deal for the AFLW – a fledgling national women's competition I never believed would happen.
In broadcasting terms the game has some big hitters in Kelli Underwood, Sarah Jones, Daisy Pearce, Shelley Ware, Nat Edwards, Neroli Meadows and Angela Pippos to name a few – still too few. Although the game has handballed blindly and recklessly its mandated relationship with women at times, it has now rewritten and reshaped its respect and responsibility policy – something my colleague Jake Niall wrote sounds more like a Jane Austen novel than a social document.
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Since I joined Channel 9 in 2007 my two colleagues for most of that time – Garry Lyon and Craig Hutchison – always hated being accused of bullying me. They felt they were unfairly attacked because audiences simply could not deal with a group of males and one female engaging in a robust debate.
Often they were right, but that doesn't mean our media has not been guilty of some horrendous double standards.
Lara Bingle, the victim in 2010 of a social media violation involving an AFL player, was repeatedly accused of being a predator by certain male commentators whose hypocrisy I can only say was breathtaking. Over decades, young impressionable males come into club environments where many are lured into the punters club and some become problem gamblers. And yet I never heard the word 'grooming' used in the media regarding club peer pressure until the sexuality of AFL Women's players became a talking point.
And sometimes the rules of engagement in this high-octane, obsessive, consuming, passionate and ego-maniacal industry we work in are broken. The AFL Footy Show had some great moments over the years, but they tended to hit back at me and the wider issue of female involvement in the game – with some occasionally vile sexist attacks. And some astonishing ones. I still remember a football player panelist asking thoughtfully on that show: "Do you think that it's because she's a woman she feels she needs to have stronger opinions?"
I've often had strong opinions about Eddie McGuire and I must say when I was first told about a conversation on Triple M on the Queen's Birthday Monday of 2016 where he and a group of commentators – including another club president – joked about holding my head underwater for $50,000 my initial reaction was, here we go again. At first you feel a bit sick about it and the natural reaction is to go back over recent columns and wonder whether you've gone too hard before hoping the whole issue will go away.
Although I mentioned it on a regular radio segment the following day, the issue was glossed over until a group of women podcasters called the Outer Sanctum addressed the 'drowning' comments. One week after the verbal Triple M gang attack, it seemed like everyone with a voice across Australia had an opinion. My own thoughts were complex but it was important as someone who is seen as strong and even tough to admit to feeling humiliated – and to enforce the view that all of us in the media should think before we speak – especially now that facts more often go unchecked and immediacy is everything.
Leadership is not always a role I've embraced or enjoyed. Certainly, up until the last five or six years, family and job meant for me that there wasn't always time or the inclination to be an off-field full- time work captain as well. I've followed fascinated, full of admiration for the accusers and anger at the revelations exposed by #MeToo. But I have to admit at times in my own career I've become a bit impatient with young aspiring journos and commentators and felt like telling them to toughen up. Breaking stories and asking difficult questions and debunking myths are all tasks punctuated by discomfort. And one of the great assets of any workplace is a sense of humour. Taking a position, too, can be fraught with challenge – on occasion the unpalatable choice has been to resign in protest, take a vow of dignified silence or slug it out.
Significantly, back in 2008 when Sam Newman staple-gunned my headshot to a mannequin wearing underwear on The Footy Show the-then AFL chief Andrew Demetriou called me the next morning to express his disgust and later slammed the stunt at a media conference, but not one footy journo reported his comments. My own newspaper said nothing to me about it for a week. A group of senior women board members complained in writing and were subsequently smashed by the same show. I was criticised for taking that episode so personally and speaking up about it to colleagues and bosses at Channel 9 and equally criticised for not resigning from that network.
Eight years later, when the Triple M incident happened Gillon McLachlan issued a press release and everyone reported it. A group of women across Fairfax took the opportunity.
It took a token appointment after the all-male AFL Commission had dragged its feet for years to bring Sam Mostyn onto the board – initially as an add-on because no male commissioner was prepared to stand aside.
Speaking of token, its hard to believe that almost two decades later the new cricket broadcast rights deal has mandated female quotas in their commentary team – quotas which seem a little light to me. And were still waiting to learn the true detail of how Foxtel has spent the $30 million of Turnbull government funding handed over in the name of extra coverage and focus on womens sport. There is public money and votes in female sport – womens football change rooms are an election campaign issue in Victoria – but Im yet to see warm and fuzzy spin and opportunism truly move from off-Broadway to the Front Bar.
In her own unique way Sam Mostyn was a disrupter before that term became a corporate noun and had she and Linda Dessau – now the governor of Victoria – not been on the commission when the penalties were handed down to Essendon for their reckless and damaging drugs program of 2012, then I suspect those penalties would have been further diluted.
Sometimes it's an asset not being a member of the boys' club. The Essendon story – where players were jabbed and dosed with pharmaceuticals, some to this day unknown, as part of an experimental program for success – remains the worst and most divisive in my time. It was not without its moments of personal and professional threats and pushback, but I remain in debt to those mothers and partners and other family members and player representatives who feared for the worst and anonymously broke the party line to expose key elements of that terrible episode.
How on earth coaches, doctors and other staff were paid in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars and regarded as the best in their field and were put in charge of men as young as teenagers and yet allowed the program to continue for almost a year still makes me angry. With the ball tampering in South Africa there was blatant cheating against a backdrop of win at all costs and arrogance and a sporting team also existing in a bubble far removed from reality. And administrative failure. As a nation we felt collective shame.
Women do often see things differently. We think about sport differently and we write about it differently. We have changed, diversified and improved the way it is covered. And where football is concerned maybe we even love it differently. But we do love it.
This is an edited extract of Caroline Wilson's Andrew Olle lecture.
