Right now, the Matildas fill Stadium Australia. They're paid the same as the Socceroos. A home World Cup drew almost two million fans through the turnstiles across two countries. It's tempting to assume this is simply what women's football in Australia has always looked like.

It isn't. The game had a real crowd, in Brisbane, before most Australians had ever heard of the Socceroos. Then it was pushed off the paddock for the best part of forty years, state by state, for reasons that had nothing to do with football and everything to do with who was allowed to play it.

This is the story of Australian women's football: a promising start in Queensland, a quiet ban that spread across the country, decades of women simply refusing to stop, and a team that had to fight for a name before it could fight for a World Cup.

Kicking Off in Brisbane

Australia's first official women's football match was played at the Gabba in Brisbane in 1921, North Brisbane against South Brisbane, in front of a crowd of around 10,000 people.^[1][2] That same year, a group of women in Brisbane formed the LaTrobe Ladies, one of the first organised women's clubs in the country, and the Queensland Women's Ladies Soccer Football Association followed soon after.^[2] A second public match in Ipswich that October drew more than 3,000 spectators of its own.^[2]

Football, or soccer as it was known then, wasn't new to Australian women even at that point. There are newspaper reports of matches being played in New South Wales as early as 1903.^[3] But 1921 was the moment the game in Australia had real, documented momentum behind it, an association, a crowd, and a growing sense that this might become a fixture of Australian sport.

The Same Story, an Ocean Away

That same year in England, the Football Association banned women's football from its member grounds entirely, declaring the game "unsuitable for females" despite huge, well-documented crowds for the women's game there too.^[4] The FA's ban wasn't just an English problem. It rippled outward, and Australia was one of the places that felt it.

"Medical and Aesthetic Reasons" — Australia's Own Ban

In 1922, several Australian states banned women from playing organised matches, citing what was officially described as "medical and aesthetic" concerns, a near-identical justification to the one the English FA had used a year earlier.^[5] But unlike England's single, centralised ruling, Australia's version of the ban was patchier and played out state by state over decades.

Across the country, restrictions on the organised women's game lingered in various forms into the 1960s.^[7] Women kept playing anyway, in regional and industrial towns like Mount Isa, Mackay and Townsville in Queensland, and wherever a paddock and eleven willing players could be found.^[6] But without official recognition, funding or a national structure, the game spent the better part of four decades rebuilding from almost nothing.

Finding Their Feet Again

Momentum returned properly in the 1970s, carried by the same wave of feminism that was reshaping opportunities for women right across Australian life. In August 1974, the first National Women's Soccer Championships were held in Sydney, with five teams: NSW, Northern NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and South Queensland.^[8] Out of that week of matches came the Australian Women's Soccer Association, the first national body dedicated to promoting and managing the women's game.^[8]

Five years later, on 6 October 1979, Australia played its first official 'A' international, a 2–2 draw against New Zealand at Seymour Shaw Park in Sydney's south.^[9][10] The captain was 18-year-old Julie Dolan, leading Australia in its first officially sanctioned international.^[10] Dolan printed her own brochures to try to get people to come. About 50 turned up, mostly family and friends.^[9] As Dolan put it years later, playing in green and gold for your country was everything, even with no crowd and no funding to speak of.^[9]

Worth a note here, since Australian football's own history has shifted under this exact point: in December 2024, Football Australia formally recognised an earlier, separate squad, the one that toured Hong Kong for the 1975 Asian Ladies Football Confederation tournament, as the "First Matildas," naming that team's captain, Pat O'Connor, as the country's first women's national team captain.^[24] Dolan, who was a 14-year-old member of that 1975 touring squad herself, publicly opposed the decision, arguing the 1975 side had been drawn almost entirely from one Sydney club without any interstate trials.^[25] Either way, the 1979 match against New Zealand remains the first fixture recognised as an official 'A' international, with Dolan as its captain.^[10]

From "Female Socceroos" to the Matildas

For the first fifteen years or so of the national team's official existence, it didn't even have a proper name. Players were referred to simply as the "Female Socceroos."^[12] That changed ahead of Australia's first Women's World Cup appearance, in Sweden in 1995. The Australian Women's Soccer Association teamed up with broadcaster SBS to run a viewer competition, with fans voting for a new nickname from a shortlist that included Soccertoos, Blue Flyers, Waratahs and Lorikeets.^[13][14]

The Matildas won by a wide margin, a nod to the 1895 Banjo Paterson song "Waltzing Matilda."^[14] Not everyone on the squad was thrilled about it at first, some players reportedly disliked having a nickname chosen for them by a television poll and were slow to adopt it.^[13] The team went on to lose all three group matches at that 1995 World Cup.^[14] But the name stuck, and it eventually became one of the most recognised team nicknames in Australian sport.

Equal Pay and a Home World Cup

The gap between that winless 1995 debut and where the Matildas sit today is enormous, and one moment captures it better than most. In November 2019, Football Federation Australia and the players' union, Professional Footballers Australia, agreed to a landmark four-year collective bargaining agreement that closed the pay gap between the Matildas and the Socceroos entirely.^[15][16] Both teams would share 24 per cent of national team revenue, rising each year of the deal, with top-tier women's players earning the same base pay as the men and an equal share of FIFA World Cup prize money.^[15][16] It was one of the first agreements of its kind in world football, reached at the negotiating table rather than in a courtroom. The United States, by contrast, only settled its own equal pay dispute through a $24 million legal settlement in February 2022, after a lawsuit that had run since 2019.^[17]

Two months before that Australian deal turned three, Sam Kerr became her country's all-time leading goalscorer, male or female, overtaking Socceroos great Tim Cahill in January 2022.^[18][19] As Matildas captain, Kerr became the face of a team that was about to have its biggest moment yet.

The 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup, co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand, drew nearly 1.98 million fans across the tournament, smashing the previous attendance record by more than 600,000 and beating FIFA's own pre-tournament target by close to half a million.^[20][21] The Matildas' semi-final against England, played in front of a capacity crowd in Sydney, became the most-watched television broadcast in Australia in decades, reaching more than 11 million people.^[22][23]

Why We Tell This Story

At Hero Athletica, we spend a lot of time talking about why girls drop out of sport, and how to keep them in it. It's easy to assume that's a modern challenge. It isn't. Australian women's football has been fighting to keep girls on the field since the 1920s, through bans, through a name it didn't choose, through decades with barely a dollar of funding behind it.

Every girl pulling on boots in Australia today is playing a game that was taken away once already, and won back by women who simply refused to stop showing up. The LaTrobe Ladies gave it a first, brief moment in the sun. Julie Dolan gave it a captain and a first official international. Sam Kerr and her teammates gave it a home World Cup and a fair wage. The players wearing Hero Athletica gear on pitches around the country right now are the next chapter.