In their own words – the women who transformed sports reporting

For the first time, the pioneers who helped pave the way for female sports journalists in Australia share a snapshot of their confronting work experiences

Workplace harassment, discrimination and sexism were often part of the daily grind for the first female sports journalists working in the major Australian media.

Women in sport are now the norm but 40 years ago you could count on one finger the number of female journalists in a sports department at the major mastheads.

Before the late 1980s, there were only a handful of lone female firecrackers lighting up the sports media across the country, including Judy Joy Davies who started at the Melbourne Argus in 1954, Pat Higgins The West Australian 1956 and Margaret Ralston AM Adelaide News 1972.

Their numbers crept from a curious handful into double figures in the 1980s thanks to Debbie Spillane who started in ABC Sport in 1984, Louise Evans, Sydney Morning Herald Sport 1987, Nicole Jeffery The Australian Sport 1987, Heather Quinlan SMH Sport 1987, Margie McDonald AAP Sport 1988, Amanda Lulham Daily Telegraph Sport 1989, Gené Stephan West Australian Sport 1989, Tracey Holmes and Karen Tighe ABC Sport 1989 and Caroline Wilson Age Sport 1989. 

Here, for the first time, some of these trailblazers share their stories from their early days as women in sport.

Louise Evans, started Sydney Morning Herald Sport 1987

The first time it happened I was shocked. The second time I was angry.

It was 1989 and I was covering my first Wimbledon Championships, dominated by German wonderkids Steffi Graf and Boris Becker, for The Sydney Morning Herald. I’d been the first female hired in SMH Sport and this was my first overseas assignment. I was terrified.

To my horror I was getting pinched on the backside as I climbed the stairs past a sea of male journalists in the Wimbledon media stand to take my designated centre court seat for the start of play. The men occupying the press benches just laughed at me when I stopped and demanded “who did that?”.  

The third time it happened I instinctively swung around and whacked the bloke sitting at the end of the row with my notebook. I had no idea if he was the perpetrator but suddenly the surrounding press pack was laughing at him. It didn’t happen again. Game over.

So began a career covering international sport that’s spanned six Wimbledons, six Olympic Games, six Commonwealth Games and numerous world sporting championships – so far.

At many of these events both in Australia and overseas I was often one of only a handful of female reporters in a press room of a hundred men.

I developed my own survival and coping strategies. In a media press room whether in Australia or overseas – I always sat near the entrance so I didn’t have to walk past rows of men to get to my desk and because the help and registration desk was always near the entrance and it was usually staffed by women. There’s safety in numbers.

When on the road I never had breakfast in the media hotel’s restaurant – always in my room – so as not to draw attention to myself. I only ever went out for dinner with people I trusted.

Of course there were hardly ever any female toilets in the media rooms. Not to worry! There would always be a lockable cubicle alongside the urinals and I had no qualms walking straight into the men’s toilet and into the cubicle – thereby causing a stampede for the exit.

One smart alec journalist even made up a joke for me. Q: What do you call two female reporters in a media room? A: An infestation. But who’s laughing now?

Nicole Jeffery, started The Australian Sport 1987

I had been a big rugby league fan as a kid and was keen to show that women could cover the sport as well as men. There had been female pioneers before me covering the Sydney competition, but I was the only female print journalist in the league media pack in 1988.

It didn’t take long to feel unwelcome. Several clubs banned female writers entering their dressing rooms – Balmain, Easts and Illawarra (before the merger with St George) – which substantially restricted my ability to do my job, because the dressing room was the primary source of news for reporters after a match.

No accommodation was made to give me access to coaches and players, and my colleagues did not support me for fear that they too would be denied their precious access.

When the media was allowed in, I was forced to wait outside and request that a coach or player come out to talk to me, or wait until they emerged and I could approach them myself.

Most memorably, I waited an inordinately long time outside the Balmain rooms at Leichhardt Oval for coach Warren Ryan one afternoon, to the point where I was in danger of missing my deadline. Eventually I discovered that no-one had informed Ryan that I was waiting for him, and I was allowed in. The dressing room was empty, except for Ryan, who was having a quiet beer with a friend. He was apologetic and happy to answer my questions, but by then I had only minutes to file my story.

Even when I was granted access to other club dressing rooms, some players intentionally made it an intimidating environment. I was standing in a media huddle with South Sydney coach George Piggins one day, taking notes, when I felt my colleagues nudging my shoulders. I looked up and discovered that a group of players behind Piggins were doing a naked dance, supposedly for my benefit. My colleagues, to their credit, were subtly trying to move me out of sight, but it was hardly a professional environment for a 21-year-old reporter.

In the three years that I covered rugby league for The Australian, I saw very little progress in the treatment of female journalists . It took my colleague Jacquelin Magnay winning a case against Balmain at the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission in 1995 for things to change.

But that was too late for me. My experience soured my love for the sport and I had moved onto the Olympic round to cover the lead up to the 2000 Sydney Games. I never looked back.

Heather (Smith) Quinlan, started Sydney Morning Herald Sport 1987 

Lucky Heather. Young, enthusiastic and in a gold-plated journalism job, being paid to interview athletes, watch elite sport and write about it. Winning! Well most of the time that’s what it felt like. Of course, there were difficulties.  

After Sydney Kings basketball matches, all the male reporters headed into their changerooms to do interviews. I did too. There were no other arrangements in place and I couldn’t miss out. So every week I frantically scribbled down quotes, head down, trying to ignore the passing parade of naked and semi-naked men going to the showers, a small number of them making stupid comments. The worst part wasn’t that I felt uncomfortable, it was that when I discussed it in the office, there was snickering. Apparently it was a perk of the job for a female sports reporter that I had to get used to.

The Me Too generation will also be shocked to learn that during the late 1980s, aged 19 and 20, I was groped on the breasts on two occasions by different male journalists. I was appalled and revolted. I talked to my colleague and friend Louise Evans, who preceded me in the Herald sports department and we resolved to take action. But I didn’t make a formal complaint out of sheer fear of the consequences. At the time, I believed my best course of action was to say nothing and avoid the creeps. That’s what the fear of losing your job does to you. Later of course I understood their behaviour was sexual assault.

Margie McDonald, started AAP Sport 1988

After seven years split between AAP’s Brisbane and Sydney offices I was offered the Sports Writer’s job in the London bureau in May 1988. I’d dabbled in sport since starting my journalism career at the Townsville Daily Bulletin in 1978. My AAP London duties included covering the Australian Rugby Union (Wallabies) Bicentennial Tour to England, Scotland, Wales and Italy in October-November 1988.

Unbeknown to me I was the first woman to ever tour with the Wallabies. One of my colleagues from the Sydney Daily Telegraph, Terry Smith, asked me in the first week: “Why would AAP send a woman to cover a football tour?”

I had no problems with the players – but the various Rugby Football Union venues in England, and even the Scottish Rugby Union had some very archaic laws. I was often asked if I wanted to sit in the Press Box or would I prefer the “Associates Seating” for ladies. I was even given tickets to a seat in the Ladies Grandstand at one regional ground. 

At Twickenham and Murrayfield Stadiums there was no female toilet in the Media Rooms – at the former I had to have a cleaner stand guard and in the latter I had to relieve myself sitting on a wall-mounted urinal.

At the RFU’s welcoming reception at India House I was not allowed in at all – stopped at the door despite my male colleagues pleading with officials to let me in as I was a professional journalist.

In Scotland I was the only woman in a room of 250 guests at the welcome dinner. I was told the wives of the guests ate in a different room but they’d made an exception for me. 

Back home years later, when I was working for The Australian, being stopped at the dressing room door happened several times, with the Wests Tigers and the Gold Coast Titans the main culprits. The Titans entered the competition in 2007, when you would have thought gender issues in the workplace shouldn’t be an issue. I received apologies from the CEOs of both clubs, who were shocked when they asked what was said to me by their officials manning the doors: “Do you enjoy seeing men in the nude?” was one comment from the guy at Leichhardt Oval. 

Gené Stephan, started The West Australian Sport 1989 

Irreversible change started when I joined The West Australian’s all-male sports department within weeks of arriving in Australia.

Management’s grand plan, to silence critics over its failure to cover women and minor sports, was to appoint a token female to write what none of the men had any interest in.

Their vision and my career plans were on a collision course but I was up for the fight.

Similar stereotypical barriers existed 13-years earlier when I became South Africa’s first female sportswriter.

I had no intention of piddling around, writing fillers in my new job, when I had already proved myself on the world stage at the Olympics, Wimbledon and even a world heavyweight boxing title fight.

Surely my investigative ability which exposed a plot, by British tabloid The Daily Mail, to whisk teenage distance sensation Zola Budd from South Africa to compete for Britain at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics could be better used to cover major sport.

But I was not the one calling the shots and for the first few years it was baseball, hockey, gymnastics, squash, athletics and anything no one else wanted to cover.

It was not until the mid 90s when in a front page exclusive, I exposed widespread abuse of young female gymnasts at the AIS in Canberra, that I was finally acknowledged as one of the boys.

Women and minor sport had finally made it onto the front page of a major national masthead – but for all the wrong reasons.

Tracey Holmes, started ABC Sport 1989

It didn’t bother me when I started as an ABC broadcast specialist trainee that I was the only female in the department at the time. It was clearly a novelty for some of the men who weren’t used to seeing women turn up to events or press conferences with a microphone, ask questions or do interviews just like they did. 

The blokes at ABC Sport were almost always supportive and keen to offer as much advice as I asked for. 

I do remember early on, being in a rugby league dressing room doing post-match interviews where one team member walked out of a shower, stood behind the player I was interviewing, dropped his towel and started gyrating, naked. I just kept asking questions until the interview was done, thanked my guest and walked out. The laugh was on the idiot trying to distract me but who never succeeded. 

The greatest lesson I learned was from Luis Chilavert, the captain of the Paraguay football team at the 1998 FIFA World Cup in France. When a journalist asked him about the pressure of playing in a World Cup he threw the apple he was eating across the room. “Pressure? You ask me about pressure? There are people in my country who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. That is pressure. Playing at a World Cup is a privilege.” 

That’s how I see my job, an absolute privilege. The occasional roadblocks are best viewed as insignificant.

Amanda Lulham, started Daily Telegraph Sport 1989

I learned early that to succeed in sport I needed to be versatile so I chased sports that weren’t being covered – pretty much everything except rugby league, cricket, horse racing, football and a bit of basketball. 

So started my love affair with cycling, sailing, surf life saving, kayaking, netball, triathlon, rugby and all the Olympic sports.

When I was sent to cover a World Cup hockey tournament two days before it started, I learned the rules from a library book on soccer (pre-internet remember) because the rules were pretty much the same. 

It was always sink or swim and nowhere more so than the Sydney to Hobart yacht race which I first covered as a teenager. I was frequently told the wrong location for press conferences, incorrect arrival times and even fed false names by media colleagues. So I looked for alternative stories when they went off to the waterfront pubs or back to their hotels. 

I ended up sleeping under the table in the press centre, too fearful I’d miss a story if I didn’t stay there near the radio. It worked. I broke a major story that became front page news and I’m still here three decades later having covered 33 races so far.

I’ve heard just about every variation of a sexist comment or put down – from being told to leave a dressing room during an interview by a rival colleague because he said I’d had enough time to “perv“ on the players – seriously – to being asked if I earned more money writing rugby than “a knitting column”. Few comments were funny, none clever, most were crude, some hurtful.  

The one thing the slurs had in common was they made me more determined to succeed.

So, cheers fellas, thanks for your help. I’m one of the rare people doing a job I love – even if there were some hurdles to kick along the way.