Over the past five years, the Matildas have become one of the most popular sports teams in the country.
They’re also one of the few teams in international sport more often referred to by their nickname than by their more formal name, the Australian women’s national team.
But how exactly did the ‘Matildas’ come to be, and who came up with it?
Well, it depends on who you ask.
There are different versions of this particular origin story, from a national team training camp in 1991, to a Canberra classroom in 1993, to a phone poll on SBS television in 1994.
But all of them speak to why the name Matildas has, over time, become such a fitting symbol of the nation they represent.
The first seeds were planted all the way back in 1982, when Matilda the winking kangaroo was introduced as the official mascot for the Brisbane Commonwealth Games.
The 13m tall, six-tonne float was one of the most memorable parts of the event.
Matilda was built on top of a special-fit forklift, meaning she could be rolled around the stadium by a mechanic hidden within the shell.
She was also designed by two special effects operators so that she could turn her head, wriggle her ears, blink, and open her door-like pouch to allow pairs of Australian children to bound out like joeys onto the athletics track below.
The marketing team that came up with the idea supposedly drew inspiration from the famous Banjo Paterson bush ballad, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ (even though in the original poem, the ‘matilda’ refers to the camping bag slung over the swagman’s shoulders, not a kangaroo).
Brisbane’s Matilda made a particular impression on footballer Sharon Young, who earned her first cap for Australia almost a decade later.
Young says it was around 1991, as they were attempting to qualify for the inaugural Women’s World Cup in China, that she first mentioned the name during a national team camp meeting to discuss future media logistics for the tournament.
“When a big event like that first kicks off — because there was never a World Cup for women before — they said, ‘we should come up with a name like the other teams [have], like the hockey players. We should have one for our side,'” Young told ABC.
“We were called the Soccerettes or the ‘female Socceroos’, whatever. So a couple names went around and I just came up and said, ‘what about Matilda?’
“It’s a female kangaroo. Matilda had a nice wink on it, like, ‘OK, here we are’ type of thing. Boxing gloves up, like ‘hey, we’re gonna beat you’. Everything about it seemed to suit us.
“We had to have a name moving forward. If we had qualified [for 1991], that name would have had to be put forward, because we wouldn’t have gone over there as the Australian women’s soccer team, that’s for sure. They were looking for names back then.
“Then … I don’t know what happened to it. After that, there was some talk about it, but I don’t know from then to when the actual thing came out, so there’s a gap between me suggesting the name and whether the name [they chose] was my suggestion.”
However, because Australia failed to qualify for China by a single goal, the prospective name ‘Matilda’ effectively disappeared from the conversation as it was no longer needed.
But not for Peter Hugg, the CEO of the Australian Women’s Soccer Association (AWSA), the governing body for women’s football at the time.
In 1993, as Australia was preparing to qualify for the 1995 Women’s World Cup in Sweden (and with one eye on the Sydney 2000 Olympics), Hugg — alongside women’s head coach Tom Sermanni and administration assistant Sarah Groube — sat in front of a blackboard at Hackett Primary School in Canberra “doodling and mapping out the future of the women’s national team” when they had a brainwave.
“It came out of a whole range of discussions and brainstorming ideas; things were bouncing around like molecules, and we just kept on coming back to this term,” Hugg sys.
“If you look at the men’s teams, you had the Socceroos, you had the Olyroos, the Joeys — clearly, the kangaroo was pretty prominent in the mindset of football supporters in those days.
“If you ask me, the link was 12 years earlier, the kangaroo mascot at the ’82 Commonwealth Games. That was the light-bulb moment.
“It was a woman’s name, so ticked that box. It was a key term in our unofficial national anthem [Waltzing Matilda]. There was a Roald Dahl book called ‘Matilda’ that had just come out as a movie. And if you search the name ‘Matilda,’ it actually means ‘mighty in battle.’
“So we sort of just said ‘this is fate’. And the fact it has stood the test of time, we were just lucky. Nowadays, you’d get strategists and creative agencies and create storyboards and brand values. We just had a blackboard and chalk.”
The name was one of several the trio came up with over a number of months, with Matildas the constant stand-out from the rest. But instead of simply announcing the final name themselves, they first wanted to test it with the public to see how it would be received.
At the same time, they also needed to raise the profile of the team ahead of their debut Women’s World Cup.
Having come into a significant amount of government funding following their qualification for Sweden, as well as the knowledge they’d qualified as hosts of the Sydney Olympics, the AWSA suddenly had more resources to push into marketing and promotion.
It’s uncertain who approached who, but Hugg’s group teamed up with SBS television — the home of football in Australia at the time — and together they decided to run a public competition to choose the team’s final nickname.
“We essentially did it just to get some publicity,” Sermanni says.
“Two things happened almost concurrently at that time. One is that women’s football became an Olympic sport, and then Sydney won the 2000 Olympics. Both of those happened around the end of 1993, early 1994.
“Women’s football — which was run by the Australian Women’s Soccer Association in those days — had very little money back then; it was essentially kept alive by a bunch of passionate supporters.
“There was no funds before 1994. If you played for the national team, you had to pay for the privilege.
“Suddenly, there was a real influx of money into the sport after we won the Olympics, which is how the women’s program at the Australian Institute of Sport started. So to raise the profile of the team heading into the World Cup, we thought to run a contest.”
The group brainstormed several potential names (including some deliberately bad ones) such as the Galahs, the Sheilas, even the Soccerettes. Five names were eventually chosen to be broadcast during the ‘On The Ball’ football show presented by legendary commentator Kyle Patterson.
Each name had an accompanying phone number, which viewers could then ring up to cast their vote, similar to the ‘Classic Catches’ poll format in cricket.
“[SBS] wanted to take it to the world and play a little game with it,” Hugg says.
“They would never show any women’s football — conscious that it wasn’t broadcast and conscious that there was not much footage — but they wanted to do this.
“Recollections will vary in terms of whose idea was it and how it got on, but what I recall is it served the purpose of being a bit like a budget leak: we were flying a kite to sort of say, ‘well, let’s put some names out there to test public opinion’.
“As an organisation, it’d be negligent, inappropriate, and certainly risky to hand over the whole decision-making to a public poll. Because God only knows what you would get. And we didn’t do that.
“You don’t run a competition like this unless you know what’s going to win. But we wanted to get the public view on it. And any statistician will tell you that if you want to skew your results, you throw in some silly alternatives.
“So as much as the competition wasn’t rigged, it was favourably positioned towards the result that we wanted.”
One of the voters was Natallie Kehagias, a teenage player from Oatley in New South Wales, whose nomination — Matildas — was chosen as the winner of the competition.
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Ironically, Kehagias’s reward was a paid trip to watch the Socceroos play a match against Ghana in Melbourne.
While the ‘Matildas’ name was the overwhelming favourite in the poll, not everybody took to it immediately.
Some of the players disliked it, and felt excluded from the process to decide their own name. Indeed, one of Hugg’s only regrets was that the playing group wasn’t consulted more thoroughly in the months leading up to the poll.
But most were largely indifferent, too busy focusing on juggling their national team duties with working second jobs, studying, or raising families to think about a name that wouldn’t gain public traction until the infamous nude calendar was released a few years later.
“I thought it could have been worse,” Angela Iannotta, Australia’s first ever World Cup goal-scorer, said with a shrug.
“But it’s a name that, after all these years, does suit the women’s football team.
“It’s quite interesting how, in Australia, the national teams have got all their nicknames: the Socceroos, the Joeys, the Boomers, the Opals. They haven’t really got that overseas. So I think it’s a good idea.”
Prior to the public poll, the women’s team was simply referred to as derivatives of the men. They were hand-me-down nicknames for a hand-me-down team that depended upon the money, the equipment, the kits, and even the coaches that had come from the men’s side.
Their prefix served as a constant reminder of their second-class status in the football landscape, as though they did not have their own identity, their own culture, their own history or meaning.
But the name Matildas changed all that.
They were, finally, something unto themselves. They started building their own mythology and wrote their own story under their own pen-name; not something borrowed from elsewhere.
The fact that the name was selected by the Australian public itself, with thousands of people calling in to vote on the winner, gives the Matildas even more national resonance: their name reflecting the very same community they represent on the world stage.
“I don’t think anyone can specifically claim ownership of the name Matildas,” Hugg says.
“This was fermenting over months, if not years. Sharon [Young] said 1991, we kept coming across the name in 1993, the poll was in 1994, the first time it was used publicly was 1995.
“We were trying to create something with this team. That they could be heroes. And everything came together at just the right time.
“Potentially, if they had qualified in 1991 in China, it could have happened four years earlier; that was a sliding-doors moment.
“I was one of many people who contributed to this idea. But it’s the players who have picked it up and run with it, and turned it into what it is.
“We plant the seed, but they have pruned it and carved it out as to what it will be. They’re the true heroes.”
Indeed, the name’s journey from obscurity to popularity is paralleled by the journey of the team itself, which has become slowly embedded in the cultural consciousness of the country as women’s football has blossomed.
Today, they are just as popular as the Socceroos, and have arguably eclipsed them in the imaginations of hundreds of thousands of fans who will be attending this month’s World Cup.
They are now one of the most loved sports teams in the country, in part because of their iconic nickname, and the story it tells about who they are.
“You wouldn’t think that [this] would happen 32 years ago,” Young says.
“It’s become so big now, but you didn’t think about it back then. It was just a name that was like, ‘OK, they’re gonna be called that.’
“Everything is so different compared to what it was. You loved the game, you played the game, you did a few signatures, but it wasn’t the big hype that it is now in the sense that everybody’s running up to you getting photos and all that stuff.
“I’m very proud of them. I’m proud of how they hold themselves, I’m proud of the way they’re going.
“I just love that I can tell it, and I love that it wasn’t just pulled out of a hat or something. There’s an actual story behind the name.”