How the women of Wadeye are reshaping their social fabric through football

Now 22, she’s played the majority of her life just around town in Wadeye, where kids sometimes kick Coke bottles instead of Sherrins and footy boots are a rarity.

They kind of hurt her feet anyway.

With red dirt beneath her toes and a footy in hand is her idea of paradise.

“I just love it,” Mary says.

“It makes my stress calm. It’s just my happy place.

“I love footy. I love to play. It’s my favourite thing to do.”

She played at college, in the school team, but Wadeye has never had a women’s team.

Until now.

For the first time, Mary has a team to represent, a community to build. A purpose as a young woman who has emerged as a leader in football and respected community member.

Wadeye is a remote community five hours south-west of Darwin, around Litchfield National Park, and across the Daly River which swells in the wet season to cut off the town.

The trip by road brings dingoes, wild horses, even packs of buffalo.

There’s about 2000 in town, and things aren’t easy.

There’s seven indigenous language groups in the town that was founded as a Catholic mission in the 1930s, where the social fabric has been pushed to its limits in recent years.

A dry community since at least 1988, Wadeye is one of the nation’s most represented communities per capita in incarceration. Maybe even the highest, with recent statistics indicating that five per cent of the town’s population were being held in NT correctional facilities, and there’s an upcoming threat of food shortages with the wet season barge that brings critical supplies when its unpaved access road is set to close.

Things get bad when alcohol gets into town, Mary says, as it did recently. People become shut away.

Things have to change.

Footy is change, and she knows it starts with the likes of her – now a leader for women’s football who is empowered through the game to shift the dial with connection and pride the pillars of social change for the town’s women, signalling the true reach and power of the women’s game.

“I just want to make my parents happy and proud,” she said.

“This might make a younger kid do good stuff, instead of spending a lot of time on their phone, on TikTok.”

Combined with AFL Northern Territory football development lead for the West Daly region, Brianna Burt, the two women are driving forces for change.

The men’s team in Wadeye has a long history. But it’s the women who are doing their bit in reshaping the community.

Burt had worked in a Murray Bridge dental surgery when a mate asked if she could help out with a football carnival in the Northern Territory last year.

A passion was sparked, and when a job to oversee increasing participation – particularly in women and girls – and building pathways for local talent became available, she jumped at it.

A post on Facebook and spreading word the old fashioned away – by word of mouth – around the community signalled the first training session for women.

Seven turned up.

“I thought, ‘this is great’,” Burt said this week.

“And then a few weeks later, I had 35 girls. The most I’ve had is 40-something. So I thought, right, we’ve got enough for two teams.”

They could play each other, on Wednesday nights at the local oval. Families come and watch. Male family members have stepped up as coaches. Teenage girls aged 12 to 15 are central in both talent and dedication. The first women’s game was held in March, at the Wadeye Football Carnival.

By June, Wadeye women represented their town for the first time – as the representative outfit of the Ngunga Suns – at the iconic Barunga Festival. Mary was captain.

The men took a plane. The women travelled in six cars for eight hours. They didn’t win. It didn’t matter.

“The girls were a bit shy (playing there for the first time), but I told them not to be shy,” Mary said.

“Just be proud.

“We made history.”

Mary loves to kick a goal, loves Hawthorn, loved Cyril Rioli, and now James Sicily.

Development for the women in Wadeye continues on skills, teamwork and bonding, with Mary this week partaking in workshops in Darwin on topics like being a strong woman in community, learning skills she can’t wait to take back to her women.

They’d love to play in a league against other communities, or have girls play in Darwin.

Leaving community is difficult, with cultural responsibilities to their families to fulfil, for girls from remote communities for whom the prospect of going to play the likes of AFLW is difficult.

But it’s about football, just for football.

“We have some ladies (in town) like that (that think we shouldn’t play), but we can show them,” she said.

“I play footy and I have a job at the clinic as a receptionist, and I’m going to study as an interpreter. I’m studying courses online with some of the clinic ladies.

“We did love footy but we had no one to support us, until Bri came. She helped us with everything.

“My cousins, they didn’t play footy but they just got inspired by me. And now they love footy – they go every day to the oval, and they always ask me, where’s Bri?

“I am proud, inside. I don’t show it on my face, but inside I am proud (that we have achieved this).

“We need more women. It’s the same girls playing, we want more girls instead of being behind the doors. We just want more girls to explore the footy game.”

Mary and teammate Marie Kolumboort were front and square when AFL Women’s came to Darwin on Friday night to kick off a fortnight of indigenous recognition in the game, almost speechless with the game underway to describe the inspiration, camaraderie and heart that the game’s top level brought with it in Richmond and Essendon.

“They are amazing,” Cumaiyi said.

Burt does countless kilometres across the region, on the ground with football a key tool for social cohesion, school attendance and community enrichment.

She’s in talks with surrounding regions and is eyeing a women’s league for Wadeye to partake in, as soon as early next year.

“I didn’t think I’d get so attached to the girls and the place out there,” Burt said.

“But the smiles on their faces when they see you, every kid will come up to you asking ‘when’s footy?’. It’s special, because you can see how much football means to them. And the fact that I can help them with their happy place, that’s an incredible feeling.”

What the future holds remains to be seen.

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“I hope it’s still flourishing,” Burt says of what she’d love for the women’s team, still in its infancy.

“I hope the girls are still getting an opportunity, more girls playing in Darwin, the younger girls are being brought up to be able to go through the talent pathways and be actually seen out there. That’s the problem at the moment – no one is seeing the talent that is there, and to showcase so these girls can have the opportunity to play AFLW.

“There’s definitely girls out there that have the skill and the ability to do so, it’s just the support.”