Dear Matildas

Dear Matildas, 

I love you. Always remember that.

As you know, I will be leaving you after the Olympics. It’s a weird feeling not knowing when my last game will be, but I have been thinking a lot about my career lately, and before we play the U.S. tomorrow, I want to take this chance to fully explain how much you have meant in my life.

I’m especially thinking back to when I was 15, and my dad had just passed away. 

I’m not sure all of you know this, but I wasn’t just down. 

I wasn’t just sad. 

No. I was depressed. 

I was at the lowest low you could possibly imagine. Actually, I can sum up what my dad meant to me in one single story, which happened when we were living in Kalgoorlie and Mum flew to Singapore for work. She was our breadwinner, and she gave us some money to make sure we could buy ourselves food until she was back.

A few days later we were walking down the street, and Dad saw one of his friends, who was an alcoholic. He was lying on the sidewalk, in need of a ride and in a bad way.

So Dad gave him a lift home and handed him $20.

I was like, “Dad, what are you doing? That’s for our food.”

He was like, “No, we’re fine. We have a house. He needs it more than us.” And then he made me a grilled cheese sandwich. 

I was hoping for more than that for dinner but then I realised that, to Dad, a grilled cheese sandwich was like a three-star Michelin dish. He grew up during the Stolen Generation, which was when young Aboriginal people were taken away from their homes and families. His grandfather had to hide him in the bush because the police wanted to take away the kids, so they had to move around in the desert, camping under the stars and living off the land. When they were hungry, they would find bush animals that they could cook over the fire, and if the animals had any excess they would drain the fat and dip their bread in it to make it last for a long time. Dad had never had an income, or an education, or even a stable job. All he had owned had been given to him by someone else, so when he got something, he gave back and gave it away.

Dad was the one who taught me how to forgive. I was the girl with the white American mum and the Aboriginal dad, so when I was playing basketball, people would say stuff like, “Whose dad is that?” Or even “Why is there a Black man watching?”

I’d be like, “That’s my dad.”

And they would say, “But why are you so white?”

When Mum dropped me off and Dad picked me up, people would ask, “Lydia, are you OK? What is going on here?” 

And I’d go, “No, it’s fine. He’s my dad.”

I could tell how much it hurt my dad. But he never got angry. He would tell me that it’s easier to let it go than to hold all this hate in your heart. He knew what he was talking about, because he’d been one of the first Aboriginal people in Western Australia to be allowed to go to school — this is only 70 years ago — and he’d left after three years because of all the bullying and racism. When his grandfather was killed in a fight, Dad began drinking. His life only changed when he found God and became a bush pastor, and so he would pass all these lessons onto me. 

Anger is pointless. 

The people who comment don’t know any better. 

You can choose to just be happy and help people.

That was my Dad. My teacher. My warrior. My hero. 

One act of kindness would chase all the hate out of his heart.

One day when I was 15, I was in school in Canberra, where we had been living for a few years. Mum called me. Which was weird. 

She said, “I’m picking you up.”

Picking me up???

“Dad’s in hospital.”

It happened that quick. Cancer. The doctors said he was going to be OK, but when we got him home he began getting really tired and losing weight. About three weeks later I got another call at school. 

“We have a car for you. Get to the hospital right now.”

When I got escorted towards Dad’s room, we arrived at the general admissions, where you have the nice beds with the view and visitors, and where Dad had been the first time. We walked right past it. 

I was like, “Hey, why aren’t we going this way?” 

The staff was like, “No, no, we’re going this way.” 

I looked up at the sign above the door. 

INTENSIVE CARE UNIT.

No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. 

Dad had these tubes all over him. The monitors were buzzing. Mum was there with a family friend, and the doctor said that the cancer was just too aggressive. 

“He has a day or two to live. We’re so sorry.”

I just went numb. Then Mum and her friend left the room, Dad took off his oxygen mask, and he told me, “Lydia, I will always be proud of you. Stay true to yourself. Remember that wherever you go, I will always be there next to you.”

That was the last conversation we had. 

The next nine months are a blur to me. I graduated from school, but I have no memory of it. It was horrible for Mum, too. She used to tell me how she left her job on Wall Street for a life in the desert, so that she could help women in the Aboriginal community who struggled with alcoholism and domestic abuse. She met Dad, he proposed in a letter, and they got married on the site of an Aboriginal massacre. They spent the next two nights sleeping in a cave, and at that point even she was like, “You know what, Ron? This is our honeymoon. Let’s go to a hotel.’”

She would laugh when she remembered that. But after he died, it took my mum and me three years until we could even talk about him together. 

Every time one of us would bring him up, we would start crying. We would get groceries, and Mum would break down sobbing in the middle of the supermarket. We just loved him so much. 

So yeah, I was depressed. I felt lost and helpless.

And I was still struggling with my identity crisis. 

All the pain and grief got mixed up with this feeling of not fitting in anywhere. We had moved to Canberra, but I didn’t know how to behave in a city, or how to dress, or how to even speak to people. Canberra had hills. Greenery. Paved roads. Cold. I just hated it.

Do you realise what I did back in Kalgoorlie?

I mean, yeah, we had a house like most people, but once a year for about two months, we would pack our white Land Rover with a tent, sleeping bags and a 10-gallon freshwater tank, and head into the desert with the rocks and the snakes. We would drive for a couple of days to a town, park the 4WD by a roadhouse and set camp by the dirt road. No Wi-Fi, no phone coverage, just a walkie-talkie and a one-way emergency radio. Dad would make a fire and tell stories about Aboriginal tribes and the stars in the sky, and he was so good at making drawings in the sand. The Land Rover had a roof rack with a board, so we could sleep up there in case we got attacked by wild dogs. 

We would eat lizards. Yep. If Dad saw one from the car, he would shout, “Look, there’s our dinner!” He’d stop the car and shout, “GO SOXY!!!” 

Soxy was our little terrier, and he would chase the lizard down a hole. Dad would run after them, put a stick down the hole so the lizard would bite it and pull it back up. 

Dinner secured. Grill on the fire. 

That was our life. 

To be honest, I didn’t completely fit into Kalgoorlie either. I went to a private school, because Mum was big on education, and I think there was one other Aboriginal kid there. I wasn’t dark skinned enough to feel like I was Black, but I would use desert lingo like “Where’s the marlu?” (That means kangaroo.) If I was making a joke, I’d do this click with my tongue, which was desert lingo as well. We were wearing uniforms and shoes, but I was used to running barefoot on the red dirt, and if I stepped on thorns I’d just pull them out. I was also an only child, because Mum had me when she was 42, so I’d be outside playing with Soxy and my two other pets, Chamby the kangaroo and Rocky the wallaby. 

I’m not gonna lie, it would have been nice to have a sibling. I did feel lonely. 

But I did not — ABSOLUTELY NOT — want to move to Canberra. 

At least I had the bush and my Aboriginal culture. In Canberra I had nothing. One day I began noticing that pieces of furniture had gone missing from our house, but I was like, Oh, whatever. But then Mum sat me down by the kitchen table and said that she had gotten this job in Canberra, and I just screamed, “NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!”  

I ran into my room, slammed the door and began crying. I told my parents that I hated them. I wanted new parents. I pushed a bookcase against the door, and when they tried to get in, I threw something at them. They were both devastated, but the job was as a Principal at a bible college, and they knew they had to go. Mum had even sorted out a house for us and a school for me, so we loaded up the Land Rover, filled up the water tank and drove all the way to Canberra — which, to me, felt like moving to the other side of the world.

My classmates had actually written me letters before I arrived, all like, “Hi! We’re really excited to have you over here!!” Blah, blah, blah. I didn’t respond to them right away and I just deadpanned them completely like, “I don’t know you.” 

After we moved, it took four months until I stopped crying. 

So yeah, I was preeeetty lost. 

One day, Mum asked me if I wanted to join up with a sports team. 

I think she understood that I needed an outlet where nobody cares about how you speak or where you’re from, as long as you’re good, and she knew that I had loved playing AFL back in the desert. I joined a basketball and football team, and that’s when I began to come out of my shell at school. 

Then the Olympics happened. I went to see Norway vs. Nigeria at Canberra Stadium, and this was in 2000, so it was the first time I saw adult women play football. We were sitting near the front row, and my mind was just blown by how good they were. About a week later, Cathy Freeman won gold at the 400-metre sprint. I was watching it on TV with my parents, and I remember that she put an Aboriginal flag around her on the victory lap, and took off her shoes. Feeling the ground, just like we did in the bush. It was like something clicked in my mind, like that Galaxy Brain meme. 

Women can have a career in football. 

An Aboriginal woman can be a national hero.

I PLAY FOOTBALL. I’M ABORIGINAL. 

OH MY GOSH!!!!!!

That should have given me all the motivation I needed, right?? 

Well, I still nearly quit football three times. 

The first time I was training at the ACT Academy of Sport with about 30 other goalkeepers. Apparently I had the most potential there, because after the first session the goalkeeping coach had told my mum, “Don’t let her quit, she has the most potential to go professional.”

My next goalkeeper coach had only trained males, so he’d shout a lot and expect me to perform the same as the boys. And I was just a 14-year-old girl thinking, Can’t we just be nice here? 

Then I’d go home crying and say that I wanted to quit. And every time, Mum said no. 

Another time was when Dad died. My world was falling apart, but I also knew that he was so proud that I was playing football at a decent level. Every time I wanted to give up, my mind went back to what he told me in the hospital. 

“Keep going, Lydia. Keep making me proud.”

Had he not said that, I would not have found the strength to continue.

The last time, or let’s say the last thing that kept me going, was my mates. My friends from school. My first teammates. The Matildas. 

I began opening up to a therapist around this time, because I know that the grief would simply have been unbearable without that. But since I had games to play, I also had no time to let the pain overwhelm me. You needed me and I needed you. If I made mistakes, it was OK. If I broke down crying in training, nobody told me to go home. And I’ll never forget being at Dad’s memorial service, and spotting four or five teammates from the Matildas. I didn’t really know you outside of training at that time, and you didn’t know Dad at all. You were in your mid-20s, I was in school. But you showed up. 

The Matildas became like a second family to me.

You made me feel like one of you, like truly. I remember when we went on the Asian Tour, this three-week trip back in the old days when we’d have to use a hotel phone to ring back home, when we’d hit the local markets and go “How much for that Friends DVD over there?” I had never played for the first team, but ahead of our last game our coach, Tom Sermanni, was like, “Oh by the way, you’re playing.” 

It was our fourth game in 15 days and everyone just wanted to go home. There were no chairs in the dressing room, so we did our pep talk sitting on the floor, and then we walked out into the pouring rain and lost 3–0. And I didn’t really get it, because afterwards everyone was like, “Well done, Lyds! Congrats!” 

And I was like, “Wait, we lost. Why are we happy???” 

Oh, only because the Matildas had a new goalie! You helped me go from being a shy little girl to a senior player who had the confidence to use her voice. You helped me find my identity. You helped me become me. 

You gave me an adventure beyond my wildest dreams. I loved it when we beat Brazil at the 2015 World Cup, and when we made the Olympics for the first time in 12 years, and we were all like, Oh my gosh, we can do something special here! I’m so proud of how we went on strike to get paid like pros. I’ll miss the jokes, the prematch playlists, the tours, the WhatsApp group chat, and our obsession with finding the best coffee every place we go. You know that feeling of joy when you see your relatives at Christmas and go, “Oh, I haven’t seen you in so long”? When I meet up with you guys, that’s how I feel. 

And now, after 19 years on the team, I’m the veteran. Or as some of you like to call me, Grandma :D 

At the last World Cup after our final game, when I sat up against the post for 15 minutes with tears being shed,  some of you came over to me to make sure that I was OK. But I was just seeing the end of the journey. I knew that my final World Cup was over, and that from now on everything I did would be the last. My whole career flashed before my eyes, and I just got this feeling that I was done, that I had achieved what I’d set out to do. 

From here on, everything would just be a bonus.

That’s why I was so emotional for my send-off at my last game in Australia. There were times during that camp when I’d be sitting on the bus and the tears would be welling up. On the day of the game, I was actually … fine. Until you guys had gone out on the pitch to form a guard of honour, and I was standing there alone in the tunnel, fighting to keep my composure. Just when I thought I had it down, I spotted our Security Manager, whom we call Toots, who has been with us for what seems like forever. You know how Security Managers are supposed to keep a straight face, right? Well, I looked over at her, and she was welling up. 

I was like, Oh no. Please. Not now.

She said, “Thank you, Lyds. I’m going to miss this.”

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Seconds later we both had tears forming, and I was like, I can’t do this I can’t do this I can’t do this. But then somebody led me out onto the grass and there you all were: Teammates, staff, friends who had been there when my dad was sick, people who had supported Mum through her grief. How can I possibly all thank you enough?

Of course I broke down crying again when Evonne Goolagong Cawley gave me the booka before the game. It’s a piece of clothing made out of three kangaroos skins sewn together, and it’s traditional in my mob. When Evonne presented it, I just got this feeling of having done all this not just for myself, but for Dad, Mum, and my culture.

I can’t imagine a better way to say goodbye.

You know that I won’t be going away. I’ll be here to continue to help grow Australian football and women’s football in general and I’ll always be cheering for you now on the sidelines. The game has given me so much that it would be criminal for me not to put something back in. A year ago my partner actually met an Aboriginal couple who said that they were seeing kids running around where I grew up, playing football instead of AFL. That to me felt like a full circle. 

Obviously there is only one Cathy Freeman, but if I have inspired just one Aboriginal girl like me to put on her goalkeeper gloves, then that’s an incredible thing.

And if not, then I still succeeded. 

It was still all worth it. 

You know why?

Because I know I made my dad proud.

Love you all.

— Lyds