On the night of the Matildas’ opening match, residents were conflicted over where to tune in since it overlapped with a local rugby game. When a coach for a competitive side approached Shipp after a game when she was nine and asked her to try out, he wasn’t surprised.ĭubbo has a sport-heavy culture but leans more toward rugby than football. “She just played a lot more mature, even when she was a lot younger than everybody else on her team,” he said. It didn’t take long for Kevin to see his daughter’s gift. Her parents, Kevin Shipp and Danielle Towney-Shipp, signed her up to play for a recreational team shortly after that. He invited her to join him, and it was a wrap. One of her older brother’s friends showed up at their house one day with a football and took it out back to kick around. “I knew as soon as I touched the football, it was my sport,” she said of her first encounter with the game when she was four years old. Shopping centers cluster the quaint downtown area, anchored by a public library, movie theater, clothing stores, and a smattering of hotels that double as nightlife options for the population of about 38,700. Situated at the nexus of five major expressways that crisscross central New South Wales, Dubbo is a small but rapidly growing city on Wiradjuri land. I wanted to understand how far the reach of this sport stretched, and how Australians were experiencing the tournament outside of the metropolitan hubs and host cities. Just as the fervor over the start of this Women’s World Cup began to reach its peak in Sydney, I traveled in the opposite direction, away from the fanfare and toward the center of the country, to a town that was given city status in 1966. Indigenous Australians and the Women's World Cup: A fight for self-determinationīut also like other formerly colonized and systemically oppressed groups, indigenous Australians will always figure out a way to break into spaces that may not have been created for them, no matter what it takes.
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