Carol Humeu’s introduction to rugby league was carrying her brothers’ bags to matches. As a girl, she was not allowed to play football with the boys or even other girls. When, as a 16-year-old, she was finally allowed to play the sport – against adult women – Humeu says, ‘‘People stood there and laughed at us’’.
Times are changing. From the first moments of the Australian rugby league tour of Papua New Guinea, change is evident. Instead of fans mobbing the players at Port Moresby’s Jacksons International Airport, tight security has limited the local presence to officials and a cordon of singers performing a welcome song in Hiri Motu, one of the three official languages of the country’s 800. A handful of fans cheer from across the street.
Symbol of the changing times: Carol Humeu at last year’s World Cup in Sydney.
On the short drive to the team hotel, roads are blocked and clusters of children run alongside the motorcade, but it is a tame welcome compared to the old days. Over the road from the hotel is the Sir John Guise Stadium, where crowd control used to involve tear gas and police throwing overenthusiastic children back over the fence. This weekend, the Jillaroos and the Australian Prime Minister’s XIII will play their matches at a new stadium with more conventional security.
No change is more prominent in PNG than the rise of the women’s game. Since Humeu, now a 23-year-old second-rower, started playing league as a teenager in 2011, the number of registered women players in PNG has risen from 700 to 3000, a number projected to double next year. There is still no girls’ junior competition, but Humeu, the PNG Orchids’ captain for their game against the Jillaroos tomorrow, says it’s better for girls than when her only involvement in the game she loved was ‘‘to watch my brothers and follow them around’’.
The women’s game in PNG is not entirely new. Filmmaker Joanna Lester’s new documentary Power Meri (‘Powerful Women’) charts the rise of the Orchids and the origins of PNG women’s rugby league. ‘‘There was a six-team league in Port Moresby in 1976, but it ended,’’ says Lester, who interviewed some of the women who played, ‘‘because of mixed opinions about how appropriate it was for women to be playing rugby league.’’
In a country where Human Rights Watch has found that more than two-thirds of women suffer from family violence and, in some regions, 80 per cent of men admit to sexual violence against their female partners, women’s rugby league has revived in the past decade. It has already overtaken netball and volleyball as the most popular female sport.
Mobs of children run alongside the Prime Minister’s XIII’s team bus in Port Moresby on Thursday.
This movement has been grasped by the Australian visitors, who are using their tour to project a message. ‘‘It’s the reason we are here,’’ Australia coach Mal Meninga says. On the Australian jerseys and training shirts are the words ‘Strong Men Respect Women’. In corporatised Australian sport, it is customary for leaders to be briefed in their required messaging, but in a country where Australia has partly funded 14 family and sexual violence police units, the responsibility has a harder-edged reality than mere sloganeering.
In PNG, where the first anti-domestic violence Family Protection Act was passed only two years ago, the fervour for rugby league is seen as a vehicle for social change. ‘‘It’s now a requirement that to get registration, clubs have to have a women’s team,’’ says former Kumul and NRL title-winning Canberra Raider David Westley, the Orchids coach.
A recent clinic, drawn from two schools, was overwhelmed by more than 150 girls. The process of developing the game, Westley says, is to ‘‘try to build the culture first, making it fun for girls to play, and then we work on the skills later’’.
If strong men respect women, strong women do too. Jillaroos captain Rebecca Young said respect would start on the field. Even though the Orchids lost all three games in last year’s World Cup, they pose a challenge for a development Australian squad missing players from the Broncos and Roosters who played in the NRLW grand final. ‘‘We respect them not just on the field, but for the way they represent women in this community,’’ Young said.
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