Karen Menzies On Being the First-Ever Indigenous Woman to Play for the Matildas

In our MECCA M-POWERED interview series, fearless women from around the globe share their incredible stories – from overcoming adversity to following their passions and inspiring a future generation of female changemakers.

Back in 1983, on her 21st birthday, Karen Menzies was selected to play for the Australian women’s national soccer team, the Matildas. Not only was she the first Indigenous woman ever to be chosen – she was one of the first Matildas full stop.

“It was the thing that I loved more than life itself,” reflects Menzies, who loved football ever since she was a little girl – only back then, soccer was very much seen as a sport for boys. While at home with her family in Sydney, she was free to play whichever games she wished; but at school, she was banned by her teachers for playing football in the schoolyard.

“My love of football was viewed by the teachers as some kind of crime. Sports had been assigned genders. If you were interested in playing a sport that didn't have your gender attached, you were seen as abnormal and treated very badly,” she says, adding, “I got mixed messages because at home, I was allowed to play soccer with other kids in my backyard –but at school, it was not accepted. I was always getting into trouble. I think the teachers viewed me as being quite oppositional and defiant.

“It really snowballed and impacted my education, because they tended to target me in a negative way. They saw me as a child who wasn't obeying the instructions that they were giving me. I was seen as being naughty, when really, I just loved running around after a round ballI spent a lot of time standing outside the classroom in the garbage bin, or picking up papers as punishment for playing football,” she recalls.

At the time, Menzies was also immersed in a distinctly heteronormative society: “For some of the teachers, there was probably an anxiety around my sexuality and wondering if I was going to be gay. Playing football was even one of the catalysts for sending me to see a psychologist. I don't know how you can make that call about an eight year old; I didn't have my first same-sex relationship until I was 21,” she says.

Then, when she was 13 years old, everything changed. Karen was suddenly separated from the family who had cared for her since she was forcibly removed from her biological mother at eight-months old. “I was not legally in the care of my family who raised me, my Anglo-Scottish family. My status was still ‘government owned’. The government made all the decisions about what happened to me,” she reflects. “

At the age of 13, they ended up coming to my school and took me away from the only family that I knew. I wasn't even permitted to take any of my favourite things. I was in my school uniform and taken straight from the high school and relocated first to Glebe [an inner-Sydney suburb], and then to Newcastle. I wasn’t even given the opportunity to say goodbye to my family. It was absolutely brutal.”

Menzies would live in institutions for the next five-and-a-half years of her life.

Yet there was a silver lining; when she arrived in Newcastle, she was informed there were a variety of sports she could play – and one of them happened to be football.

“A couple of hours later, I was at the local footy field training, in a girls’ team, for a competition. I felt like I was in paradise. I don’t mean to minimise or dismiss what the care experience is like for many people in the past and present, but for me, it was an opportunity to be able to explore my life passion,” she recalls.

Finally, she had the opportunity to play in an all-female competition. “There was still that societal perception that girls playing this game was a bit weird; ‘really, that's for blokes, that's for boys.’ As I travelled through my adolescence, and even into my twenties, there was a lot of sexism and misogyny. There was a lot of homophobia as well. So, although I didn't get caned anymore, the verbal abuse was pretty profound,” she reveals.

As she became immersed in the world of football and rose to the level of representing her state in the sport, something else in her life would shift; her identity, her beginnings, her birth family, had all been things she’d wondered about for years. She’d asked questions but had never been given any answers.

“From a very young age, I regularly questioned myself about where I came from. I had been told virtually nothing as a child. Later, at a case conference, they produced a photograph of my mum and my four siblings,” says Menzies.

There was something she immediately noticed about the photograph – her family were Indigenous.

“I didn't quite understand what was going on. I thought they'd made a mistake. There were a couple of other girls at the institution who were visibly representative of what I understood Aboriginal people look like, so I thought it was an error – I thought it was the family members of the two girls that I lived with. I just remember blanking out – I now know I was experiencing dissociation,” she says.

What followed was a visit to Queensland to meet her lost relatives – which “didn't go so well.”

“There was very poor preparation to assist me on that cultural journey, and there was inadequate support given to them, she reflects, describing herself as “an angry, adolescent living in an institution” that “didn't have the softness or the warmth that you experience in a family home.”

Discovering she was part of the Stolen Generations, and then meeting her biological family for the first time isn’t something Menzies can put into words.

“Some people say the word ‘shock’, but I have no words to describe the monumental shock that it was. To say ‘shock’ is such a gross understatement of what the feeling was like for me,” she recalls.

She continued to have contact with her biological mother through letters and phone calls, but this led to the authorities who still had “control over [her] entire life” to assume she wanted to move to Queensland and live with her. That was an “inaccurate assumption,” says Menzies, explaining, “At that stage, I’d had a boyfriend from when I was 14 to 18. He was a wonderful support. He’s still one of my best friends and will be until the day I die. He was a very significant part of my life. Plus, I loved all of my soccer activities, my friends from school.

So, even though I was still in an institution, I didn’t want to go to Queensland So, she cut off contact with her birth family. “I was acutely aware that they’d had control over my entire life. They told me they could ‘arrange’ for me to go and live in Queensland, and I didn’t want that to happen, so I just severed contact with my mum because I was absolutely and utterly terrified that I was going to be sent to Queensland,” she says.

It was years before she resumed contact. “That space should not have happened,” Menzies says. “My mother and my siblings and myself should not have ever been denied that time in our lives – but, as I say, the welfare authority’s miserable management and mismanagement played a significant part there.”

There was one constant in her life: as she began to untangle the mystery of her beginnings and develop her personal identity, sport continued to be a lifeline and a source of identity.

“What football gave me, and indeed other sports, was a sporting identity. Throughout high school, I was always referred to as a ‘sports girl’. It gave me a sense of who I was, a strong sense of identity. I dedicated so much time to football and sport, and I really think it stopped me from going down another path,” she says. “I would be a statistic if it wasn't for football.”

When she talks about trauma, she immediately acknowledges her childhood in Sydney, where she felt safe. “I had really good foundation of parenting from my Anglo family. I was always safe in their hands. When people have had trauma, particularly interpersonal trauma, there's often a loss of trust and a loss of safety that they have in others around them.