Just a Girl by Tammie Adele

  Gonna use my arms Gonna use my legs Gonna use my style Gonna use my sidestep Gonna use my fingers Gonna use my, my, my imagination   Why, as a sports mad nation, did Australia only in 2018 get semi-professional female sports competitions? While I had absolutely no interest in playing it as a kid, I was none-the-less aware that just about every other girl in my school was mad about netball. Now, while netball is still not a professional or even semi-professional sport in this country, the two largest football codes are falling over themselves to have ‘W’ leagues? This is following only a few years earlier (2012) when the AFL was patting itself on the back for allowing Chelsea Roffey to be the first female goal umpire in a grand final. The media made such a big deal about ‘Oh my God! A woman!’ being able to wave her fingers around at the right time, as if they’d never realised that we could do it before. I’m not trying to take away from Chelsea’s achievements. ...

  Well muma told me, When I was young, Stand tall girl (stand tall girl) You’re number one (you’re number one) (she said) You can't be what you wanna be But you can change the course of your destiny   In 2010 a 1980s riddle was retested. The riddle goes something along the lines of: A father and son are in a car accident. The father dies at the scene and the son is taken to hospital. At the hospital the surgeon says ‘I can’t operate on this boy. He’s my son’. Who is the surgeon? Unfortunately, despite more than 20 years passing since the sexual revolution of the 60s, most of my generation – Gen X – in the 80’s thought that the surgeon was a male. For the record, the surgeon was ‘Oh my God! A woman!’ - the boy’s mother. There is a light at the end of this tunnel though, as when the riddle was retested on school kids in 2010 most of them had the intelligence and social awareness to realise that a woman can be a doctor. With this riddle in mind it i...