Natalie von Bertouch explains why it’s time for a female athlete to be immortalised with a statue at Adelaide Oval
It’s time for a statue of a female athlete to be built around our great Adelaide Oval. But who should it be, Natalie von Bertouch asks SA’s sports lovers.
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AS the sporting season turns from football to cricket, Adelaide Oval staff are busy getting everything ready: the pitch is being prepared, the stands are being pressure cleaned, the goalposts have come down. There’s also some big works happening with one rather controversial hotel.
And before long, that much-loved stadium will be ready for the thousands of cricket-lovers to flood through the gates and cheer on the teams.
As they come through those gates they’ll be walking past the beautifully carved statues of South Australia’s sporting greats. Don Bradman. George Giffen. Jason Gillespie. Darren Lehmann. Barrie Robran. Russell Ebert. Malcolm Blight. Ken Farmer. Clem Hill.
Each statue is a reminder not only of the individual achievements of these sportsmen, but of the history and deep connections we have with sport. These people inspire us. Propel us. Remind us of greatness.
The thing is, though, that of those nine statues, not a single one is female. None.
And it is time for that to change.
Last month in Melbourne, much fanfare heralded the unveiling of a statue honouring the now-famous kick of Carlton’s AFLW forward Tayla Harris. And whether you agreed with the statue or not matters little, because what that statue merely pointed out was how few female athletes have been immortalised in a similar way here in SA.
In fact — and I am happy to stand corrected on this if I am wrong — I cannot think of a single statue anywhere across the state that commemorates a female sportsperson.
No Anna Meares outside the Velodrome. No Michelle den Dekker or Kathryn Harby-Williams outside Priceline Stadium. No Jan Stirling or Rachael Sporn outside Titanium Security Arena. No Juliet Haslam at the State Hockey Centre. Meanwhile, there’s a statue of a horse on the Port Lincoln foreshore; Makybe Diva’s a girl.
South Australia has a proud sporting history encompassing many sports and many women. It seems such a shame that we have confined our statues to men.
The last statue to be unveiled at Adelaide Oval was in December, 2017. It is of cricketer Clem Hill (who played 49 Test matches between 1896 and 1912 and captained Australia for 10 matches). The statue was gifted by philanthropist Basil Sellers and its sculptor Silvio Apponyi took five years to craft the large granite tribute.
I hope that the next one to be unveiled is of a woman, and thinking back over SA’s long history of women’s cricket — and to a lesser extent women’s football — there are many females who could become that first historic one: Faith Thomas, Karen Rolton and Shelley Nitschke among them.
And what will it mean when she is up there in bronze or granite? It will mean that when those crowds flood through the Adelaide Oval gates, there will be a little girl somewhere among them, who will look up at that statue and think: “One day, that could be me”.