A TREASURED photograph has emerged of local girls in V-neck team guernseys playing Aussie rules football for Wonthaggi more than seventy years ago.

Young women first pulled on football boots for Wonthaggi in the late 1940s when it was no longer considered to be a novelty for women to play footy.

More than once the Wonthaggi women’s team would have played against a young men’s team as a curtain raiser to the main game.

Captain of the ladies’ team, Margaret (Peg) Fletcher (née Keltie) was a tenacious player according to her grandchildren and continues to be a sprightly ninety-seven-year-old living in Mornington.

“Peg was seventeen at the time,” explained her granddaughter, Helaine Stanley.

The team photograph was most likely taken in 1944. 

“The girls would ride pushbikes over to the football ground, straight from the basketball game to watch the boys play footy.”

The names of many of the women in the photograph may well have been lost in time but most worked at the White Manufacturing Company making dresses, remembers Peg.

Audrey Combridge is standing next to Peg (top left) with Betty Stewart. 

Margaret’s husband Ron Fletcher played twenty-one games for North Melbourne in the Victorian Football League as a six-foot-plus ruckman from 1950 to 1951.

Ron’s uncle Les Kew Ming played for North Melbourne in the VFA, and once held the record for the world’s longest drop punt, booting a massive sixty-seven-metre punt in front of judges at a kicking contest in 1928 followed by a staggering sixty-six-metre drop kick.

The Fletcher and Kew Ming families are remembered as two local families that were not only skilled but genuinely loved their footy. 

Ron Fletcher’s mother Florence was the chef at the Whalebone (Taberners) Hotel in Wonthaggi for forty years. 

Ladies’ football teams were popular until the end of 1953 when women’s basketball or netball began to attract more players.

Women footballers owned their own jumpers, shorts, boots, and socks and followed the same draw as men’s football.

Dressing sheds for women were not a problem, there simply were none.

A rudimentary pan toilet with a cold water tap that doubled for washing off the mud as well as providing water to cook saveloys for the boys would have been the order of the day.

Peg Fletcher thinks the young women playing football today, are pretty clever.

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