How a Women’s Muslim Aussie Rules Team Stood Tall

Patrick Skene’s recent articles on the Almanac site have won a significant audience, and generated a really worthwhile conversation.

His most recent feature has gone straight to The Guardian:

READ THE ARTICLE

Also worth reading the discussion which follows.

@patrick_skene

About Patrick Skene

An Epicurean Celt interested in Sport, Culture & History.

Comments

  1. Earl O'Neill says

    Great piece, thanx Patrick.
    Unity thru sport? One thing sport does tremendously is remove barriers, the only thing that matters is performance. The NFL is a great example.

  2. Congratulations Patrick on your publication in the Guardian.
    Great that others will come across your writing.
    Well played.

  3. Patrick Skene says

    Thanks gents,
    It was a wild and exciting ride.
    My first experience being trolled and the article seemed quite polarising.
    I’ve been spoiled by the Almanackers positivity and agenda free analysis.

  4. From all the publicity the Aiburn ladies’ side gets, presumably because of the religious angle, you wouldn’t know that there are other ladies’ sides in Western Sydney.

    There’s a ladies’ AFL side “standing tall” in Penrith too for instance. You know, smack bang in the middle of Rugby League territory. There’s also a new side set up this year in Moorebank.

    But let’s give all the kudos and publicity to Auburn……..

    (By the way, I don’t have an issue with Auburn nor am I decrying their achievements. It’s just that they are not the only ladies’ side promoting our great game – either in Sydney or its west. But it’s hard work for all the ladies’ sides and they are all working equally as hard in trying to make their sides be successful).

  5. Mark,

    If you have time to bang out a few words on one or all of the teams you mention I suspect the Almanac audience would love to hear more.

    I can assure you Patrick Skene lives his belief in a multi-cultural community which celebrates each other’s ways of expressing the greater truths, thereby creating something important in itself. I see no chauvinism, parochialism, bigotry in Patrick’s body of work. This was the group he observed. Since taking up the pen in a more systematic way, he has spent the last two years observing other groups and doing his utmost to represent them faithfully in his articles.

    He is open-hearted. The level of his respect for people and their communities is such that he has readers from those communities comment on his words in the process of putting his pieces together.

    Regarding the Guardian piece, I have also found it instructive to read the comments which follow it, to see the range of understandings out there.

    JTH

  6. Patrick Skene says

    Thanks Mark,

    An oft quoted maxim is to ‘write about what you know’ which is what I do and most on here do.

    There are literally thousands of untold stories every weekend in sport and for every story written here on a club or a team there are 10 that are not told of the other teams in their comp.

    For all the ‘kudos and publicity’ the Auburn Giants have received I was the only spectator at the game to capture the milestone of their first finals series.

    I was thrilled to be able to share the Auburn Giants first finals story with the rest of the world on the Guardian platform.

    AFL Media has an in house publicity machine with over 100 staff and there are strong media teams at AFL Sydney and GWS Media, so for women’s footy stories not being told I’m sure they would be interested.

    Thanks
    Patrick

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