How the Matildas Got Their Name

The easy answer is “Waltzing Matilda”. The real answer runs through a Scottish folk tune, a tea advertisement, six tonnes of winking mechanical kangaroo, a suggestion nobody followed up, a blackboard in a Canberra primary school and a phone poll that the man who ran it later admitted was rigged in the nicest possible way.

Soccertoos. Blue Flyers. Waratahs. Matildas. Lorikeets.

Five names on a blurry SBS graphic, each with its own phone number, twenty-five cents a call. That's the screen that decided what we'd be shouting at televisions for the next thirty years. Look at it now and it seems less like a defining moment in Australian sporting culture and more like the interval voting in a regional heat of Eurovision.

Ask most people why Australia's women footballers are called the Matildas and they'll tell you it's because of “Waltzing Matilda”, and they'll say it with the calm certainty of someone who has never been asked a follow-up question. It isn't wrong, exactly. It's just the sort of answer that skips the interesting bits — like saying the Beatles were influenced by rock and roll, which is true, and which also loses you several very good records.

I've spent close to thirty years in and around design and advertising, which means I've sat through my share of naming exercises. They generally involve a lot of laminated paper and a facilitator who says “there are no bad ideas”. This one involved a blackboard, some chalk, three people with no money, and a national broadcaster charging viewers a quarter of a dollar to have their say. It produced a better name than most of the exercises I've been paid to attend.

Before the name: a team with no noun of its own

To understand why the naming mattered, you need to know what the alternative was.

Through the 1980s and early '90s, Australia's women played international football under two labels. One was “Soccerettes”, which sounds like a dance troupe. The other was “the Female Socceroos”, which is worse, because it's grammatically precise about exactly where the women sat: an appendix to the men. Football Australia's own account notes that “Female Socceroos” still turned up in an official match programme shortly before the naming exercise. The men were the noun. The women were the adjective.

This wasn't only a language problem. The Australian Women's Soccer Association was a separate body running on close to nothing. Tom Sermanni, the national coach, has recalled that before 1994 there was essentially no money, and that players could end up paying for the privilege of representing their country. Kyle Patterson, who hosted the SBS show that ran the vote, remembered the same thing: women funding their own participation because the association had none.

Two things changed the weather. Sydney won the 2000 Olympics, and women's football entered the Olympic programme. Suddenly there was a reason for administrators to think about visibility and identity — which is a polite way of saying there was finally a reason for someone to care whether anyone knew the team existed.

It's worth pausing on how the same instinct was moving through Australian women's sport at exactly the same moment. At the 1988 Olympics a commentator had called the women's basketball team the “Bloomers”, a play on the men's Boomers that the players didn't much enjoy. When Tom Maher took over as coach in 1993, the players wanted something of their own — Australian, feminine, strong. “Opals” was approved for the 1994 World Championships. Within roughly two years, two Australian women's national teams shrugged off names built around the men and went looking for their own.

1895: a borrowed tune and a tea advertisement

Start at the source, and the source is already a bit of a mongrel.

In 1895, near Winton in western Queensland, Christina Macpherson played from memory a melody she'd heard at the Warrnambool races. A. B. “Banjo” Paterson supplied the words and the title. The National Library of Australia holds Macpherson's manuscript of the melody and verses, along with her later account of how the song came about, and describes “Waltzing Matilda” as Australia's best-known folk song.

The tune Macpherson remembered has been traced by the State Library of Queensland to a Scottish song, “Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea”. The first published edition was arranged by Marie Cowan in 1903, substantially in the service of selling Billy Tea. So Australia's great spontaneous piece of bush folklore has, tucked into its DNA, a borrowed Scottish melody and some product placement. Honestly, I can't think of better preparation for a career as a sporting brand.

And “Matilda”, in the ballad, isn't a woman at all. It's the swag — the bundle the itinerant worker carries. The story is about a swagman, a stolen sheep, the authorities arriving, and a man choosing a waterhole over surrender. Historians and archivists have long wondered whether Paterson was drawing on the bitter 1894 shearers' strike and the death of Samuel Hoffmeister at Dagworth; the State Library of Queensland treats that connection as plausible rather than settled.

Which means that underneath the jaunty chorus sits a story about poverty, property, authority, defiance and death. That's a considerable amount of baggage to load onto a football team. Then again, that might be exactly why it lasted. Symbols survive by having enough contradictions in them that everybody hears a different song.

1982: six tonnes of winking kangaroo

Here's the step the trivia answer skips, and it's the important one.

On 23 March 1981, organisers unveiled Matilda, a smiling kangaroo, as the mascot of the 1982 Brisbane Commonwealth Games. The next day's Canberra Times ran the story under the headline “Smiling Matilda is Brisbane's choice”. Sir Edward Williams, chairman of the Games foundation, made the connection to the song unmistakable: the mascot, he said, would “waltz with us” towards a successful Games. Nobody was being subtle. Another Canberra Times report three weeks later, “Matilda goes on show”, records how quickly she spread — giant replicas, stuffed toys, merchandise, corporate displays, all well before the Games began.

Then came the opening ceremony, and Matilda stopped being a logo. The ABC's later archival account gives her as roughly 13 metres high and six tonnes: a towering mechanical kangaroo who winked at a stadium and lodged herself permanently in the memory of everyone who saw it.

That wink is the hinge of this whole story. In about eighteen months, “Matilda” had travelled from a dead swagman's bundle to a gigantic, cheerful, unmistakably female Australian animal. The song made the name available. Brisbane gave it a body.

Around 1991: “What about Matilda?”

Almost a decade later, Sharon Young remembered her.

Australia was trying to qualify for the inaugural FIFA women's world championship in China. At a national-team camp around 1991, Young recalls the players talking about the fact that every other Australian side seemed to have a proper name while they were stuck with Soccerettes and female Socceroos. Her contribution was gloriously economical.

“What about Matilda?”

Sharon Young, recalling a national-team camp around 1991

She wasn't picturing Banjo Paterson hunched over a manuscript. She was picturing the kangaroo: the wink, the boxing stance, the sheer Australianness of her. Young thought it suited a side about to go into battle internationally. Football Australia's current history now explicitly credits her with putting the name forward because of the 1982 mascot.

And then nothing happened. Australia lost the Oceania qualification race to New Zealand on goal difference and missed that first World Cup, and the naming conversation went quiet with it. Young herself is admirably honest about the gap: she doesn't know what became of her suggestion, or whether the name that eventually arrived descended from it. That candour is why her account is worth taking seriously. She's the earliest person we can currently identify proposing it — not, on the available evidence, the sole inventor.

1993: a blackboard in a Canberra classroom

Two years on, three people sat in a classroom at Hackett Primary School in Canberra and talked about the future of the women's programme: Peter Hugg, chief executive of the AWSA; Tom Sermanni, the national coach; and administrator Sarah Groube.

There were no creative agencies. No mood boards of women staring purposefully into the middle distance. No forty-eight-page deck titled Brand Essence: Fearless Togetherness. Hugg remembers a blackboard and chalk.

“Matildas” kept coming back. For Hugg the 1982 kangaroo was the light-bulb association, but the word carried more than that: the kangaroo imagery already running through Socceroos, Olyroos and Joeys; a name that was recognisably a woman's; “Waltzing Matilda” sitting there as an unofficial national song; and the martial reading of Matilda as “mighty in battle”. It was a Swiss Army knife of Australian symbolism, and it had the enormous advantage of not containing the word “soccer” anywhere.

One detail in Hugg's recollection is quietly instructive. He also mentioned Roald Dahl's Matilda, and described a Matilda film as having recently come out. The well-known Danny DeVito adaptation was released in 1996 — three years after the classroom session and after the team already had the name. It's a small chronological slip in a memory being reconstructed three decades later, and it doesn't discredit his account. It just tells you to treat precise dates in oral history the way you'd treat a VAR line drawn from a slightly blurry camera angle.

By October 1994 the branding anxiety had a deadline attached. Australia won the Oceania championship in Papua New Guinea — Football Australia dates the tournament to 14–20 October 1994 — and qualified for its first Women's World Cup, in Sweden the following June. A team that had spent years being under-reported was about to be watched.

The poll that was “favourably positioned”

Enter SBS.

“On The Ball” put five names on screen with five phone numbers. Viewers paid 25 cents to vote. Matildas won comfortably. A teenage footballer from Oatley in Sydney's south, Natallie Kehagias, was identified as the entrant whose Matildas nomination won the competition; her prize was a trip to see the Socceroos, which is either lovely or slightly on the nose, depending on your mood.

Patterson, hosting, remembered the outcome as never being in much doubt: Matildas, he said, was the popular one from the start.

And here's where the story stops being a branding case study and becomes properly Australian. Hugg later admitted the administrators already wanted Matildas and had built the shortlist accordingly. Some deliberately weak options were kicked around before the final five were chosen — Galahs, Sheilas, Soccerettes. He wouldn't call it rigged. He put it rather more beautifully than that.

“It was favourably positioned towards the result that we wanted.”

Peter Hugg, AWSA chief executive

So yes, the public chose Matildas. In roughly the way you choose when someone asks whether you'd like the nice shiraz, the warm tap water, the vinegar, the brake fluid, or the nice shiraz.

The result was neither an executive decree nor the pure wisdom of the crowd. It was institutionally composed and publicly ratified, which may be the most accurate five-word history of the nickname anyone will write.

The players weren't universally thrilled, either. Some felt they should have been consulted more closely. Angela Iannotta, who would go on to score at that World Cup, gave a verdict with the majestic enthusiasm of someone reviewing a service station sandwich: she thought it could have been worse.

The bit nobody can pin down: 1994 or 1995?

There's a dating problem sitting in the middle of this story, and it deserves better than being swept under the historian's carpet.

The ABC's detailed 2023 reconstruction dates the SBS poll to 1994, and Hugg's own chronology agrees. But Football Australia's separate official account says the competition followed a Socceroos friendly against Colombia whose match programme still called the women “the Female Socceroos”. The Australia–Colombia fixture in historical match records took place at Lang Park, Brisbane, on 8 February 1995. Football Australia also says the side was officially nicknamed and first appeared at a World Cup as the Matildas in 1995.

Those accounts can't all be literally correct about sequence. Maybe one retrospective has the year wrong. Maybe the competition began in 1994 and finished in 1995. Maybe the Colombia programme has been placed before rather than during the process, or separate nomination and voting stages have collapsed into one remembered “poll”. The available evidence doesn't let anyone pick a winner, and the honest formulation is the untidy one: the name gestated between about 1991 and 1993, went through a public-choice process across the 1994–early-1995 transition, and was established before Australia flew to Sweden.

That uncertainty isn't a failure of the story. It's part of the story. The whole reason the naming stunt existed was that women's football had almost no media coverage. It would be perversely neat if a publicity campaign designed to fix historical invisibility had left behind a pristine archive. It didn't.

So who actually named them?

No surviving document says “on this date, X invented the word Matildas”. What we have instead is oral history, official retrospectives, a surviving poll graphic, contemporary newspaper coverage of the mascot and the song, and a couple of chronology problems. Which means the credit has to be split, annoyingly, several ways.

The fairest allocation of credit is a relay rather than a penalty shootout over ownership. Paterson and Macpherson gave Australia the phrase. Brisbane 1982 gave it a kangaroo's body. Sharon Young carried it into women's football. Hugg, Sermanni and Groube turned it into a proposition. SBS put it on television. The callers made it legitimate. And the players — this is the part no committee can arrange — made it mean something.

Why Matildas survived and Soccertoos didn't

Look at that ballot again and you can hear natural selection cracking its knuckles.

“Soccertoos” was precisely the thing the women were trying to escape: an identity defined as an eccentric offshoot of the men, with the added disadvantage of sounding like a children's programme in which foam kangaroos explain the offside law. “Waratahs” had Australian resonance but belonged to no one in particular. “Lorikeets” was cheerful and vividly native and not, if we're honest, the word you want on the team sheet when you're trying to frighten Germany. “Blue Flyers” sounds like an airline rewards scheme.

“Matildas” did several jobs at once. It sounded Australian without having Australia in it. It was feminine without being a diminutive. Through the mascot it implied a kangaroo without producing yet another “-roo”. Through the song it arrived carrying a century of recognition. And, crucially, it didn't make the women grammatically subordinate to anybody.

That last point is the whole thing. A name can't fund a national programme, professionalise players or force a network to broadcast matches it has spent a decade ignoring. What it can do is make a team the subject of the sentence rather than a footnote in someone else's. The distance between “the Female Socceroos” and “the Matildas” is a few syllables and an entire way of being seen.

They weren't voting for an icon. They were voting for a word.

By June 1995 the name was attached. Australia played Denmark, China and the United States in Sweden as the Matildas, and Football Australia says the term was in regular use in the lead-up to and during that tournament.

Worth clearing away one more myth while we're here: the women weren't informally called Matildas for decades before that. Football Australia is explicit that 1995 was the first major tournament at which the side was known that way. In 2024, after a historical review, it recognised the Australian team at the 1975 Asian Women's Championship in Hong Kong as the first Australian Women's National Team, retrospectively calling those players the “First Matildas” and awarding them caps. That's an honour paid backwards, not evidence of what anyone was saying in 1975. Nobody in Hong Kong was checking the fixture list for “Matildas v Thailand”.

Famous names do that. Once they stick, they travel backwards in time and colonise everything behind them, until it feels as though they were always inevitable. They weren't. Had Australia faded from public view after 1995, “Matildas” might now sound as quaint as Blue Flyers, a curio from an era of blurry graphics and premium-rate phone lines.

Nobody in that Canberra classroom could have known what the word would end up carrying. Nobody dialling a 25-cent SBS number could have known either. They were choosing between five options on a television screen, and four of them were terrible.

The icon came afterwards. It was built, one tournament at a time, by the players who had to wear it.

The chain, in order

1. 1895Christina Macpherson and Banjo Paterson create “Waltzing Matilda” near Winton, Queensland.
2. 1903Marie Cowan's arrangement is published in connection with Billy Tea.
3. March 1981“Matilda” the kangaroo is unveiled as the Brisbane 1982 Commonwealth Games mascot.
4. 1982A giant winking Matilda becomes one of the defining images of the Games.
5. c. 1991Sharon Young suggests “Matilda” at an Australian national-team camp.
6. 1993Peter Hugg, Tom Sermanni and Sarah Groube brainstorm “Matildas” in a Canberra classroom.
7. October 1994Australia wins Oceania qualification for the 1995 Women's World Cup.
8. 1994–early 1995SBS “On The Ball” runs the five-name telephone vote. Retrospective sources disagree on the exact timing.
9. 8 February 1995Australia play Colombia in Brisbane — the match Football Australia cites in its naming account.
10. June 1995Australia contest their first Women's World Cup, in Sweden, as the Matildas.

The Matildas' name was never a solo. It was a cover version that became the definitive recording.

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