Social justice beats at the heart of Suzie Miller’s work

What first sparked the idea for Strong is the New Pretty? 

I was born and raised in Melbourne, absolutely saturated in AFL culture, but as a young girl, the fact that it was only boys playing and umpiring meant that I felt excluded. Women might have been playing AFL for generations in communities or home-spun teams, yet had never really been acknowledged, organised into a visible sporting league or professionalised, until the advent of the AFLW. 

I am also very close friends with Sam Mostyn, who at the time was the only female commissioner of the AFL, and she kept raising the idea of a women’s league. Hearing her speak about it and then witnessing the advent of the AFLW brought to my attention just how invisible women’s football had been, despite women playing all over the country. 

How did your own experiences of sport or girlhood shape this story? 

I was highly aware as a young girl that women were excluded from spaces and, even worse than that, their voices were not heard loudly. I do remember wanting to be in the spaces where boys were, wanting to have a voice and a platform, and I didn’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to have that. 

I also remember the feeling of watching boys’ sport being resourced and elevated, while girls made do with very little. Yet I was a really sporty kid. Those experiences stayed with me and continue to shape the way I look at the world and the stories I want to tell. 

Prima Facie reframed the legal system and struck a chord worldwide. What parallels do you see between that work and Strong is the New Pretty?  I examine the systems and the structures within which society operates and look at them through different portals to ask why they exist and what we can do to shape them to include the perspective and lived experience of women.

Strong as the New Pretty examines and interrogates how women work differently to men and must dance around the patriarchal structures that are so globally endemic. It celebrates and templates a different way to effect change.

There was not one ringleader behind the rise of AFLW. Many women collaborated quietly behind the scenes, methodically working through those structures to make women’s perspectives “seen”. These women instigated this league in a non-hierarchical manner and created something extraordinary by doing it their way. What was remarkable to me was how these women, from players to commissioners to those who had spent their lives working in grassroots women’s football, came together in a shared, collaborative model of change.

How do you navigate the balance between activism and artistry and your storytelling? 

I think it’s interesting that it’s considered activism to centre women’s voices because I’m a woman and I’m a writer, so I write what I know. I don’t write specifically for activism; I write because, to me, storytelling is a powerful way of illustrating where contemporary values and alignments are not working and how people and humanity suffer as a consequence of that. 

Strong is the New Pretty seizes on an extraordinary moment of activism in Australia. It celebrates the women who effected incredible change and created a league in a space where most believed there was no room for women’s football. This activism has brought about something incredible, magically creating a league in a space where there was absolutely nothing before. 

What makes your creative partnership with Lee Lewis so personally fulfilling? 

A. Lee Lewis is at the absolute top of her game as a theatre director... Her dramaturgy is sharp, clarified and wholly engaged with the style and the thematics of the writing. I met Lee Lewis early in my career and, when we came together to create Prima Facie with Sheridan Harbridge, I realised that working with her was an absolute gift. 

How does this play challenge the ideas of strength, resilience and femininity? 

In many ways, the intersection of strength, resilience and femininity comes about not only in the sport itself but in the way the sport was structured around women. Ultimately, the women who instigated the AFLW created a structure and system within a larger male-dominated system that strongly promoted a female vision. 

I hope that Strong is the New Pretty starts a wave of women celebrating the fact that they do things differently. Women in boardrooms all over Australia, women who are leaders and women in government, are attempting to do that every day. They’re all trying desperately to change the way things are done so that they can create a space for women coming up behind them. 

What do you hope the audience experiences as they watch this play unfold? 

The delight in watching how something came into being out of nothing, purely because a group of women believed in the idea of a fair go. I hope people come away inspired, excited and thrilled that now little girls are growing up who don’t know a time when women didn’t play professional AFL. To me, that is extraordinary. The young girl that I was would never in a million years have dreamed that that was possible. 

Watching young girls heading to AFLW matches with their parents, dressed in their team colours as if it has always been normal to watch women play AFL, has been one of the most powerful reminders of how far we’ve come. 

How do you see this work inspiring the next generations of girls? 

I hope that mothers, grandmothers and daughters all come together. I hope that fathers bring their daughters and their sons. It’s not just a play for women; it’s a play that shows how you can do things differently – and that different way of seeing things can inspire whole communities, institutions, leagues, governments and countries.