Women's World Cup: Inside the infamous nude calendar that got the Matildas in trouble with the Australian government

Picture this.

It's 1999. The biggest sporting event in the world, the Olympic Games, is less than a year away.

Women's football is still a novelty: the Women's World Cup only began in 1991, and the sport had only been introduced to the Olympic program in the latest edition in Atlanta, where the Matildas didn't even qualify.

This time, though, it's different.

Sydney is hosting the 2000 Olympics. Australia's women's national team will be there regardless of their global standing. It will be the most important international platform they've had since the 1995 Women's World Cup in Sweden.

Except nobody really knows who they are.

What do you do?

That's the question the board of the Australian Women's Soccer Association (AWSA), the national governing body of women's football at the time, was faced with as they tried to get the Matildas ready for one of the most significant football tournaments of their lives.

Media coverage was slim, broadcasts of their games were non-existent, and major sponsorships were a pipedream. They needed to do something different. Something daring. Something that no women's football team had done before.

A nude calendar.

It's unclear exactly who came up with the original idea.

Some say it emerged during a boozy player party earlier in 1999, with a couple of squad members then approaching AWSA CEO Warren Fisher privately with their suggestion in the sober light of day.

Others say it was a Melbourne businessman who approached Fisher, offering to add the Matildas in his catalogue of nude calendars and other raunchy material he published in Australia.

Either way, the enthusiastic CEO took the idea to his board, arguing that it could allow the AWSA to hard-launch the Matildas' brand, publicise their new nickname (which was decided via a public poll a few years earlier, but hadn't really caught on), and raise funds for the players themselves.

But not everybody was as optimistic as Fisher, particularly not some of the women on the board.

"I was personally very uncomfortable with the whole concept; I was not a fan of using sex to sell sport, and all the gender politics associated with the initiative," former board member Heather Reid tells ABC Sport.

"Bearing in mind, this was also off the back of other calendars that had been done, including Jane Fleming and her Golden Girls, where they were spray-painted gold.

"There had been men's AFL calendars as well, and that's what was put to us: men are doing these things, why can't the women do it?

"My point was the men are recognised as athletes first, and they're using the sex-sells angle to get greater promotion. Whereas we were flipping that around in saying the performance isn't being recognised, so we need to take the clothes off, like, 'Have a look, we're real women, get over it, we just happen to be football players'.

"So there was a real tension between the players who felt empowered by wanting to do this, and the sexploitation associated with the risk of doing a calendar like that."

After lengthy discussions among board members, it was agreed that the calendar would go ahead, but under certain conditions.

First, players could opt out if they wanted to, which several did.

Sacha Wainwright famously said no, with her rebellion earning her a spread in New Idea magazine, though she never felt pressured or ostracised by the team for her decision.

"My thinking about it was that I wanted women to be recognised as athletes, and over-sexualising sport was something that didn't sit well with me," she told Fairfax in 2019.

Second, there would be supervision at the photo shoot to ensure the players weren't being exploited beyond what they had agreed to do.

And third, the players and AWSA board members would have the final say over which photos were or were not included, with a number of more explicit images supposedly removed before the final calendar was released.

"We expected something that would be fairly tasteful," Reid says.

"But it was quite shocking.

"There's full-frontal nudity there. In some cases, the players are fairly guarded in their poses, but there are others who are right out there. And these were the days before Brazilian trims were popular.

"We didn't think we'd get something as confronting as what we ended up with."

Tracie McGovern was 21-years-old when the idea for the calendar was brought to the team.

Having grown up in a small country town of Wauchope, west of Port Macquarie, where she played football with boys and was regularly judged for her muscular body, she said she relished the opportunity to not only show the world how hard she'd worked, but — more importantly — to embrace her body for herself.

"I grew up hiding my physique because of the comments people made: that my legs were big, I had big glutes, a 'masculine' body," she says.

"My whole life, I was the girl that played a male-dominated sport and copped a fair bit, mainly from the opposition teams' parents. Probably because I was taking the piss out of their sons on the field.

"It was especially hard around the teenage years once I started going to the gym because I was in an intensive training program down in Newcastle, working towards getting into the national team.

"So when it came to the calendar, I remember thinking: 'I don't want to be ashamed of that anymore.' I wanted to show my body because I was an athlete.

"And now look at it: we all look at CrossFit athletes and go, 'wow, they look amazing.' Female athletes aren't judged for being muscly as much anymore."

The calendar was launched at a small bar in Darlinghurst, in Sydney's inner-east, to an unprecedented wave of media interest.

So big was the hype around the calendar that the venue was at capacity within minutes, with an overflow line snaking out the door.

While the first edition was originally meant to publish just 5,000 copies, that number increased to 45,000 based on the strength of pre-publication interest. It sold out within weeks, leading to a second edition being published by popular demand.

"It changed the world for the Matildas," Reid says.

"The name 'Matildas' came in before the World Cup in 1995, but it never really got any traction locally, nationally, or internationally until the release of the calendar. It just went viral.

"In the times when social media was fledgling, the images still somehow went around the world. Especially the front cover with Amy [Duggan]. It just blew up.

"This was a sport that was willing to explode its boundaries, and the calendar exploded all expectations about how it would raise the profile of the team."

The Matildas' nude calendar and its accompanying story is a time capsule, an insight into the creative lengths some women athletes went to in order to break into the consciousness of an apathetic or oblivious Australian public.

The Matildas weren't the only sportswomen to pose naked around the turn of the century: Lauren Jackson, Nicole Boegman, Louise Dobson, Tatiana Grigorieva, Trish Fallon, and Tamsyn Lewis all got their kits off for various causes in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with all the support and derision that came with it.

Maria Berry, the vice president of the AWSA, was chosen to supervise the photo shoot on the day. Like McGovern, she believed the concept was much more about celebrating empowered women athletes and showing that the Matildas were not afraid to be different.

"Those who participated really enjoyed it," she says.

"There are naturally feminists worried about the male gaze [...] but this really got cut-through internationally and very positive responses, because for the people doing it, it was about showing off their athletic, well-honed bodies.

"It was professionally photographed. But it was pushing the envelope. It wasn't Rodin's 'Nude'; they weren't sexless. But we didn't let anything go through that we thought was too much.

"There was a feminist critique: people saying, 'Women shouldn't have to do this'. Yeah, maybe they shouldn't, but maybe they have to, because this was a way of cutting through. And it did that.

"They're showing off their bodies in an environment where that's what people were doing in the sports world. I'm not saying this is perfect, but we ticked all the boxes that we wanted to tick in terms of brand-building and the breakthrough.

"It used the typeface and the motto of what we were promoting as a brand: 'Matildas' and 'the new fashion in football'. And they were trying to look like the new fashion in football. They looked different, didn't have the daggy oversized [clothes], but tried to look a bit more schmick.

"They were finely-tuned athletes who were proud of what they've built with their bodies and wanted to show that."

None of the players anticipated just how big of an impact the calendar would have, both individually and as a collective.

They remember a huge surge of attendance at their home games, including 10,000 fans who watched them take on China in a pre-Olympic friendly.

Berry recalls several Matildas players being invited to a Liberal Party fundraising event at a famous Melbourne-based club, where the AWSA was able to form relationships with politicians and potential future donors.

It also led to more commercial opportunities off the pitch, including a cancer awareness billboard, a partnership with a disability advocacy group, invitations to AFL launches, and more photo shoot invitations for publications like WHO Magazine and Sports Illustrated.

One of those opportunities was a largely unknown Japanese toothpaste commercial, which featured several Matildas players running naked across Western Australian sand dunes, kicking a football at some unsuspecting fishermen.

That commercial allegedly earned the players $100,000 in total, in addition to building their brand overseas, but was never broadcast in Australia.

One of those players was Alicia Ferguson-Cook, who was just 17-years-old at the time the photos were taken, but 18 when the calendar itself was released.

She had to get written permission from her parents to take part in the shoot, which happened in a lecture hall at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra. Her parents fully supported her decision, trusting her judgement and maturity.

She remembers her mum running around to several newsagencies buying up copies of the calendar once it had been released, and still has Alicia's photo framed and hanging in her house.

"I really enjoyed the experience," Ferguson-Cook says.

"I always had body confidence, and having grown up in football, it always frustrated me how insecure and how many body issues a lot of young women had. I kind of thought: we're training all the time, I'm confident in my body. So I saw it as a bit of an empowering moment.

"It's a point in time. It's something that has a bit of historical significance for the team, whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it or not.

"And it got people talking about the Matildas. Now, the great thing is we don't need to do that anymore. The players don't need to do that anymore, because we all talk about their on-field performance.

"It's a pretty bold thing. There could have probably been other things suggested to be done, but if you want to make a statement, that's definitely one way to do it."

Ferguson-Cook was one of around 15 players (including some who didn't participate in the calendar at all) who travelled to Perth to film the toothpaste commercial.

She remembers shooting several takes of herself slide-tackling Cheryl Salisbury, as well as the Japanese director hooning around the sand dunes on a quad-bike, shouting instructions to the players via a translator as they ran across the hills dribbling a ball.

Each player got sent a big box of toothpaste (as well as some cash that Ferguson-Cook used to buy her first car: a Ford Laser) as payment.

Part of the reason why Ferguson-Cook is so proud of her participation in the calendar is because athletes no longer have to do things like this in order to earn money or publicise themselves. Her generation of Matildas walked so the current generation could run.

"It's important that we acknowledge the past, respect the past, but players these days are doing their own thing now," she says.

"They're professional. We were 'full-time': I was a full-time athlete, I was working. I wasn't a professional athlete. These girls are fully professional. It's a different world for them now, and it's fantastic.

"It's exactly where all us past players wanted the game to get to, and just because it didn't get there in our time in the Matildas, it doesn't mean we're not proud and grateful and happy that the game has got to a point where they don't need to do that stuff anymore.

"They don't need to run through bloody sand-dunes in Perth. It is just about the football. That's all we ever wanted: everyone wanted the game to get to that stage, so it's nice to see that happening now."

Naturally, the nude calendar ruffled some more conservative feathers in the media, too, with the criticisms leaning into old tropes surrounding women with sexual agency choosing the ways in which they presented their bodies to the world.

"Whatever next?" one Sydney columnist wrote at the time, "a lap dance of honour at the Olympics? A free trip to a massage parlour with every season ticket?"

Indeed, the calendar is one of the major flashpoints in the history of the Matildas, which highlighted simmering stereotypes regarding women athletes' identities, pushing back against the idea that they were simply 'masculine women' or 'butch lesbians'.

While some of the players who posed did identify as LGBTQIA+, they were presented in a way that shattered assumptions about what queer women in sport looked like.

In fact, the calendar featured one of the first public representations of a gay couple in Australian sport when Alison Forman and her then-partner Sharon Black posed together in the month of April.

"That's all part of the Matildas' story today, in my view," Berry says.

"That we had two [gay] women in a picture together on the calendar, and then we've got the Disney documentary where these relationships are presented as a normal part of life.

"I don't think anyone could look at that calendar and tell you who's gay and who was straight ... even though many of them were.

"I thought that was good to have in there. That was boundary-pushing. To present women in that way was different."

To this day, it's still unclear how much money the nude calendar made or who it was distributed to.

The AWSA Annual Report for the 1999/2000 financial year revealed that revenue from non-government sources exceeded $800,000, or more than double the previous year.

Further, sponsorship and merchandise income reached a new peak of $246,435, three times as much money as the last cycle.

National team players sharing in more than $75,178 in "royalty payments", up from nothing at all the previous year. McGovern thinks she paid off the rest of her car loan with the money she got for her participation, while others were able to pay outstanding bills and quit temporary second jobs.

However, the money would soon dry up.

Part-way through 2000, with the four-year Olympic cycle now drawing to a close, the Australian Sports Commission de-funded women's football from $1.1 million in pre-tournament preparation money to just $664,434 the next year.

While the Matildas were gaining brand recognition at home and overseas, trouble was brewing within the AWSA itself.

Not only were they in the midst of a takeover by the men's governing body, Soccer Australia, but they were also fielding challenges from the ACT Supreme Court over unpaid legal fees behind the nude calendar.

The broader mystery of where the money went was concerning enough to make its way to the very top of parliament, raised in the Senate by MP Kate Lundy in two separate "matters of public interest" sittings as the government prepared to launch a national inquiry into Australian soccer, whose final findings would become known as the 2003 Crawford Report.

In addition to allegations of financial mismanagement, Lundy also pointed out the potential financial coercion Matildas players faced as they were asked to participate in the calendar and the commercial.

"The minister's proposed inquiry into soccer should also investigate allegations that young female athletes were duped into appearing topless for a foreign television advertisement," Lundy said.

"It is important for the integrity of the sport that we know who duped these girls and where the funds have gone.

"It is important that allegations that female athletes were pressured into appearing in this sort of ad because they were told the sport needed the revenue be investigated."

In addition to shining a spotlight on the financial issues plaguing the governing body, Senator Lundy also noted the broader structural inequalities between men's and women's sport that led to such decisions.

"On a more general note, women's sport in Australia has suffered in comparison to men's sport, and nowhere is this more evident than in sponsorship, profile and media coverage," she said in a second sitting a few days later.

"I have previously said that I respect the rights of adult sportspeople to make decisions about how they market themselves. The issue with the television ad is that there appears to be a culture in women's soccer that this type of activity is part of their role as Matildas.

"This is not about adults making decisions about how to market themselves; it is something very different."

McGovern disagrees.

In hindsight, she sees the calendar as an important stepping-stone in building the team's public presence to the point where the current players no longer have to consider such extreme measures in order to earn money or publicise themselves: their football does it all for them.

"I'm prouder of it now, to be honest, because if you take a step back — it's been 23 or so years now — you can see the impact it really did have," she said.

"I've got my photo framed up in my home now. When I look at it, it's an image for me that's frozen in time because of what I was going through as an athlete. It represented so much.

"If they asked me to do it again, as a reunion photo shoot or something, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I'd do it because it was fun, and to me, it was empowering. And we achieved the objective.

"The only people who knew us were within the soccer community, and compared to what it is now, it was very small. But what the calendar did was put our name out there. We may not have been competitive internationally as we are now, but people knew who we were.

"This is part of our history. We shouldn't be ashamed of it; we should embrace it."

Despite the calendar's popularity, it ultimately wasn't enough to save the AWSA.

In 2002, the organisation went into formal liquidation with debts owing over $70,000, while all of its other assets were absorbed into Soccer Australia.

In some ways, then, the calendar and the sequence of events that tumbled from it were responsible for the downfall of the very organisation who had signed off it in the first place.

However, Reid believes the ripple-effects of the calendar have created far more positive change in the long-term.

Not only did the Matildas become a household name across the country for the very first time, but they also began to write down the story of their identity as a team: a group that takes risks, that isn't afraid to do something different, that sets themselves apart from the rest. It is what has made them who they are.

"The calendar put the Matildas' name not just on the Australian map, but on the world map in terms of branding for a national team," Reid says.

"It was deliberate fundraising. It wasn't about inspiring young girls to play football, none of that. It was about getting people to know who the Matildas were.

"It was like they came out and declared: it's not just men's football anymore. It's women's football. And we're here to stay.

"Now, fortunately, the players don't have to do that. We have all these superstars at the moment who can go and fly the flag for the Matildas and for Australia in other ways, but the message is still the same: this is women's football. Look how far we've come."