Ann Odong's incredible story

When Ann Odong was starting out as a sports journalist in Perth, she encountered scepticism, stonewalling and a whole lot worse.

“I was a 21-year-old African Australian woman looking to get into football,” she says, with a smile that’s all-restrained diplomacy. “Sometimes it was hard for people to take me seriously.”

But not everyone was dismissive of her aspirations – in fact, one of her staunchest supporters was an SBS journalist and commentator at the very top of his game. Les Murray was always happy to come on the radio show Ann hosted with a friend, or to answer any questions or calls for advice that he received from her.

“From the very beginning, he treated me with respect and talked to me seriously,” recalls Ann, 37. “To be treated that way by someone of his stature made it easier to cope when other people were disrespectful. I felt that if someone that important in Australian football would give me the time of day, then I was going to keep going.”

“I was a 21-year-old African Australian woman looking to get into football, sometimes it was hard for people to take me seriously.”

Like Ann, Les was a former refugee and his generosity towards her, and others, was part of a lifelong advocacy for newly arrived Australians. At Australia for UNHCR’s World Refugee Day event on June 18, Les’s support for refugees will be recognised in a new award – The Australia for UNHCR – SBS Les Murray Refugee Recognition Award, that celebrates the talent, creativity and courage of refugees in helping make a more inclusive and diverse Australian community. Ann will be one of the women speaking in support of this inaugural prize.

Unfortunately, she won’t be there in person because she’s travelling with the women’s national team, the Matildas, to their training camp in Sweden, where they’re preparing for the Olympics in Japan in July. “It’s a little bit daunting,” she says of the 11-week trip.

After establishing Australia’s first women’s soccer website, The Women’s Game, and working on Australia and New Zealand’s winning bid to host the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2023, Ann is now the Digital Content Project Manager at Football Federation Australia ̶ arguably the dream job for someone so committed to the sport. As part of her role, she’s the media officer for the women’s national teams and also works in community football.

“I feel like now is a really great time for both women and multicultural communities because people are more open to hearing their stories,” she says. “And I know it’s a cliché, but sport is a great equaliser and creates a sense of community. And most migrants would tell you that when you’re grappling with being in a new place that’s so different, it’s incredibly important to have that anchor of something familiar.”

Ann became a refugee aged two-and-a-half, when her mum, Janet, fled fighting in northern Uganda and crossed the border into Kenya. With her younger sister, Caroline, who was just six months old at the time, the family spent the next three-and-a-half years in Kenya before being resettled in Australia in 1990.

After arriving in Perth, both of Ann’s parents worked as cleaners; their degrees weren’t recognised in Australia, and they needed to work hard to support their growing family. As the eldest child, Ann shouldered considerable responsibility for her three younger siblings, which exacerbated the difficulty she experienced in fitting in at school. “I didn’t get to be able to participate in everything everyone was doing at school,” she says. “Everyone would be talking about that episode of Dawson’s Creek last night and I didn’t see it because I was cooking dinner, and I’d try to pretend so that I still felt included.”

As the only black children in both primary and secondary school, Ann felt that she and her siblings were visible and different in a way that she struggled to articulate to her parents. “You had to be African at home, but Australian enough to assimilate away from home – you had to navigate two worlds, and you were never enough in either,” she says. “Looking back, I struggled with that isolation. I developed bulimia for a period because that was one thing I could control.”

Where Ann did find connection was through sport, and particularly soccer. Her mum – an ardent sports fan – introduced her to everything from tennis to basketball, but it was watching the 1998 World Cup that got Ann hooked on soccer. At 16, she joined a club, Lynwood United, and played at state level as a goalkeeper before deciding to throw her energy into writing about, rather than playing, the women’s game.

“No-one was covering it consistently,” she says. “In 2007, I met the head coach of the Matildas, Tom Sermanni, and he let me cover them. And I fell in love with it, and realised that this was what I wanted to do.”

At times, life at work wasn’t easy. She recalls one occasion where a player refused to reply to her questions with anything other than one-word answers, “to demonstrate that I wasn’t worth their time”. As the only female state league reporter, the “old guys would absolutely give it to me… You have to continually prove yourself and you don’t have the luxury of making mistakes.”

In 2008, Ann founded website The Women’s Game from her bedroom, interviewing players during her lunch breaks at work, and writing up interviews and stories late into the night. By 2017, her team had grown to 17, with match reporters for the W-League in every state. Working on Australia and New Zealand’s winning World Cup bid in 2018 was the icing on the cake.

“I remember reading an interview with Homare Sawa, the captain of the World Cup-winning Japanese team, which said, ‘Every hero is a rebel first’, and that always stayed with me,” says Ann.

“The players who are heroes today were considered rebels 20 years ago; they were outsiders fighting hard to get into the system.”

Now, though, the women’s game is hugely popular, with record numbers of girls and women playing in Australia, while several players in both the male and female teams are from refugee backgrounds. “We have players with origins from 13 different countries,” says Ann. “That’s really important, because it changes the concept of who is Australian. Our national teams look like modern-day Australia, and that’s exciting.”

Last chance to secure your online ticket at the World Refugee Day event on Friday 18^th June.

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