LEAGUE’S FIRST LADIES Sue Entwistle is believed to be the first female official to tour with the Kangaroos and provide a significant contribution to Anglo-French league relations. BY IAN HEADS
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grainy photo from a forgotten age re-emerged during the recent NRL Women in League Round, the annual celebration that has grown to become a rousing reminder of the female contribution to all departments of today’s game. The snapshot, reproduced here in its faded glory, is a reminder of a different time, one in which rugby league was almost entirely ‘men’s work’. Yet even from the vast distance of 108 years it captures a remarkable sense of the spirit of a young New Zealand lady, Bella, hanging determinedly to her seat on the sidelines at Sydney Showground, despite the overwhelming and boorish presence of the sprawling NSWRL president E.W. O’Sullivan. Bella was one of two young female guides who came to Sydney with the New Zealand Maori team in the game’s genesis year, 1908. If Bella was a pioneer – so too are the women who kicked off the second wave of more formal female participation in and around league in the 1970s and ‘80s. The story of one of them, Sue Entwistle, an adventurous French-speaking high school teacher, is one of the better unknown yarns of the game, and a foundation stone in the story. In 1975 Enwistle, armed with a French Government scholarship, was teaching in a small school in Albi in the Midi Pyrenees region. Chancing to be in the central square, the Place du Vigan, one afternoon in the town made famous as the birthplace of painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, she encountered a passenger coach with a Kangaroo flag draped along one side. Sue had been musing on the fact that she was the only Aussie in Albi when, suddenly, here was a busload of them. In a meeting of grand chance, she had run into the Australian World Cup team of ‘75, strangers in a strange land in France’s south, but on a determined mission to win back the cup they had lost in 1972. To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, it was to be the start of a (mainly) beautiful friendship. 22
MEN OF LEAGUE SEPTEMBER 2016
A reproduced photo from the New Zealand Maori tour of 1908.
“I was very happy to see some other Aussies,” says Sue. “They didn’t have an interpreter with them; they were struggling and (team manager) Bob Abbott asked me if I could help.” So it was that Sue Entwistle from faraway Townsville took the plunge and became interpreter, guide, food expert, cultural advisor, travel consultant, troubleshooter and general eminence gris of Australian touring teams in France over the next 15 years. Joining the 1975 campaign she was told by a leading player to: “sit at the front of the bus and don’t look over your shoulder”. After that first adventure in which Australia won the World Series, Sue would subsequently hook up with the 1978 Kangaroos, the 1982 ‘Invincibles’, the 1986 ‘Unbeatables’ and the Kangaroo team of 1990, smoothing the path for