Trailblazers: tracing the history of girls in sport at Carey

[Adapted from Torchbearers by Helen Penrose]

Less than half of Carey’s history has been co-educational, and despite the ratio of girls to boys remaining very low throughout our early days of co-education, Carey girls have collected 53 sporting premierships, to the boys’ 46.

When Carey’s first female students began in 1979, there was very little formal interschool competitive sport available to them. Some girls played netball against a few local girls’ schools, while others fearlessly competed in boys’ APS teams. In 1979, for example, the volleyball team included four girls and Julie Clarke (1979) played in the Senior Open Basketball Team (pictured). Carey was also the only school to have girls in APS badminton teams in 1979 and 1980.

By 1981, half of the table tennis team members were girls, which challenged the all-male opposition teams, and two girls also joined the APS swimming team. Many Carey girls saw great success in these teams, including Lucy Carruthers (1982), who was the first girl to compete in APS cross country events for Carey in 1981 and regularly finished her races ahead of dozens of boys. Jane Armstrong (1983) captained the open volleyball team in 1982, and opponents from Melbourne Grammar School and Haileybury College were disconcerted to be beaten by a team that included girls.

Shortly before Carey girls’ teams officially joining the APS in rowing and athletics in the mid-1980s, Carey became part of the Eastern Suburbs Association (ESA), which offered sporting competition for girls’ schools. Matches in netball, tennis, softball, cross country, and later in cricket, hockey and basketball, were played against six local private girls’ schools. During their time in the ESA, Carey girls won several titles, and soon became feared rivals because they dominated the competition – no doubt assisted by the culture at Carey of regular after-school training and good coaching. Netball (five titles) and tennis (four) were the standout sports, and the best overall year with the ESA was 1990, when Carey girls won the basketball, cricket (feature image), netball and softball.

The ESA ceased at the end of 1993, not long after it had decided to exclude Carey girls from the competition. Other schools had taken offence when Carey mentioned the girls’ teams’ extraordinary success in an article in a local newspaper.

The Carey girls competed in cricket between 1982 and 1999, unfortunately ending just before the Lanning sisters, Meg and Anna, started at Carey in the 2000s. Famously though, the sisters were allowed to play in the boys’ APS teams. Meg Lanning (2009), attributes the experience of playing against boys at school as part of what prepared her for the professional leagues: she debuted for Australia’s Twenty20 team in 2010 and for the Test team in 2013, and was appointed Captain of all three forms of the game in 2014.

‘The boys didn’t want to get out to me when I was bowling,’ Meg told Torch in 2018. ‘They were always pretty defensive which was good for my bowling!’

By 1995, Carey girls were playing in the APS in every mainstream sport, including badminton, basketball, cross country, diving, hockey, netball, soccer, softball, swimming, tennis and volleyball. From 2018 to present, Carey has fielded a first girls’ football team.

The Carey girls’ APS sporting program continues to grow in strength and popularity every year. Their immense success in such a short period makes it hard to believe there was ever a time that competitive interschool sports weren’t available to girls at Carey!

Read the full history of Carey girls in sport in Torchbearers by Helen Penrose, or read more about our century of sport at Carey in the extensive and detailed Celebrating 100 Years of Carey Sport we developed for our 2023 Centenary Sport Dinner.

Helen Wolff
Archivist