The power of more than 75,000 fans at the Matildas’ opening match at the FIFA Women’s World Cup at Sydney’s Stadium Australia will help bulldoze that notion into reality. Soon it will be Brisbane’s turn. Next Thursday night’s clash against Nigeria will produce another stunning full house at Suncorp Stadium.

The FIFA Fan Festival at Southbank Parkland, with every game on screen for nearly a month, will be buzzing as well with entertainment, junior games and the rest. If you ever had any doubt that the sleeping giant of women’s sport has stirred, here’s your proof.

It won’t be a packed stadium for a Taylor Swift concert or Origin footy, it will be 50,000-plus fans cheering women’s football.
They’ll be there supporting Queenslanders like Cairns-born Mary Fowler, veteran defender Clare Polkinghorne, Palm Beach Soccer Club product Hayley Raso, Kyra Cooney-Cross, goalie Mackenzie Arnold, Katrina Gorry, Cortnee Vine, Teagan Micah, Aivi Luik, Tameka Yallop, the sidelined Sam Kerr or their other favourite Matildas.

All those little girls in gold, their mums and female fans of all ages in that crowd will walk by the classic statues of Lewis, Arthur Beetson, Darren Lockyer, Mal Meninga, Allan Langer and rugby’s John Eales.

They should all start humming the old Moving Pictures’ song, What About Me.

It’s no different for female fans attending a rugby league Origin match or Brisbane Broncos’ game in NRLW at Suncorp Stadium.
There’s not a bronzed bicep or metallic ponytail representing female achievement anywhere. Not at Suncorp. Not anywhere in Queensland.

Come to think of it, there’s no magnetic Cathy Freeman statue, a classic cast of Susie O’Neill in Madame Butterfly mode, Ash Barty swinging a giant bronze Head racquet or rugby sevens icon Charlotte Caslick wearing a bronze Olympic gold medal.

The imposing 2.6m statue of netball legend Laura Geitz made her the first female athlete in Queensland honoured with a life-sized statue. You’ll find the Geitzy statue at Nissan Arena these days for every young netball hopeful to see or have a photo taken with.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is well aware of the gross disparity and will be doing something about it. The Premier made specific mention of it recently when she opened the impressive National Rugby Training Centre at Ballymore which State and Federal funding has turned into the first full-time home for Australian women’s rugby.

The Brisbane Roar women’s football team will also play at Ballymore. It will be hockey’s home for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics so it may well become the favoured precinct for rectangular field sports for women.

The perfect place for a statue? “What a great idea,” the Premier said, “We’ll listen to the nominees that get put up.
“We actually have a program at the moment where we ask members of the public to put forward which famous women they think should have statues.

“It lends itself absolutely to having a female Queensland rugby union player here (in bronze).”

We can thank Brisbane schoolgirl, Malia Knox, for this momentum. She was only eight in 2020 when her curiosity led her to discover there were only three statues of women in Brisbane.

Her #FemaleFaces4PublicPlaces initiative has grown from that. It has been instrumental in the building of a statue of pioneering astrobiologist Dr Abigail Allwood to feature at the Brisbane Planetarium.

Queensland prides itself on its sporting heritage and head-spinning record for producing worldbeaters like Rod Laver, Greg Norman and Freeman. The Premier regularly attends the annual Queensland Sport Awards and the Hall of Fame Legends inducted is quite the roll call.

She asked one year, “Where IS the Hall of Fame?”

Former QSport Chief Executive Peter Cummiskey had to answer that it was in his computer.

There is no Queensland Sport Hall of Fame.

The sporting statue debate can’t bubble on indecisively just as the invisible Hall of Fame cannot.

Here’s a free suggestion without costly government committees. House the first Queensland Sport Hall of Fame in the new Olympic Stadium at the Gabba with crowd-pulling attractions like Freeman’s running suit from the 2000 Sydney Olympics, an old wooden racquet from “Rocket Rod, the persimmon driver that “The Shark” used to hit golf balls into orbit, a prized Wimbledon momento from our Ash. Perhaps a rotation of Olympic swimming gold medals on loan, a space-aged Anna Meares bike, Darren Lockyer’s last Queensland Origin jersey, a Greg Chappell single scoop Gray-Nicolls. On it goes.

Erect a Cathy Freeman statue on the plaza outside the Olympic Stadium. Tick.

Put bright orange tape around the proposed site of a female footy player statue at Suncorp Stadium so it never slips from public mind. Erect a Charlotte Caslick statue at Ballymore.

If you are worried about cost, Gorry is just 1.54m of midfield dynamo.

There’s your cost saving on bronze right there compared to a well-fed bronze Mal Meninga or a life-sized 2m Eales at full stretch in a lineout pose.