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Levelling the Playing Field - By Emma Young

26 Aug 2011

Dixie Marshall will never forget the shock of male reporters and the general public when she began sports reporting in Melbourne in the 1980s. Marshall remembers being spat on and getting death threats in her first year covering Australian Football League games.

She says the first time she turned up in an AFL change room, there was chaos; overloaded switchboards and letters to the editor followed. All this, she says, “Simply because a chick wanted to have a crack at doing what the boys did.” She hadn’t played the game, so how could she possibly report on it?

She did report on it, and successfully. Over the next 25 years, Marshall won awards for sports reporting as she rose through the ranks at Channels Seven and Nine to become Channel Nine’s senior news presenter. She gave the game away earlier this year to become the WA Government’s media director.

Marshall had a tough time starting out as a young sports reporter. But how much has changed for women reporting sport in Australia?

These questions and more were raised when more than 70 media and sports-women, and a handful of men, gathered at Patersons Stadium on July 27 for Women in Media’s 20th event, Levelling the Playing Field: Women in sports broadcasting.

Warm and dry in the John Worsfold room, overlooking a rain-lashed football field, WIM members caught up and networked over wine and canapés before assembling to hear WIM’s Victoria Laurie welcome Marshall to lead the discussion.

Marshall represents a time in sports reporting that, at first glance, is far away from this evening; and women of both hers and a new generation were eager to hear what she and her panelists had to say. 

She introduced panel members Roanna Edwards, from the ABC’s Grandstand, and Caty Price, sports reporter with Channel Ten – “the princess of the punt”.

“These girls weren’t born when I went to Melbourne in 1986,” Marshall joked, as she kicked off a discussion ranging over concerns about tokenism and role models, making decisions about which sports to cover and how to cover them, and women’s treatment of each other as sports reporters.

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