Closing in on her ten years with the club (she took up a part-time appointment with Carlton’s membership department in December 2002), Gill offered a typically dry response to best articulate the myriad of roles she fulfills in football administration.
“What do I do? Mmmm . . . Can I tell you what I don’t do? I don’t play and I don’t coach. Other than that I probably do most of everything else,” she says, in a week in which the contributions of all women are acknowledged by the AFL.
Reporting to GM Football Operations Andrew McKay, Football Administration Manager Shane O’Sullivan and each of the club’s coaches, Gill’s duties in part involve assisting player welfare, arranging flights and hotels for up to 60 footballers and matchday personnel on the road, and availing the proper food for team members on matchdays. As the point of contact, she also enjoys a healthy rapport with players’ parents, and it is here that some of her greatest friendships have been forged in her Carlton working life.
“There’s probably not much change out of seven days and I’d probably need eight to fit it all in,” Gill readily admits.
“But I love it, I really do, and there wouldn’t be many people driving to work of a morning who’d be saying ‘Gee I’m lucky I’m going to that place’.”
While the acquaintances are ultimately what she savours most of her days at Visy Park, Gill feels the pain of her boys whenever they’re on the end of a loss - and she was there through the dark old days of the past decade “when to lose by less than a hundred points was considered a good day out”.
Gill also feels the pain of a player delisted, but understands the brutality of the system and the harsh realities. As she says: “If I had my way I’d keep them all because they’re good kids, but then I’d have to help manage a list of 500 and it probably wouldn’t work would it”.
The prerequisite for being part of the football club’s nerve centre is a thick skin, and Gill clearly boasts the aforementioned veneer. She did after all migrate to Australia as a 17 year-old, having bid farewell to her hometown of Holloway in North London in the Carlton premiership year of 1972.
Gill’s indoctrination into all things dark Navy Blue came not long after her arrival, when members of the company with which she was first employed held a Christmas party in, of all places, the old boardroom of the since-demolished George Harris Stand.
Forty years later she gives as good as she gets with her contemporaries in the footy department, and by her own admission “they probably like that”.
“I remember one day down in the rooms I got hit in the face with a football ,” she recalls. “I got a big bruise across my face and it hurt. I also happened to tear up, so they gave me a wristband with the words ‘Harden the f… up’ on it and I had to wear it for a week. I thought it was a tad harsh but if you’re in there that’s what you cop.”
Gill lauds the advancements in gender equality at football’s coalface with the increased presence of female trainers and myotherapists in the team’s day-to-day running, considering that “when I started I was it”. She also notes that the presence of women in traditional men-only bastions has contributed to a quantum shift in male attitudes “and they’re starting to learn that because you’re a woman you’re not the only one who can make a coffee”.
“I can remember coming back from a holiday many years ago and the first thing someone said to me when I walked in the door wasn’t ‘How are you?’ and ‘Did you have a nice holiday?’ but ‘Did you know we ran out of coffee?”,’ Gill says.
“It’s always going to be a male-dominated area but they’re slowly wizening up. You get treated the same as everybody else and I think that’s good.”
Robert Warnock echoed the sentiments of all senior players when he said of Gill: “She’s a motherly figure for the boys, she calls herself the ‘Gill of all trades’ and I’ll give her that”.
”She’s a great lady, a maternal figure for the boys as I said, and a real reference point for their partners whom she also speaks to. She’s been here for ten years which is a testament to her durability and she’s obviously doing something right.”
