The way she remembers it, Karen Menzies's childhood was just like any other growing up in Australia in the 1960s.
She was raised in North Ryde, in the north-western suburbs of Sydney. Her parents were warm and generous, sending her to a local public school with everything she needed.
She didn't like studying, though; she preferred to play street games with the neighbourhood kids, many of whom came from migrant families. Tennis, cricket, touch footy; you name it, she played it. It helped that she was a natural athlete, picking up skills easily, understanding rules and tactics within minutes.
Soccer, though – soccer was always her sport of choice. The famous Yugal Ryde football club, which won the inaugural Australia Cup in 1962, was close by. Kids from the local Yugoslav community grew up wanting to be Boris Krstulovich, Sam Ivanisevich, Tiko Jelisavcich.
Menzies basked in this blossoming football culture. She would spend most afternoons kicking a ball around with her neighbourhood friends, teaching herself tricks and techniques to wriggle around objects she'd place in the grass, imagining herself out there on a wide, green field.
Hours disappeared into aching calves and mud-scuffed shorts. She played until the light faded behind the gumtrees and the fruit bats woke up and wheeled around; the only spectators to her small successes, whistling and cheering her on in the dark.
Menzies would go to weekend soccer games and watch adoringly – sometimes furiously – from the sidelines. There were no competitions for girls back then. There wouldn't be for at least another decade. But that never stopped her.
She was regularly disciplined by her teachers for playing with the boys at lunch time: canings, detentions, lectures, stern letters home.
"It was something that I just had an absolute love of," Menzies told the ABC.
"Of course, it helps when you can play and you've got some mastery over it.
"And very often, when we had the games at school – because they were all boys that I was playing with – as you do, you pick two captains and they then pick the teams. And usually, I was one of the captains; I wasn't just an extra add-on to the boys, I was a main player in amongst the cohort.
"I see little girls now in football gear on a weekend and I just think, 'I would love to have worn that when I was six years old. I would have loved to have had those boots when I was a kid'. It's come a long way."
It was, in many ways, an unremarkable childhood.
Until she was 13. That's when it all changed.
An unexpected discovery
Menzies had started acting out. She was skipping school and mixing with people who exposed her to drugs and alcohol, which caught the attention of Social Services. She had always known she was different; that her parents were non-biological. What she didn't know, though, was where she had come from.
She was placed in a temporary institution in Sydney for three months before being permanently relocated to Newcastle. All of a sudden, after 13 years in the safe harbour of her Sydney family, she was cut adrift.
She vividly remembers the day she arrived at her Newcastle residence, where she would stay for the next five years. Because that's when football arrived, too.
"I'd only been there for a matter of minutes, and in the briefing they said that one of the activities I could do was play soccer," she said
"And I just remember thinking, 'what? There's a competition and it's girls?' I was literally out of my mind with excitement.
"It was a love affair. From that moment on, I was completely addicted to everything about it."
It was here, alone in Newcastle, that Karen learned about her birth family. Her Indigenous family.
"I wasn't aware that I was Aboriginal until I was 16. That information was withheld from me," Menzies said.
"To cut a long story short, I was removed from my biological Aboriginal mum when I was eight months old, and then I was placed in an institution – no memory, obviously – for about four-and-a-half months. Then I was placed with my Anglo family, which was [meant] to be an adoption.
"My Anglo family were not told, and because … I don't have an exclusive Aboriginal visual appearance, I wasn't the sort of kid that looked in the mirror and, from what I knew Aboriginal represented, I didn't reflect that."
Menzies learned that the adoption was never finalised because, like many mothers whose children had been taken from them as part of the Stolen Generations, her birth mother had never given consent.
That's how she ended up in an institution as a teenager; how her entire world was up-ended just when she was starting to figure out her place in it.
A journey towards self-acceptance
"It was really hard to manage because I'd grown up in a culture here in Australia where public opinion about Indigenous Australians had been poisoned," she said.
"Also, my own micro-experience of schooling was I was given a very strong message that Indigenous people were inferior to other cultures in this country. So when I found out, I struggled a lot because I thought there wasn't a lot of good to attach myself to given the incredibly derogatory and negative information that I had been exposed to.
"That struggle continued for many, many years. I had a whole lot of stuff to work through; some of that was about that I, too, had internalised and subscribed to what an Aboriginal person looked like.
"At the end of the day, I know who my mum is, I know who my nan is. Cultural heritage is acquired through our genes, and regardless of how I look, those individuals who challenge the fact that I'm Aboriginal don't have a say in it. Ultimately, it's me that decides what my cultural identity is."
It took Menzies over a decade to unlearn and untangle a lot of the things she'd been told about birth families like hers.
After she finished school, she wanted to work with kids who had similar experiences to her own. She got a job with the organisation responsible for the forcible removal of First Nations children.
One day, she came across her own file, where she learned the truth about her forced separation from her biological mother.
By that point, she had already met her birth family. But it had been organised haphazardly; without care or delicacy for the difficult emotions Karen was processing.
She'd been flown up to Queensland for a weekend by herself – no case worker, nobody to help or guide her. She described herself as "a square peg being pushed into a round hole", that her family felt like complete strangers.
More than just a game
Throughout this tumultuous period, as the sands beneath her sense of self shifted, the one constant Menzies had was football.
"I was in the institution from 13 to 18-and-a-half, and had I not had football, I suspect – like many other people who are part of the Stolen Generations, and even now, kids who are in out-of-home care – I suspect I wouldn't be here talking to you today," she said.
"One of the things about adolescence is we're trying to carve out our own identity and separate ourselves from our family, then develop our own sense of ourselves as we head into adulthood. Trying to do that, for me, was really difficult because I had this mass confusion of: who am I?
"But I had football. I had structure. I had friends. And I had huge enjoyment and satisfaction. I loved nothing better than to kick that ball. It was the ultimate. Even now, in my 50s, if I'm at the university and there's a ball around, I'd stand there juggling. Even now.
Menzies's own childhood experiences laid the groundwork for her professional and sporting life. She rose up the footballing ranks quickly, representing her state while still a teenager, captaining Northern NSW to a national title.
She was selected to represent Australia in 1983, when she was 21. She cried the first time she pulled on the jersey, which she would wear for another six years. She was the first Indigenous woman to do so.
Passing on the knowledge
After retiring from the game, Menzies poured her energy into coaching and, ironically, study, eventually working at the Australian Human Rights Commission. She was one of the social workers during the Stolen Generations Inquiry in the mid-1990s.
She has just completed her PhD on Aboriginal child protection and the need for welfare workers to understand the complexities of First Nations trauma, and is now a lecturer at the University of Newcastle.
"We still have enormous problems around the trauma that sits within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and a complete dismissal of people's pain and suffering from too many non-Indigenous Australians," she said.
"[This] then means that trauma continues to be unrecognised, not acknowledged, and people are unable to process that trauma – whether it's collective trauma, whether it's historical trauma, whether it's inter-generational trauma.
"It's still a major issue in this country. The work that we do, I guess, is trying to convey the importance and the relevance of recognising First Nations people as a first step."
Menzies has also recently been selected as a member of Football Australia's first National Indigenous Advisory Group, using her knowledge and experiences – both personal and professional – to ensure football does for others what it did for her.
"[The group] matters, firstly, as a way of honouring and valuing First Nations peoples," she said.
"That's fundamental that Football Australia should be doing that. But I think also as a way of tapping into what is enormous talent out there, we should be having something like this.
"It's portraying an image to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities that this is an organisation that does actually embrace you and want to support you and want to see you succeed and want to help you reach your goals and your hopes and dreams as well.
"What I'd like to see is that this particular group that's been launched can gain some traction and some support, so that come the [2023] World Cup, when we have Indigenous players, they're not just peppered throughout the team.
"It is just about celebrating diversity: whatever that is, wherever you come from, whatever you look like, whatever you do. We celebrate that diversity and we recognise it."
