The athletes behind the crunching body-checks and colourful alter-egos of roller derby are portrayed in a photographic exhibition, timed to coincide with an historic moment in NZ women's sport.
Philippa O’Brien is calling from the Australian outback, where she’s arranging costumes on the set of a Royal Flying Doctors drama. She wants to talk roller derby, rugby, a bucket of fresh pig’s blood, and the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
This is not your typical Sunday morning conversation.
O’Brien, a Kiwi costumier and art photographer, is organising an exhibition of her photography in Auckland, which chronicles the thriving New Zealand roller derby scene. It’s deliberately been scheduled to coincide with the start of the biggest women’s sporting event on the planet next week.
While roller derby and football may not initially seem to have a lot in common, O’Brien reckons the female athletes in both sports will share similar stories – particularly around the struggles women’s sport faces.
It was another major women’s event - last year’s Rugby World Cup played in New Zealand - that sparked O’Brien’s idea for the Skateface exhibition, which opens in Silo 6 on Wednesday.
“Even though I was in the Australian outback last year making a film, I got very involved in the hype around the Black Ferns and the Rugby World Cup,” she says. “I watched the final on a tiny phone in a town called Burra where the power was out, but one of the crew members had enough gas on their phone to let me watch it.
“I felt everything everyone at home was feeling. It was indescribable. But I felt I needed to be part of something like that happening again in New Zealand.” And, of course, the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup was already inked in on our sporting calendar.
"Women have embraced derby because it’s one of the first sports predominantly run and dominated by women. And a lot of people say that once you start derby you think of your body in a different way, like all of a sudden it’s good for something" - Bubble O'Kill, Skateface
O’Brien took the photos of roller derby women in New Zealand over a five-year period, from 2011 to 2015, when the sport was going through an important transition – from its theatrical roots to a more legitimate sport.
Forget the fishnets and tattoos. Today there are around 25 serious roller derby leagues through the country, and a Team New Zealand women’s side who battle internationally. A Kiwi team is competing for the first time at the world junior roller derby championships in France later this month.
“That transition is really apparent today when you see the skating world,” O’Brien says. “There’s a big push and pull between how roller derby is seen as a sport – it’s sometimes still perceived as entertainment rather than serious sport.
“Their fan base come to see the spectacle as well as the sport. They have to balance how they project the sport and themselves in order to get and maintain interest.
“But they still train like any other athlete, and have to have a fitness level that’s safe. You’re not allowed to play if you can’t protect yourself and other players.”
Speaking from Broken Hill in outback New South Wales, where she's been working for the past three months, O’Brien admits the nuances of roller derby still escape her.
“I come back from a traditional sporting background, playing hockey and watching netball,” she says. She represented Otago in hockey alongside Black Sticks stars Mandy Smith and Tina Bell-Kake.
“So roller derby was really was quite a mystery to me. But the project developed from its intrigue.”
"In terms of spirit and soul, derby changes everybody. I’ve learnt to work with people from diverse backgrounds and that helps you grow as a person. You become more open-minded and receptive to people with different social skills and personalities. It’s a giant social experiment" - Mawhero Mischief, Skateface
Having worked in costumes for television, movies and advertising all of her adult life, O’Brien decided to return to university in her early 40s – studying towards a diploma in photography at Massey University’s Wellington campus.
“I was doing a project for a documentary paper, and I was really struggling with the subject matter,” she says. “But I was walking down Cuba St and I saw a really intriguing poster. It was playing cards, with queens and the heads of Richter City roller derby players. It was their campaigning that got me.”
O’Brien contacted Richter City, Wellington’s roller derby league, and then reached out to female skaters around the country, inviting them to be photographed. Using colour positive rolls of film, she shot 57 skaters across New Zealand; 25 feature in her book she titled ‘Skateface’.
“I loved the really strong sense of community you get in roller derby,” she says. “They had this whole culture that was so complete to them. They were able to bring their children along - they were wise to what other women in their position needed in order to play sport.
‘And many of them were older - in their 30s and 40s. Most had given up sport around 14 or 15, or some had never made it that far. They weren’t the right body shape for netball or hockey, so they didn’t feel like they fit in and they fell by the wayside.
“Many talk about finding the sport after having children or going through some body dysmorphia. Roller derby was a gamechanger for them – it improved their physical and mental health, and their relationships at home.”
"I was told several times when I first started that I wasn’t strong enough or stable enough, and I wasn’t placed on a roster for almost a year. Instead of giving up, I thought to myself, 'F*** you! I’ll show you!'...Now I’m one of my league’s strongest blockers, playing tournaments and games nationally and internationally, and I’m not afraid to own that success because I worked really hard for it" Sugar Hit, Skateface.
O’Brien travelled the country scouting shooting locations that were unique, but not iconic. “I wanted it to feel like it could be shot anywhere in the world,” she says. “I deliberately wouldn’t Google the skaters. I didn’t want a preconceived idea of who was arriving.”
But the athletes were invited to come dressed as their roller derby personas. She captured Bubble O'Kill in a cemetery, Cookie Cut Her in a car demolition yard and Skulls and Morphine surrounded by taxidermy animals. “There was an irreverence to it all,” she says.
O’Brien says she has a “soft spot” for Meat Train, the Richter City player on the cover of Skateface. Meat Train, aka Marcia Taylor, has partial hearing and dyslexia and took her case of non-selection in the national roller derby team in 2014 to the Human Rights Commission.
“She’s a fighter, who stood up for her human rights,” O’Brien says. “She wanted to have blood in her portrait, so I said ‘Sure bring it along’. Being from the film industry, I thought she’d have fake blood - but no, she’d been to the butcher in Island Bay and picked up a bucket of warm pig’s blood.”’
They poured the blood on her arm and on the street, which attracted some unexpected attention.
“Two-thirds of the way through the shoot, a woman and her toddlers came by with a black dog who was very interested in the pig’s blood.” The dog became part of Meat Train’s portrait.
"There isn’t any one type of person best suited to roller derby. There are teachers and librarians, counsellors and accountants. It’s not sizeist, it’s not racist, it’s not ageist. It’s not anything. There is something there for everyone, the big-butt chick and the skinny mini-wafer" - Meat Train, Skateface
O’Brien showed a friend the photos, who wanted to know more about the woman behind the persona. “It took me another year to interview them all,” she says.
“These women are from all walks of life and are in a time of their lives when they’re not afraid anymore; they’ve come to terms with themselves. That’s what these images portray.
"Most are standing directly in front of the camera, and we don’t see women portrayed like that very often. These are athletes.”
* LockerRoom writers Ashley Stanley and Alice Soper will speak on the social power of women in sport at the launch night of the Skateface exhibition on July 21 at Silo 6 in Auckland’s Silo Park. The exhibition runs from July 19-30.
