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Suzie Miller is an Australian playwright, novelist and lawyer. She has written more than 40 plays, including award-winning productions Prima Facie<\/a> and Inter Alia<\/a> \u2013 the latter adapted into a new novel examining issues with everything from modern masculinity to motherhood, and systemic justice within patriarchal structures. Her latest play, Strong is the New Pretty<\/a>, premiered in Brisbane this month and tells the story of the birth of the women\u2019s Australian rules football league, and how the AFLW went from a pipe dream to a sensation.<\/p>\n Suzie, you gave a speech recently about a \u201crelay of women\u201d. Can you expand on that? What I was talking about in that relay is that no one really makes change on their own. Basically, we are generations and generations of women who have been running our leg of a relay and we pass the baton on to the next one when we\u2019re exhausted or when we\u2019ve run out of capacity and someone else takes that baton. We might pick it up later and run again. But I feel like generational change comes from women being united and seeing the big picture and working together, not as a hero or heroine\u2019s journey where one person gets to the top and everyone\u2019s like, \u201cThat\u2019s the person who did it.\u201d<\/p>\n My new play, Strong Is the New Pretty, is really me recognising the underground relay that\u2019s going on behind the scenes all the time. It was really extrapolated into this little microcosm of how the AFLW came to be. It\u2019s an analogy for how women really do make change, and I wanted to study how that came about because I think that\u2019s exactly the great skill that women can use to really effect change.<\/p>\n I think what\u2019s really interesting with the AFLW is all these women at grassroots level who\u2019d been trying for generations to get women to [be able to] play football, all of the young girls who really begged to be able to play and their mothers who agitated. Suddenly, there\u2019s a woman on the AFL Commission<\/a>. Then there are two women on the AFL Commission, and suddenly these men are confronted with their \u201cno\u201d because it was a hard \u201cno\u201d about women\u2019s [Australian rules] football. \u201cIt won\u2019t sell. No one wants to see it. There\u2019s no merch attached to it, and also this is a boys\u2019 zone. This is a men\u2019s zone. It\u2019s a hard no. There\u2019s no space for it.\u201d<\/p>\n Related Article Was there a sense that women should be \u201cfeminine\u201d and shouldn\u2019t play sport? Oh, absolutely. \u201cWhy would women want to do it anyway? Won\u2019t they get hurt?\u201d I mean, lots of men get hurt. But it was just that it was an invisible possibility. I got invited to the grand final of the very first AFLW. I grew up in Melbourne where AFL is the landscape. I didn\u2019t really engage with it\u2009\u2026\u2009because I used to say, \u201cbut there are no girls playing. I don\u2019t understand why we just watch boys run around. Why can\u2019t we watch girls run around?\u201d It never occurred to me to say that women should play. I just thought, \u201cI\u2019m not interested in boy stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n The other reason I wrote this play is I thought this is what a \u201cfair go\u201d means. It\u2019s about finding people who are left out and including them. And I feel like Australia has this incredible mantra, which is the fair go, but we\u2019ve let it die and be a bit kind of co-opted by the far right. We\u2019ve also not modernised it for contemporary society and I think the rest of the world is going in a completely other direction.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s bunker down and grab our mantra, which really does define Australia in so many ways, and actually interrogate it for a contemporary society and be proud of it and use it in the way that it\u2019s meant to be used \u2013 which is about widening it, not about closing it down; which is about inviting anyone who is \u201cother\u201d into that conversation and recognising and having empathy for their experience so that we actually are the community we could be, which is a very rich, culturally rich and inclusive society. Rather than letting the mantra die, [we should be] re-energising it and actually making it our point of difference in a world that\u2019s becoming very polarised.<\/p>\n You have a new novel coming out \u2013 an adaptation of a play that you wrote called Inter Alia. How did you convert a play into a novel?<\/p>\n It was so much fun to convert it into a novel because I could say all the things and write all the things that you can\u2019t fit into a 90-minute play. The next iteration of that for me was, well, what? Where are men in this conversation? I was very adamant about protecting women, and I thought, if you\u2019re a mother of a boy, what happens if you\u2019re a feminist and you\u2019ve raised your son to be a feminist and informed and respectful of women? And what happens when they reach those teen years and they\u2019re a bit beyond the reach of their mothers?<\/p>\n So I had to dig deep into the manosphere and into what online porn is doing to young men in particular, but also to young women and how it\u2019s basically robbing them of their own sexuality in terms of dictating to them what sex is, what intimacy is, and so on. And I wrote this play with a main character as a woman called Jessica Parks, who\u2019s a judge in London.<\/p>\n \u201cI think what is really horrendous is that young people have access to porn 24\/7\u201d<\/p>\n The story is about more than just her. It\u2019s also about how you raise a feminist son. I was fascinated by how do we make generational change in terms of violence against women. What happens with young boys is they get to a certain age of about 14 or 15, where their peer group really kicks in and really impacts how they think and what they feel, but also they\u2019re being given a different message to the one that perhaps their feminist mother has instilled in them. So there\u2019s a dissonance about what they\u2019re hearing at school among their mates and what they would tell their mother.<\/p>\n I think what is really horrendous is that young people have access to porn 24\/7, and I\u2019m not just talking regular porn. I\u2019m talking pretty aggressive porn, and a lot of it incredibly difficult in terms of how it portrays women. The 24\/7 access, with no interrogation and no conversation around what the paradigm of porn is, is really detrimental to young people\u2019s sexuality and also to the way that young boys and young girls relate and how they discover their sexuality together.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n That\u2019s where my call-out is \u2013 to fathers, to godfathers \u2013 anyone who\u2019s in a mentoring role or has a relationship with a young teen boy needs to have the responsibility to reach out and have a male-to-male conversation about the concepts around porn and the dangers of porn and \u201cDon\u2019t think that what you see is normalised or what\u2019s expected of you in your sex life\u201d. I think that it can only come from other men who can say, \u201cI remember when I was your age, this wasn\u2019t around, but I know what it means to try to impress your peer group.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDo we want a world that reflects a kind of tech-bro zone? I don\u2019t think so.\u201d<\/p>\n At a certain age, men need to step in. That\u2019s when they come to the fore and they don\u2019t just talk about their conquests or all their successes. I think it\u2019s hard for men to talk about the things that they haven\u2019t got right or the rejections they\u2019ve had. But I think it\u2019s also hard for men to talk to their sons about sex and porn.<\/p>\n The number of men who have contacted me to say \u201cas soon as I saw that play, I went home and I walked my son around the block the next day and had that conversation\u201d. And I think, you know, you might have saved your son from some real confusion and potentially lost him to a sort of manosphere zone. You might also have saved some girl somewhere that\u2019s going to actually date your son or even just be at a party drunk with him, where he doesn\u2019t understand the boundaries. I say this with sympathy because we\u2019re expecting our boys to disentangle toxic masculinity that\u2019s all around them, and to self-educate through the internet because we\u2019re not giving them a structure around it.<\/p>\n So how do we expect a 15-year-old boy who\u2019s trying to live up to his peers\u2019 expectations to understand all of that, detangle it, and then come up with a rational understanding? We can\u2019t possibly expect that, and yet we do. We get a shock when they come out at 18 or 19 with something that we think is completely untenable. And you think, well, what influences have they had? Just because they\u2019re coming home and saying \u201cI love you\u201d to their mother every night doesn\u2019t mean that they\u2019re actually not in that bro-zone themselves.<\/p>\n AI can\u2019t write a play that makes change like that, can it?<\/p>\n Well, it can\u2019t at the moment. I\u2019m very, very strong on the human side of writing, and I think that great art and great stories are born of the insight that someone has of putting things together and juxtaposing things, and suddenly seeing how it has a structural kind of content to it that comes together because you\u2019re grappling and grappling with it.<\/p>\n![\"Suzie](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/81cb1d1383d64576cc6a4941857e18815f55b797.jpeg\")
Suzie Miller: \u201cJust because
\n[sons] are coming home and saying \u2018I love you\u2019 to their mother every night doesn\u2019t mean that they\u2019re actually not in that bro-zone themselves.\u201dSteven Siewert<\/p>\n![\"Will](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/9a36bed23363b164c4791f88ef2e4fa0d85d16be6161ceecc6cd55fc6c70eb62.gif\")
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Promotional image for the Brisbane Festival production of Strong is the New Pretty, about the formation of the AFLW.Queensland Theatre<\/p>\n
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